Had an urge, made POC. A little bit of fakery to achieve an effect. Nothing too fancy

Click for the live version (ShiVa web player required – desktop PCs only).

ShiVa Hologram Proof of Concept

After a brief conversation about poly trails in ShiVa this morning I came up with a mostly unrelated idea to create a SFX only Xmas tree. Created using only poly trails and particles within ShiVa. Only about an hours work in there and most of that was sorting out anchor points for the trails, so don’t be too critical.

Click for the live version (ShiVa web player required)

ShiVa SFX Xmas Tree

I think I’ll call it “Unemployed Depressed Elf Drinks Alone On Xmas Day Accompanied By Cat”

As done as it’ll get this time around, not enough processing power to ward off editing frustration. All created in Blender apart from using Arial on the calendar. 1000 sample Cycles render. I may post a “how I did this” soon.

Click for larger image.

A work in progress, all Blender, Cycles render.

WTF have I done?

Well hey if you’ve been paying attention, I’ve released 4 games… that’s a lot! I’ve also released an EP, submitted a very in depth tutorial and solved a bunch of problems for my fellow ShiVa devs. But am I in a better place?

Financially, no. But who cares about that… well it would be nice to be able to feed myself I can tell you during this year of full-time dev’ing I’ve become extremely proficient with ShiVa and tbh I love it more every time I work on something new. I definitely made the right choice with the engine regardless of the parent companies’ legal problems. ShiVa lives! And I can’t wait to see version 2. The community may be small, but all of the guys I know who work with it are avid and I can only see the application and community growing. All good, all good.

Blender-wise, I am similar. I’ve progressed very far since last year and my knowledge of it has increased dramatically. I know I’m not a fantastic artist, but my application knowledge is nearing expert level in many areas. There is still plenty to learn. Like anything one may learn, someone is always better than you, and that’s great because there’s always someone else to learn from I really should be practicing visual “art” as much as possible, but there are only so many hours in the day, and I find myself obsessed with any project I’m working on, learning only what I need to to get it out. ( to to )

What’s happening next? I have a very big project in the works, but I am broke-as. So next I need to find an income, realllll bad. I have a lot of confidence in my unannounced project and honestly I am a little pissed at myself for not switching projects 3-4 months ago when I was considering ditching the bears project to get this happening. If I *had* done that I’d have something to publicly show by now and could be submitting something for funding. 20/20 hindsight. However! I finished the bears game, it’s out, and that is something I should be proud of, no matter the result.

So have I shown you anything good, have I proven myself? If anyone’s been paying attention then yes, they would be able to see that I’m definitely a “finisher”. Always room for improvement, but jeez look at what I’ve made in a year.

Next up, I’m working on a high quality still in Blender that may give a better impression of what I’m capable of, instead of my tiny little game pieces. After that I’m going to finish this big-ass project to the point where I can get an attractive funding submission together. People will notice. You’ll go “mannnnnn that’s cool”, and maybe someone will send me a dollar or two.

Enjoy your work Best advice: Finish something.

Hiya,

Some publicly displayed work I have created that I’ve neglected to post here

Blender work, a time-lapse of my troll model being created:

Katana model for a new unannounced game I’ve been working on for some months. Cycles render (and a hasty one at that!).

A shotgun model I created as a prop for a Blender still (unfinished). Cycles render.

Howdy,

I wanted to do a little test using different render engines within Blender. This is not meant as a comparison of the final output, almost impossible without spending way more time on it, different materials, different lighting etc.). It is more so I could get a feel for them all as I haven’t messed with them much.

Must say, LuxRender is quite nice and has produced what seems to me the best result with minimal effort. The image is a little dark, I was playing with the post effects built into the renderer (vignette, very nice!) Real time light group editing post-render made me “wow” You can do that with comps in Blender but man, this was easy as.

Cycles is still a bit of a pig, much as I wish it wasn’t. And as my machine is outdated I was unable to utilise my gpu for rendering (couldn’t even force in experimental mode). On top of that it was the only renderer that produced what may be “terminator artifacts” – hard edges on smooth shading. So the result displayed here for Cycles is actually subsurfed (where all the others aren’t).

Yafa was extremely painless to install and set up, I was surprised . And there’s the Blender internal test of toon shading combined with Freestyle, it would take me half a day just to tweak those line settings.

Anyways, here’s some Parsley. Click for larger versions.

LuxRender 200 Samples

YafaRay Photon Mapping

Cycles 200 Samples

Blender Internal

Freestyle & Toon Shading

Good news, good news, Friendly Forest is fixed up and back on the store! After the catastrophic release with the nasty little engine bug, I felt it prudent to extend the free period. So, free weekend!

Hello there,

Finally, finally, Friendly Forest (formerly Down to the Woods) is publicly available on iOS. While the development process was at times disheartening etc, I am quite pleased with the final package overall.

I have been very fortunate to have had a lot of help with translation from ShiVa community members enabling localised versions in German and Spanish as well as English.

The iPad version is available from 24/09/2013, with the first day free.

Check out the feature page over here: http://www.shotiris.net/friendly-forest