# 40 – October 17, 2021

From news this week: Valve has banned blockchain games from Steam, AMD support is coming soon in Cycles-X for Blender 3.0, and Blender 3.1 will have native Metal support in Cycles.

Interesting: A video from GDC about the voice acting of Hades, Inmost and the secrets of its sound, King’s Bounty II returns to its 30-year roots.

Updates / releases / news

Valve Banned Blockchain Games On Steam That Can Trade Cryptocurrency Or NFT

Attention to this drew the developer of the game Age of Rust.

A separate clause about blockchain and NFT has been added to the documentation.

AMD Support Coming Soon to Cycles-X for Blender 3.0

The announcement was Twitter… You can track the status in tracker Blender.

Apple joins Blender Foundation as Corporate Patron

A this is from € 120K per year.

Substance 3D Painter 7.3 Released

In the update added new Warp and Cylindrical projection modes for projecting textures or decals on a 3D model, updated color palette and added support for Substance resources in Adobe CC Desktop.

SmartMarket Cup HTML5 Games

Tournament on porting and creating HTML5 games for virtual assistants of the Salyut family. You need to submit an application through the registration form from October 1 to November 30.

The total prize fund is 1,500,000 rubles.

Ocean Waves Generator 1.1 for 3ds Max

Scriptwhich effectively automatically creates a 2D ocean wave mask in 3dsMax. With its many wave styles, it can be applied flexibly across projects while saving a lot of time.

Blender 3.1 will have native Metal support in Cycles

Apple engineers develop a new Metal backend for the Blender Cycles renderer.

GitHub Game Off 2021 Coming Soon

Game Off is annual game jam, which is slightly different from most jams, as it lasts all of November, not just a weekend or a few days. It’s the perfect excuse to learn a new language, try out a new game engine, or create your first game.

A new advanced approach to rendering 3D scenes from a set of photos

The team says the rendering of the point cloud is done by a differentiable renderer using “multi-resolution one-pixel point rasterization”.

Be the first to join the ArtEngine Mobile Closed Beta Testing

ArtEngine Mobile allows create content using AI on your mobile device. Start by taking photos with your mobile camera or simply select an image from your gallery to generate PBR footage and easily export it to your project.

V-Ray won the Engineering Emmy 2021

At the presentation notedthat V-Ray is “optimized for large production scenes” and provides a “seamless blend of real and virtual on-screen elements.”

Unity Introduces Ad Mediation and Bidding

Unity Mediation, which is entering open beta today, is an ad management toolwhich gives users the ability to optimize ads, simplify adapter setup and maximize ad revenue.

Sketchfab has improved pricing plans

Improved past plans, here and there raised the limits

Houdini 19 Sneak Peek

The developers talked about their work for the year, showed the upcoming improvements in the next version of Houdini.

Stream with an overview of all the innovations of Houdini 19

The team showed a new version of Houdini and showcased new tools.

Freebies / giveaways / bundles / courses

Free Blender Photorealism Addon Released

Quick roughness Is an add-on for Blender that allows you to make any object photorealistic by adding roughness maps as layers. Each layer can be controlled individually and even constrain the top or bottom of the object using Z-Masking.

Add-on for Blender to easily add realistic camera shake effects

Available on Githabe under the GNU General Public License.

Interesting articles / videos

Hades: breathing life into Greek myths

An interesting talk with GDC from the Hades developers on how they approached the voice acting of the characters, how they chose the actors, what problems they faced.

Create an antique mono bike in 3ds Max and Substance Painter

Andrea Uriarte shared details of the Monomoto project, with an emphasis on the texturing techniques in Substance Painter.

Game development tips and tricks from Civilization creator Sid Meier

In Sid Meier’s Memoirs, the author shares articles…

Inmost and the secrets of its sound

NikiStudio founder spoke with Alexey Nechaev, composer and sound designer of Inmost. For this work, he received the Best Audio award at the LT Game Awards.

A Tutorial on Using the Unity Shader Graph to Procedurally Generate Water on the Planet

V article The author explains how to create a stylized procedural water shader that is ideal for use with the procedural planet shader created in the Unity Shader Graph.

Using Unity’s Terrain Generation Tools

Learn to create and manage a wide range of landscapes in your applications using the powerful Unity Terrain Tools and the all-new Terrain Toolbox API.

Creating the Foreboding Ruins project in UE5

David Wason shared detailed descriptions of Foreboding Ruins projects, talking about work and technical experiments, highlighting the workflow with Megascans and Unreal Engine 5.

Interview with the authors of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution

Digital Foundry in an interview with Nick Tibierose, AMD Director of Game Development, discussedwhy AMD decided to go against the tide with an upscaling approach like FSR fits into the FidelityFX ecosystem, which already includes another useful upscaling technology (CAS), why the company did not repeat the Nvidia and Intel approach using machine learning and developer best practices to extract the most of this technology.

Optimizing Unity Games: A Proven Plan

Playgendary’s article focused solely on an analysis method that will suggest the right ways to optimize your particular game.

King’s Bounty II returns to its 30 year old roots

Unreal Engine Team talked with 1C Entertainment CEO Nikolai Baryshnikov about the design decisions that led to the return of the franchise, the studio’s hopes, and the inspiration it drew when creating a large-scale tactical role-playing game.

Creating a modular environment in UE4

G. Daniela Ontiveros V. shared a detailed description of the Hermit project, talked about creating a modular environment in Unreal Engine 4, and described the modeling and texturing workflow.

How to write shaders in a unit. Part 1. Surface Shader

Unity Draw Call Batching: Detailed Tutorial

Detailed article about droppers and how you can optimize rendering in Unity.

Working with Disposable Types in .NET

V article explains how to properly dispose of objects in most cases. Sometimes Dispose should not be called due to the lifetime of the object. The author promises to talk about this in the next article.

Game video creation: best practices and pitfalls to avoid

Natalia Shukhman from Alconost shares his experience in creating trailers and teasers of games.

Valve Employees Answer Top Questions About Steam

About promoting games in the store, important service tools and a little about the Steam Deck. DTF Team chose the main thing from the stream.

Unreal Engine 5 Modeling Mode Takes Form

UE5 introduced a completely redesigned simulation mode to ensure efficient operation.

Unreal Engine Team Shared detailed article on working with the tool.

“20 things I’ve learned in 20 years as a developer”

Perhaps it will be useful for general development article… In general, both beginners and pros can find interesting moments for themselves.

How streamers choose games: interview with SplatterCat

Streamer tells, how best to attract youtubers, gives recommendations on press kits.

Creating a 3d environment with GraphN in Ecotope

Polygonflow’s Adnan Schaumette shared another tutorial on creating environments with Ecotope and Arnold.

Lighting work for Spirit Untamed

Eva Mateo Fabregas told about the production process of Spirit Untamed by DreamWorks from the perspective of a lighting designer.

A behind-the-scenes look at destructibility in The Ascent

Magnus Larsson showedhow the team used Unreal and Houdini to prepare the scenes.

Running on the walls in UE4

V article describes how to implement the wall-running mechanic as in Mirror Edge.

The tutorial uses blueprints from UE4, but can be transferred to UE5, C ++ or another engine without any problems.

Ghost of Tsushima musical open world

In a talk with GDC 2021, Andrew Buresh, Peter Scaturro and Bill Hemstapat of Sony Interactive Entertainment share how the music for over 40 hours of gameplay was created, adapted and implemented in this rich fantasy tale of samurai.

Rendering Lines Part II: Alpha Issues

V article describes the problem with alpha blending when overlaying geometry and provides a way to work around it.

Miscellaneous

New Unreal Fellowship Works

Recently classes ended, 479 students from 21 countries completed the program. In just a year, they created enough animated content to fill 10.5 feature films. This video presents the best work.

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