Variance Theory » Textures

Animated Texture Builder

Ben — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:20:31 +0000

Some engines (Unity, Unreal) support animated textures that are formatted in a grid. However not all engines support converting movies into this format. After looking around for something that would do this and failing to find anything, I wrote a 3dsmax script to help out with this process. It takes in one or more avi’s and builds a subdivided plane with the corresponding frames mapped to the quads. It then creates a camera. All you need to do at that point is set the render size and render out the camera view.

Download AnimTexBuilder.ms

Detonator – Explosions for Unity3D

Ben — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:54:35 +0000

Detonator is an extension for Unity3D that lets you make good looking explosions quickly and easily for your Unity projects. How you use it depends on who you are and what your goals are. Solo coders can quickly get prototype explosions going while artists can stack effects to quickly make complex explosions.

Detonator was created originally for the Unity Summer of Code 2009 – Major releases are hosted on the Unity website.

Download Detonator 1.02

Instead of replicating the documentation here, which will change over time, here’s the webplayer that shows what Detonator can do.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Bug Reports

If you find bugs in the package please report them. Either drop a comment in here or even better, head over to the Assembla page and create a ticket.

Open Source – Help improve Detonator!

Visit the project at Assembla.com

The Detonator project is written in C# and is hosted with Subversion on Assembla.com. There’s integrated bug reporting and wiki for documentation. Please join up for free and help expand the project! Some ideas for contributions:

Texture packs
iPhone version, probably a wizard, that snapshots a Detonator explosion to an animated texture
Prefabs
Additional DetonatorComponents.
- Camera Shake
- Decals/Blast Marks
- Screen Flash
- Explosion Chaining

Right now only the C# source is hosted, but if you’d like to contribute art or prefabs, we can set up a section for .unitypackage downloads. And of course when Unity 2.6 is released, it will have SVN support that (hopefully) will make this type of hosting even more productive.

Syphon Filter PS2 Characters

Ben — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:56:42 +0000

I was the Lead Character Artist on Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain at Sony Bend. In addition to heading up concepts, modeling, texturing, and rigging of all game and movie characters for the studio’s first PS2 title, I worked very closely with the Lead Character Programmer in creating a state-of-the-art character customization system and corresponding pipeline. Below are some samples of artwork and in-game shots.