Voxels in the wind

Fall is here and it is getting windy. It is a good time to finally add some animation to grass blades and tree branches.

 Here you can see some results:

   

There is nothing fancy going on here. The post title is deceiving since no voxels were animated, just traditional polygonal billboards. The motion is a few sine waves overlapping at different frequencies. The next step is to feed wind vectors to the vertex shader. This will create turbulence near cliffs and some other nice effects.

And then some leaves and other particles flying around for increased realism.

Talk Points

I just found out the audio for my talk at the Mont Royal Game Society was very poorly recorded. It seems the only way you will hear this presentation is you invite me for beer. Anyway for what it is worth here are the slides. They were designed to go with the talk so there is a lot missing.

Come see me!

Do you live in Montreal? Do you like beer?

The Mount Royal Game Society has invited me to give a talk about procedural things. It is happening next week. Here are the coordinates:

WHEN
Wednesday, September 5th, 19h30

WHERE
Brasserie Artisanale l’Amère à boire
2049 rue Saint-Denis, 3rd floor

I will be covering everything I have learned over these years. If you have any non-Minecraft related questions, I will be delighted to take them.

More Grammar Screenshots

Here is another series of screenshots. These are also from the Canyon City grammar.

I really need to improve the lighting in this preview. I normally export the final mesh to 3ds max and render it with nice global illumination. The meshes I get out of this are so large 3ds max cannot deal with them anymore.

The mesh complexity is a problem only at this stage of the grammar edition. Once this is voxelized and optimized back to polygons, it will be fast enough even for realtime rendering.

Over the weekend I will see if I can load this into 3ds max to produce better previews and share them with you.

Canyon City Teaser

In the past few days I have been writing a grammar for a massive structure. It is some sort of water collector for desert areas. It is so big that there are buildings on top of it and acts as the center of a small, parasitic city.

I did a couple of concept sketches for it. This was painted with my fingertips on an iPad (using the Paper app). Don't expect too much detail here:

The grammars for this structure are not difficult, but there are a lot of special cases. Since it is taking so long, I thought it would be nice to post some partial progress.

Here is a preview of what I have so far. The screenshots are taken straight from Voxel Studio.

This is a teaser so I won't be showing much. You cannot fully appreciate the scale here, but this thing is so large it will have an entire forest under the main dome. The towers, which are for cooling, are hundreds of meters high.

I am building this so I can finally show all elements of the procedural world coming together.