Variance Theory

Unity Model Viewer In Progress – Rev 2

Ben — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 05:26:58 +0000

An addition to the Model Viewer – Animation switching. The viewer automatically reads the animations on a model and lets the user flip through them. The model is a blockout concept for an in-progress project my buddy Andy and I are tinkering with.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Productivity++ or how I stopped bad browsing habits

Ben — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:29:38 +0000

Like anyone that works at their computer all day, I have to make a point of staying productive through periods of waiting. Waiting for an app to load, for a file to process, or anything else that takes me out of the Flow, and my habit is to reach for Firefox and pull up Facebook or Digg. These two sites really offer no value during the workday. Zero. Unfortunately they are horribly addictive.

Well, I’ve tried putting extensions on Firefox, but sometimes I’ll end up browsing with Chrome and BAM, before I know it I’m commenting on a photo of someone’s car or reading about the latest LOLCat to set the tubes on fire. Well my New Year’s Resolution was to put an end to this and at the very least start visiting sites that advance my life in some way.

So here’s what I’m doing and it’s working so far. See, most every computer nowadays has a “hosts” file, which takes precedence over everything in determining how a URL gets mapped to an IP address. By editing it strategically, you can redirect any attempt to visit one site to another. Wikipedia has a nice article on hosts files and how they work, but their links to instructions are poor. Try these instead:

Windows XP/Vista/7: http://www.fpweb.net/support/managed-hosting/hostfile-editing-support.asp

Mac: http://ocaoimh.ie/mac-os-x-how-to-update-etchosts/

Linux users already know this stuff.

So what you can do with your hosts file is map a site that you want to stop visiting to one that you want to start visiting. If you habitually type digg.com into your browser, then that will get remapped. Here’s what you need to do to map digg.com to answers.unity3d.com (because reading the Unity Answers site will certainly enrich you in some way)

Open up your hosts file per the above instructions
Get the IP address of answers.unity3d.com by opening up a command line/terminal and typing ‘ping answers.unity3d.com’ minus the quotes. In this case it is 64.34.80.165
In the hosts file, add a line that looks like this: 64.34.80.165 digg.com #digg->answers.unity3d.com
Then add a line that looks like this: 64.34.80.165 www.digg.com #digg->answers.unity3d.com
Save the hosts file
Try visiting digg.com and enjoy your self-administered smackdown.

I’ve already found that this has helped me break some bad browsing habits.

Robot – Rev 1

Ben — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:53:46 +0000

Putting together a model viewer – here’s a work in progress model as well.
The viewer is using the new screen space ambient occlusion in Unity 2.6 plus some regular shadows.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

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

VFX – MUA2

Ben — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:50:28 +0000

Towards the tail end of Vicarious Visions‘ work on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 for the 360 and PS3, I contacted my old boss Steve Derrick and asked if he could use me for anything. The timing was right – they were a bit short on folks to do FX production. Since I had some experience with the tools and processes at VV, Steve asked me to come on and build some cutscene FX.

This was a blitzkrieg of a job. Entering crunch from the word go, it was 3 weeks to get set up, learn the new system, and produce a series of effects. For the most part, the scenes were entirely set up and just waiting for particles and corresponding effects, like lighting, screen flash, and physics chunks. I was given some solid direction by Brent Gibson and I had creative freedom in deciding how to execute the work which kept my motivation level sky high.

As with any large project, there’s significant overhead in integration. Checkins were only allowed after a team member had completely validated their work locally. This means lots of syncing, lots of building, and lots of waiting. At that stage of the project though, you do not want to be the sucker that breaks the build. Luckily I escaped the ire of Aaron, the lead engineer, and my checkins all cleared.

Overall, I would’ve been more productive had I been local for the duration of the contract, but with my wife ready to go into labor at any moment, I wasn’t able to go on site except for a day to ramp up and pick up a devkit. Still, what I was able to provide even under those circumstances was a win for everyone and I enjoyed the work immensely – even carrying a rekindled love of particle explosions into the creation of Detonator after my son was born.

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.

Detonator 1.01 – Indie Fix

Ben — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:58:18 +0000

Thanks to everyone who pointed out that the initial release of Detonator did not play nice with Unity Indie. The Heatwave and its HeatDistort shader made it quite sad indeed.

Indie users note: After installing this package, delete Detonator/Resources/Detonator/Textures/HeatDistort

Update: Posted 1.02 – The fallback subshader in HeatDistort was not working properly. Now it is and you don’t need to delete that shader anymore. Woop!

Link: Detonator-1.02

Detonator release today?

Ben — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:21:21 +0000

(Update: Apparently the Unity guys had some issues updating their site. Stuff should be up 9/17)

Well as of this writing it’s not out just yet, but it will be very shortly. I’m going to bed in a few minutes and the boys in Copenhagen will be getting up, and Detonator, if not all of the SOC projects, will be released tomorrow. I wanted to just make a quick post for anyone that ends up here and is looking for more info, wondering where development is headed, or finds bugs.

I plan on continuing development on the project and will be posting the code and the current dev build to some public source sharing service like Assembla.com or Google Code in the next couple of days. I’m SURE that people will find bugs and I’d like to stay on top of them as best I can. Really, there was minimal testing done on this project so if something acts weird, it probably is.

In the meantime, if you find a bug and don’t know what to do with it, drop it in the comments here. Thanks!

Detonator is close…

Ben — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:53:20 +0000

Detonator Parametric Explosion Framework for Unity from Unity3D on Vimeo.