The Spirit and the Mouse - Animation & rig related footage dump

 Just felt like posting a bunch of developpment gif and video from The Spirit and the Mouse. I Love recording footage, so I have a LOT! This is only a fraction

 

loosely themed around animation, rigging, etc. There is no chronology, it's from the earliest stage of dev to even after the release!

 

Prototype - Slingchess

A prototype done a while ago, semi abandoned for now, but I still entertain the idea of doing it one day!

The idea is simple: Slingshot + Chess = Slingchess! The idea came from brainstorming about a Physics-based chess game

Each turn you can move a piece of your choice, I came up with this idea that each piece have differents movement "patterns" inspired by the actual rules of chess

Weight, speed, friction and such varies between pieces, the goal is to evoke the feeling or the idea of a chess piece.  Ex: Pawn has a small radius, but can go fast, but will stop fast too (high friction)...because..I dont know it feels like a pawn 😁

In the video you can also see that each piece has health points and even an attack value, very different from chess! The goal is that you can play more with the physics.

Finding the balance between the strategy of chess, and the fun/chaos of physics is very fun!

 

here is a another video: 

 

a few more details on Twitter : https://twitter.com/AlexStrook/status/1744761230194045014

 

 

 

Lofi 3d pixel art explorations

 Various gif of different unrelated project, for some reason I'm really digging this style recently!

It feels pixel art, but I would not call it pixel art: My process is usually the same

• lower down resolution of the game in unity (create a new RT, apply to camera, reduce its resolution and set to point, and then display it on a canvas as a fullscreen raw image, or on an unlit texture material + a different camera. You can also use a post process shader like this one "Pixelate", which is what I used for that first gif, it gives a smoother feeling) 
  
• Make the art, but always looks at the final render (game view) while working , because the scaling is not consistent, its a lot of tweaking to get it looking right!
• I keep changing the resolution while I work, trying higher/lower rez, still trying to find the one I like
• I really enjoy square 1:1 formats
  

All of this was made in Unity, because I just like working in it!

F.A.S.T.

Something ive been playing around in unity!

The whole thing started about making something that feels really FAST

Im slowly turning this into a game I think, but I won't be big, probably a small itch io web game or something

Clayxels art dump

Posting a bunch of characters I made with Clayxels, because I don't want that to be stuck on twitter forever!

In case you don't know Clayxels is a plugin for Unity, and it allows for non destructive SDF modeling! SDF is similar to the technique used in the game "Dreams".

I really love working with that because I can just stay in unity, and use all of its toolset

I loved it so much I wanted to share it with people and even made a tutorial on how to get start with Clayxels

Anyway, this post is more of a random art dump, If you want to see more of those, check out some of my MOments on twitter: [here] and [here] where I have many more Clayxels stuff

Note: original character design by Dani Kruze, original post here

Unity simple gradient skybox shader

a lot of time, i just want a simple gradient shader for my skybox in unity...and i find the procedural skybox PBR shader to be impossible to work with.

 DOWNLOAD SHADER HERE

Here is a very simple shader i did using amplify, you can use it in screen space or world space 

It just lerp two colors (TOP and BOTTOM) using either the Screen position Y (screen space), or the Vertex pos Y (if you uncheck screen space.  There is always a sphere around your scene that unity appy the skybox material too, hence why it works). 

 There are also optionnal control for the gradient contrast (power and multiply). The shader is made with Amplify shader.

details HERE

Clouds shader breakdown

 UPDATE: download the project here : https://github.com/AlexStrook/UnlitClouds

 

Final Effect (Twitter)

This is a small breakdown of  the clouds shader I did based on the one from the game "SKY" from thatgamecompany (read more about it THERE)

 The thing that contribute the most to this effect is the mesh itself, and the baked lighting.
I used Houdini + 3ds max to generate that (more info THERE), I'll focus only on the Shader part here, and I used Amplify Shader editor for this

The Shader :

First step of the shader is just to plug the vertex color in emission, to display the previously baked lighting. I use a power with (0.454545) to adjust with 3ds max vertex color (because of all the sRGB/linear/Gamma nonsense)

This effect rely on having a lot of triangles to get a smooth displacement, and Tesselation is great for that if you can afford it. Just check "tesselation" in amplify, and use the distance based mode

Adjusting the Distance value and tesselation factor  to fine tune the performance. For this effect having a very close distance works quite well

Now for the fun part, I add a Noise Generator. It's a handy node that will generate a 3D noise base on a world position. Using 3d noise is the most heavy, you can use simplex too. I'm pretty sure this whole effect could be reproduced with a noise texture and creative UVs.  I added a noise, and in the "Size" input, I add a world position multiplied with a float (this will control the tiling of the noise).
Also a remap from -1/1  to 0/1, to avoid negative values
For noise I'm plugin this in the Debug input of the shader.

Here is what changing the float that control the tiling looks like !

Instead of the using a simple world position, multiplying it with a Vector3 ("NoiseScaleA") allows you to scale the noise non uniformly, very handy ! (it's like scaling your mesh, but you only scaling the input position if that makes sense). I stretched the noise along the Z axis as an example here

Time to add some movement. Pretty straightforward, before I plug my Scaled world position in the noise, i add a vector3 multiplied by time. This allows to control the direction the noise is travelling.

Changing the direction of the noise (This works well because it's a 3d noise, this would be hard to replicate with a 2D noise)

I now plug this in the Local Vertex offset, and multiply with two thing :
A 0-1 ranged float, to fine tune the intensity and a Vector3 (0,1,0), to force my noise to only displace along the world Y axis. You can use the normal of the mesh too if needed, it's justed looked better like this

Adjusting the new paramter, Speed, Size, Strength

For this effect, I decided to duplicate the noise 3 times. Copy all paramter, and add them all together. It reminded me of an old project I did (Cartoon Pyroclastic noise). The idea is simple : For each noise you apply, lower the intensity by half, double the tiling, double the speed. This this idea, then tweak everything !

The relationship between the value of each noise is important, here I tweak only the strength. I find it easy adjust all noise separately (turning all strength but current noise one, to 0), and then adjust the strengths.

 Closer view of how the noise are merged together

For the fading edge a simple setup with Transparent material, and a Depth fade.

This part is more a hack, but it add a lot of details. Basically I add a black and white texture of cloud, using triplanar mapping. To get the triplanar mapping animated I use the modified world position from noise C (See image 01), and I multiply everything with the Noise A to "erase" the texture here and there (See image 02)

Img 01. World pos from Noise C

Img 02. Noise A 

I used Register/Get local variable, to avoid spaghetti connection, it's an amazing feature from amplify editor.

this is how the clouds texture looks like.

You can see the difference the cloud texture make, it's pretty neat !


Thanks for reading, if you have any comments/question, post them here or, on twitter where I'm more active :)



NOTES :

• This is all baked and static, but I'm sure you could make this a lit shader. You might want to reconstruct the normals from the displacement, you can use those node to do it :

• I intended to, but didn't have time to add flowmap to this effect. Flowmap would help define the direction of the tiling cloud texture And/Or the noise scrolling
• Here is another technique i saw a while ago that very interesting LINK TO VIDEO (around 10 min). They made clouds in Battlefield one by carefully positioning billboard. it looks great but i guess they had to do some crazy magic behind the scene to make the overwdraw viable...also idk if you can go through them ! 
• The way they did the clouds in Sky was using raymarching, mike lester from ThatGameCompany who worked on the game : LINK TO TWEET