Okay "Decimate" is magic.
I decimated the vertices down to 1,100 and while I can see a flicker when it gets applied, I can't really tell a visible difference.
So this is something I will have to do on every asset with more than 100 vertices as the final step.
Or this might still be way too high. 🫤
I still don't understand how most of this works.
And with some further billboarding optimization, I got it down from 28,000 triangles to 4,400.
Which probably still would have been nuts for just one tree in 1998.
But I think this should probably be low enough for a decent 2015 computer to handle 30 to 40 of these before the rest of the forest gets reduced to lower LODs.
I made this.
The longer I look at it, the more amazing it feels.
This is 99% all made entirely by me.
The main trunk in the shadow is a free PBR material I turned into a flat image texture, and I am using 80% of a geometry node arrangement I got from a tutorial. But every needle and every branch is something I build from scratch with vertices and nodes.
That it took me 3 months of learning and practice to get to this instead of 3 years feels unreal.
Now we are getting to where I wanted to go with this.
A very unhealthy specimen of the predominant tree species in the Lerinas colony on Kion.
I wanted to do this with a free image of a conifer branch from the internet, but ended up learning some first basics of geometry nodes to build my own branch that I can turn into a texture card. A bit more irregularity among the individual twigs, and I think the green is good to go.
I broke something in a #Blender file that I've never seen before:
I think I accidentally hit a hotkey and now snapping to grid or increment will always snap to full meter coordinated no matter how much I am zoomed in and out.
It's as if Blender ignores the grid that is on screen and behaves as if there's only a 1m size grid. It doesn't happen in any other files.
Any idea what I did, and how to undo it?
Today I learned that Blender accepts the letters "pi" and "tau" as a number value. ✨
I can't believe how many hours I have already wasted looking for a free texture of a pine branch that I can use for my game.
14.7°C.
Even I have to get out the sweater and long trousers today. 🥶 ❄️
I'm not going to try making a strategy game.
But a game in which units need to be resupplied with food (always goes down) and ammunition (goes down in combat), and suffer exhaustion that recovers very slowly when staying put and much faster when being rotated out to the back rows would be really cool.
And you have long range detection units that can be taken out to hide your movement.
"Interdiction" would be a great name for a game.
Just discovered Warp Point which is primarily a blog directory specialising in independent games journalism with the webring side of things being optional.
It was only launched a few days ago (with no random button sadly but it's on the todo list) and there's already lots of cool stuff in there. If you have have your own indie blog where you write about games you should consider joining!
Check it out: ↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓↓
https://www.warppoint.games/
#gamedev #webring #indieweb #videogames #journalism
Are there any strategy games that don't take 20+ hours where supply lines matter?
All the strategy games I ever played always ended up being slugging matches where both sides throw units at each other until one army runs out of hit points.
It's actually easier for me to scale, rotate, and arrange the branches in blender and then make a render of them than doing all these things in GIMP.
Coming from Blender and going into GIMP to combine several tree branch textures into one is the worst.
I don't know any of the shortcuts! Why can't I click on a layer to select it?! Why can't I zoom with mouse wheel? 😆
Still a very ugly tree that I would never put into the game. But I really enjoy that I have reached a point where I feel I have some understanding of what about a model is wrong and deliberately do something to improve it, rather than just trying more or less random things to see if anything gets better.
Jagged Alliance 2 total conversion Star Wars mod...? 🤔
Idiocracy is to the 2020s what Starship Troopers was to the 2000s.
Presented as satire, but just saying what had already started and was easily visible to anyone who cared to look.
This is a crappy first attempt and more a proof of concept. But to me, this already feels extremely 1999.
I tried the apparently common method for making trees of using skin modifiers and particle systems for the last week. And it did create pretty okay trees very quickly. But they just didn't feel right for #IridiumMoons.
I now tried a much more back to basics, fully hand crafted approach. And while this first tree is terrible, it just feels a lot better. Being able to place everything myself instead of using wire and duct tape to make process do something kind of what I want is much nicer.
