Variance Theory » Web

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.

MrsRiley.com

Ben — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 06:01:05 +0000

MrsRiley.com is a project that I started in May 2007 with the goal of creating a site that helps people make visual supports for kids with Autism. Though it seems like this is a far cry from my prior work as a game artist, there was actually a lot in common between the two. I still had to make a tool that simplified a complex workflow as I did as a Technical Artist. I needed to design the UI, the branding and logo. I also had a contractor build over 3000 individual Flash symbols and was responsible for managing him during the months long process. Then as his art came in, I needed to figure out how to integrate it with the system. Lots of stuff.

The first and most important part of the effort was the Flex application called PageBuilder, which is detailed in this other post. But wrapped around PageBuilder is a sophisticated site made with Drupal 6. From the start, Mrs. Riley was imagined to be a subscription site, and having an integrated forum and blog was also important. The majority of the development of the site portion was done Nick Garofalo, who I hired while he was a student at Saint-John Fisher University. For the most part, I would do the concept, design, and functionality and Nick would implement the Drupalese.

The site uses Ubercart to support credit card payments, and has a novel method of group subscriptions where one user buys a coupon code worth X uses. They can then give the code out to coworkers or friends and the site tracks who uses it. Regardless of whether a user buys a subscription directly or via a key, they are then promoted to a new role where they can access PageBuilder.