# 41 – October 24, 2021

From news this week: Unity launched Unity Gaming Services, Arnold 7.0 released, Unreal Engine showed cloud solutions, Apple now allows developers to tell customers about alternative payment methods.

Of interest: a documentary about the design and philosophy of Death’s Door, parsing the Control frame, improving HDRP performance in Unity, a video with parsing the state of the stream.

Updates / releases / news

Unity launched Unity Gaming Services

There enters 18 tools from 4 categories: multiplayer, backend, analytics, monetization.

Everything is almost still in beta, so I do not recommend using it in production.

Cloud solutions for Unreal Engine

Fun news from Epic Games in collaboration with TensorWorks made official container support in Unreal Engine 4.27 and upcoming 5.0.

What for? Here are some examples of use:

• CI / CD and continuous integration.

• Pixel Streaming, which allows you to render everything on a server, and transfer the result to the device.

• AI and machine learning.

• Remote virtual desktop.

In the article you can find link to pdfwhere all this is explained in more detail.

Yandex.Games will be held from November 1 to December 1

Defold Foundation and Yandex.Games invite Defold developers from all over the world join the monthly jam. The developers will be tasked with creating a themed web game. The winners will receive support with marketing and advertising of the featured games, gifts in the form of iPhones and new consoles.

Apple Now Allows Developers To Tell Customers About Alternative Payment Methods

Apple updated App Store guidelines… Information about the ban has been removed from clause 3.1.3. The company now allows developers to communicate with their customers about other payment methods available outside of the App Store.

Arnold 7.0 released

Autodesk has released a new version of the renderer, adding support for Open Image Denoise, extending the post-processing framework and reducing memory usage in the Arnold GPU.

The update is also significant expands USD capabilities, adds MaterialX 1.38 support, makes ACEScg the default rendering color space.

Mercenaries Engineering released Rumba 1.1

The latest version of Maya-compatible character animation software for visual effects and art animation added a new customizable Picker Tool, the ability to import and edit audio and video clips, a new display mode for silhouettes, and import and edit USD.

ArmorPaint 0.8 released

Major update annexes for open source 3D painting added path traced rendering and texture baking, decal layers.

Flame 2022.2 released

In the update added eight new types of control curves in the MasterGrade color correction toolbox.

There is a Streaming Service profile for H.264 export for transmission to popular streaming services and support for 12G-SDI output when previewing video on external displays.

2022 mobile gaming trends you need to know

2022 is just around the corner, and the Unity team wants to help start planning the next phase of mobile game development. Understanding the latest trends will help you make the right decisions about what types of games should be developed to target audiences, and what marketing and monetization strategies should be used.

Freebies / giveaways / bundles / courses

GameDev.tv Humble Bundle

New Humble bundle consists of courses from GameDev.tv. GameDev.tv courses were included in the previous bundle, make sure you haven’t bought it yet. The courses are constantly being updated.

Interesting articles / videos

Death’s Door design and philosophy

A documentary from Noclip on creating a game.

Creating Wardrobe Props in 3ds Max, Substance Painter and UE5

Artist Diego Torres Ortiz told about the workflow underlying the project “Wardrobe of the Arcane Perfumist”, about creating a low poly in 3ds Max, high poly in ZBrush, hand-finishing in Substance Painter, and the final render in Unreal Engine 5.

Creating games with Flutter on the Flame engine

The article shows how to create a simple game using the growing Flutter. Within the framework of lesson you will create a virtual world with a movable animated character.

SIGGRAPH 2021: character movement in Half-Life: Alyx

An overview of the motion tween systems developed by Valve Software for Half-Life: Alyx. Originally presented at SIGGRAPH 2021.

Improving HDRP Performance in Unity

HDRP 10 has recently been released for Unity 2020 LTS. To tune HDRP for optimal use, it is important to understand all the basic settings, how they work and what they do. This is why it is important to know how it works in terms of CPU / GPU utilization profiler, Render Pipeline Debug, and HDRP shader framework.

V his article In a blog post, the Unity developers have shared tips to help you customize HDRP for your project, from graphics debugging to profiling and optimization, using the Custom Pass API.

Stream analysis video

Quite detailed and good presentation.

In the description you can find link on books and articles that were used in the preparation of the material.

Detailed article on PS3 architecture

Here and about the CPU, and about the GPU, audio, I / O and other components of the system. About operating systems and games did not forget too…

Lucifer: character creation and animation with Maya, Rokoko and UE4

Tsubasa Nakai told about the production process behind the Lucifer project, explained the workflow in Maya and talked about capturing facial expressions with Rokoko.

10 Live Top Rules for Mobile Games

V article examined the pitfalls that catch us by surprise again and again.

How Supermassive Games changed itself and created The Dark Pictures anthology

Unreal Engine Team talked with Pete Samuels, CEO of Supermassive Games, on the company’s evolution, how it creates such terrifying masterpieces, and where the anthology is located ahead of the season one finale: The Devil Within.

Ghost in the Car: Author’s Voice in System Design, Frostpunk and More

In a talk from GDC 2021, Anshar Studios creative designer Martha Fijak talks about the expressive qualities of systems and game balance, showing how this design approach was used to develop the social elements of Frostpunk.

Control frame analysis

An overview of the rendering architecture of Control, the ray tracer.

V article and the video shows a high-level analysis of a still frame in the middle of combat with a lot of lights, reflections and global illumination.

Create a foliage shader in Unity URP Shader Graph

V tutorial discusses the foliage shader in Unity.

It talks about double-sided materials, translucency, normal settings for more natural diffuse shading and wind deformation.

Rainbow Bridge with Shader Graph in Unity

3D artist David Sanueza has recreated the rainbow bridge from the Marvel films. According to the post Reddit, the author used Unity and Shader Graph to accomplish the task.

Influence on storytelling

Developer Astortion looked at two important systems that bring game dialogue to life.

Miscellaneous

In the depths of 2d

Mental Canvas lets you turn 2D sketches into 3D. You can rotate them, move the camera and look from different angles. Art director of Urban Scale Interventions shared an example in Twitter…

Substance Painter analog created in Godot

Union bytes painter Is a tool for pixel art artists written in Godot and C #.

Allows you to create low-resolution 2D sprites and textures with color, normal, height, roughness, and metal maps. Sprites and textures can be edited in multi-channel mode in 2D or 3D space.

Resources for modern GPU architecture (PS5, RTX, etc.)

In the answers in Twitter thread a lot of useful links on the topic.

Relicts: Upcoming Horror Short Filmed With Maya, Arnold & Nuke

It was announced back in 2017, but now it has finally received an official trailer.

The project can be supported at KickStarter…