Tag: Art

Dust3D is an open source 3D modeling application we first looked at back in April of 2018.  Since that time Dust has improved a great deal, including winning a Epic MegaGrant award.  Dust3D is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and is open source on GitHub under the MIT open source library.  Key features of Dust3D include:

Free and Open-Source

Yes, it’s free. And it’s cross-Platform, no matter you are on Windows, Linux, or MacOS, the same experience you’ll get.

The Easiest Game Asset Pipeline

With Dust3D, you’ll see yourself finish a game asset in a blink! Dust3D also supports export your model as FBX and glTF format, so that you can then import the files into softwares like Unreal Engine, Unity, and Godot for further development.

Start Modeling with Zero Experience

Believe it or not, you don’t need any experiences to make a 3D model with Dust3D, all you’ll need are good reference photos. There’re more videos on this.

You can learn more about Dust3D and see it in action in the video below.  You can download several example Dust3D projects here.

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GameDev News Art 3D Review

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Sprytile is a free tile map editor that runs entirely inside Blender, similar in functionality to the recently covered Crocotile 3D.  Over the weekend, Sprytile for the most current Blender 2.8x versions was just released. Details from the Sprytile Itch.io page:

Sorry for the long long long delay, but finally the official release of Sprytile for Blender 2.8 is out!

All of the work porting Blender to 2.8 was handled by Yonji and Ologon, with Ologon taking the work to the finish line.  Ologon has written a guide on the changes to the Blender 2.8 workflow on the forum.

A major change to the workflow is the use of the Sprytile tools tab in the Tools Sidebar. Open the sidebar by pressing the arrow button on the right of the viewport, or pressing the T key.  Another optional workflow change is setting up the pixel viewport. By default, Blender 2.8 will make your textures look darker without this step, but you might want to skip this if you will be using the color correction functionality of Blender.  Sprytile tools are now part of Blender 2.8’s toolbar. To use the ‘Get Normal’ mode, you just need to press ‘N’ on the keyboard while in Build mode.

I’m very grateful to the community for porting Sprytile to Blender 2.8 and continuing to showcase the work they make with Sprytile.

Sprytile is available as a free download here, with the documentation available here.  Be sure to note that many things have changed for Blender 2.8, shown in the guide above, or by watching Sprytile in action in the video below.

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Art GameDev News Blender

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Allegorithmic (now Adobe) are well known for their excellent Substance Designer and Painter texturing tools have recently released a major update for Alchemist, their Quixel Mixer competitor.  The biggest new feature to Alchemist is the AI driven Image to Material, an image importing option along side the existing B2M functionality.  From the release notes, Image to Material is describe as:

Bring the outside world into your creations. For the first time, tap into the power of AI to convert a simple photograph into a full material with incredible accuracy. No need for complex and expensive photogrammetry equipment; use pictures taken on a holiday or in your backyard, in any lighting condition.

The Image to Material filter will generate a perfect albedo, as well as normal and displacement maps which closely match the original real-life surface.

The release also adds new filters, texture importing and management tools and more.  Substance Alchemist is available as part of a Substance Subscription, and there is a 30 day fully functional trial available here.  You can check out Substance Alchemist and the new features in the hands-on video below.

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GameDev News Art Applications Review

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Pixologic have just released a new free version of their ZBrush sculpting application, ZBrushCore Mini.  Details of the software from the homepage:

ZBrushCoreMini is all about sculpting. Start with a simple sphere or a stone block, then use a select group of the most popular digital sculpting brushes from ZBrush to add or remove material and simply… create! ZBrushCoreMini frees you to explore your imagination.

Once you are happy with your creation, it also provides an exciting new way to share your work with others, through the iMage3D format. On any website, this will simply appear as a regular 2D image. But other users of ZBrushCoreMini can open the file in full 3D!

And with 3D printers increasingly coming into their own, ZBrushCoreMini includes the ability to export your model for real-world printing.

Interestingly however, nowhere do they mention the major limitation of the Mini version, not even on the version comparison page.  From the EULA:

       2.5 ZBrushCoreMini 

ZBrushCoreMini is intended for educational purposes. It may not be used for commercial, professional and other for-profit purposes. 

This non-commercial license will greatly limit what you can use ZBrushCore Mini for and is something you should be made aware of immediately.  You can learn more about ZBrushCore Mini and see it in action in the video below.

Art GameDev News Applications

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Blender 2.83 was released last week and one of the new features is tentative support for Virtual Reality headsets in the form of Scene Inspection:

Scene inspection refers to the ability to inspect the scene in VR, without interacting with content. Essentially this means head-mounted display (HMD) support as well as some simple settings (controllable from outside the VR view) to control the experience.

Examples of supported use cases:

• VR as a way for directors or clients to inspect scenes and give feedback to artists.
• Pre-visualization for artists working on VR games.
• Samsung GearVR/Google Cardboard movie making and app development.

Blender VR support is via OpenXR, which unfortunately isn’t currently supported by HTC or Steam VR headsets.  Details about supported headsets are available here.  Check out the new Blender VR functionality in action in the video below.

Art GameDev News Blender VR

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Embergen, by JangaFX is a real-time fluid simulation software for creating fire and smoke effects for game and film projects.  You can create and modify fluid simulations in real-time on consumer class graphics hardware and export your results in flipbook or image sequence formats for use in games, or export in OpenVDB format, an open standard Blender 2.83 just acquired the ability to import.

Details from the 0.5.3 release:

• Improved the fidelity and simulations of ALL presets and added 9 new presets.
• Pressure solver improvements:
  • Improve base pressure solver accuracy and performance.
  • Slight memory reduction.
  • Expose more pressure solver controls.
  • Increasing the parameters will improve the accuracy and produce better motion, but are more expensive.
• Volume masking/Simulation post-processing (only visual, not affecting the simulation): Motion blur, Sharpening, Dilate, Stylized.
• Basic navigation gizmo in the lower left corner to show orientation.
• Fixed crashes and freezes when previewing some output modes.
• Fixed the Simulation upscaling parameters being incorrect when loading from a preset.
• Improved tooltips.
• Sixpoint and normals fixed for upscaling.
• Improved background color with transparency.
• General rendering improvements and speedup.
• Simulation looping:
  • No longer cuts on the first loop wraparound.
  • Fixed an off-by-one error where later loop iterations did not sync properly.
  • Fixed parameters not animating correctly.
• Improved accuracy of turbulence advection.
• Made the ExportVDB node work similar to the ExportImage node. Certain widgets will “multicast” when multiple nodes are selected, e.g. timing controls and export masks.
• Displays tick in the timeline indicating which frames will be exported.
• Automatic frame timings when looping.
• Fixed colors and forces when using multiple emitters and shapes for colored smoke.
• Fixed a difference in lighting between the basic mode and combustion.
• UI Improvements: Informational text displayed when necessary per node, e.g. if the license or trial is expired.
• Disabled buttons now have a red border.
• Fixed bug preventing timeline key editing.
• Small visual tweaks to the timeline for user experience and consistency.
• Stop sliders from keeping focus after submitting.
• Tooltips no longer display when their respective UI element is occluded.
• Fix incorrect behavior for color picker widgets.
• The color picker will no longer lock up and become unresponsive.
• A bunch of smaller bug fixes.
• Miscellaneous Improvements: Lots of refactoring and delicious code cleanup.

Embergen has a fully functional 2 week trial available here as well as several free OpenVDB datasets to start with.  You can learn more and see Embergen in action in the video below.

GameDev News Art Applications

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Blender 2.83 is now available now in LTS or Long Term Support version.  Described a few months back, the long term support version of Blender is meant to remain stable but well supported for two years:

The first proposal is to do one Long Term Support (LTS) release every year. This release would be supported for two years with important bug fixes and updates for new hardware, while strictly maintaining compatibility.

A good reason to do an LTS now is the focus on fixes and patches of the past months. The next release (2.83) although big, will be relatively less experimental, thus a good candidate to keep supporting for a while.

LTS versions also will help to ensure that a project that started with an LTS version can be completed with the same version in a reasonable amount of time. Nice for studios with large projects, but also for add-on maintenance.

So if you are on the verge of starting a long term game or movie project, Blender 2.83 LTS may be the ideal version for you.

Of course long term support isn’t the only new feature in Blender 2.83, with highlight features including:

• New Cloth simulation sculpting brush, as well as other sculpting improvements
• NVIDIA Optix denoiser now works in the viewport as well as renders
• A completely rewritten faster and more powerful Grease Pencil
• Import and render OpenVDB files
• Initial VR Support, specifically the ability to navigate around your scene in VR
• New face set system enabling new visibility options
• EEVEE improvements
• Updated shader nodes
• Performance improvements across the entire application
• Updates to several modifiers
• Video sequencer improvements
• Much, much more

You can learn more about Blender 2.83 in the release notes here or by watching the video below.

Art GameDev News Blender

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In one of the biggest game development Humble Bundle, the RPG Game Development Assets 2D Art, Music and Sound Effects bundle is live now.  As always it is split into tiers:

1$ Tier

• 7Souls RPG Graphics – Desert Tileset
• 7Soul’s RPG Graphics – Sprites
• Dialogue Boxes
• Inventory Sound Pack
• Japanese Bar Interior Assets
• Osaka City Game Assets
• RPG Inventory – Fantasy Battle Axes
• RPG Inventory – Fantasy Bows
• RPG Inventory – Fantasy Daggers
• RPG Inventory – Fantasy Potions
• RPG Inventory – Fantasy Spears
• RPG Inventory – Fantasy Swords
• Warrior Adventure Game Characters

15$ Tier

• 2D Characters Male
• 2D Hand Painted Mine Tileset
• 2D Hand Painted Snowland Tileset
• 7Souls RPG Graphics – Town Tileset
• Clean City Game Assets
• Dark RPG Chiptune Soundtrack Bundle
• Dwarves vs Elves RPG Sprites
• Hand Painted Extra Objects Tileset
• Japanese City Game Assets
• JRPG Character Pack
• Pixel Art Beach Tile Set
• Pixel Art Town
• Side View Animated RPG Battlers
• Spells and Abilities Icons
• Fantasy Character Bundle
• Forest Isometric Block Tileset
• Frozen Village Isometric Block Tileset

30$ Tier

• 7Souls RPG Graphics Tiles- Grasslands
• Over 80RPG Characters with Animations
• Ancient Game SFX Pack
• Elemental Magic Sound Effects Vol 1
• Elemental Magic Sound Effects Vol 2
• Fantasy RPG Items Vol 2
• Farm & Fort Tilesets and Icons
• Human Fantasy Animated Pack
• Interface SFX
• JRPG Music Pack
• Lighthearted RPG Location Soundtrack Bundle
• Lighthearted RPG Soundtrack Bundle
• Medieval RPG UI Kit
• Monster Creature Animated Pack
• Pixel Art Medieval Interiors
• RPG Music Pack – Complete Collection
• Survival Icons
• Tyler Warrens RPG Battlers Pixel Style
• MMORPG UI Kit
• Monster Creature Super Mix
• Pixel Art Medieval Fantasy Characters
• Pixel Art Medieval UI Pack
• Cute RPG UI Kit
• Pixel Art Forest Road
• Pixel Art Old Castle
• 58 Fantasy RPG Items

… yeah, this one is BIG!  The GameDev Marketplace license details are available here.  As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your money is allocated, including (and thanks so much if you do!) to support GFS if purchased using this link.  Learn more in the video below.

GameDev News Art 2D Sale

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As discovered on BlenderNation, a new plugin for Android was released that makes quickly creating buildings in Blender a breeze.  Building Tools is available for download here in both zip and tar.gz formats.  Simply download the archive and add it as a plugin in the Blender add-ons panel.  Building Tools enables you to rapidly create houses, from simple single story bungalows, to 100 story towers.

Buildings feature the following configurable assets:

• Floorplans
• Floors (slabs and walls)
• Doors
• Windows
• Multigroup (door-window combinations)
• Roof
• Stairs
• Balcony

The add-on is also open source under the MIT license on GitHub.  You can see how to create buildings quickly and simply using Building Tools in the video below.

GameDev News Art Blender

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Earlier today, Krita just launched the first beta releases of Krita on Android and Chrome OS.  Unfortunately for now it only works for Android tablets and the UI still has many desktop requirements so it may not work as expected, at least without a mouse and keyboard attached.

Details from the Krita website:

Thanks to the hard work of Sharaf Zaman, Krita is now available in the Google Play Store for Android tablets and Chromebooks (not for Android phones).

This beta, based on Krita 4.2.9, is the full desktop version of Krita, so it doesn’t have a special touch user interface. But it’s there, and you can play with it.

Unlike the Windows and Steam store, we don’t ask for money for Krita in the store, since it’s the only way people can install Krita on those devices, but you can buy a supporter badge from within Krita to support development.

Install

Notes

• Supports: Android tablets & Chromebooks.
• Currently not compatible with: Android phones.
• If you have installed one of Sharaf’s builds or a build you’ve signed yourself, you need to uninstall that first, for all users!

Do to the limited number of Android tablets and the massive size of some Android phones, it’s unfortunate a phone release isn’t also available.  Do keep in mind this is early access software, so expect all the bugs that come with that.

Art GameDev News Android

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