Tag: Art

At GDC 2019 Epic Games announced their $100M Epic MegaGrant program supporting among other things, open source efforts in the world of game development.  Prior winners have included Blender, Godot and ArmorPaint.  Today, the open source cross platform sprite tool Laigter has joined that list!  If you are a regular of GameFromScratch, Laigter may sound familiar as we featured it in the Summer of 2019.

I spoke via email and Twitter with the author Azagaya about his experiences with the Epic MegaGrant program and on the future of Laigter:

I applied to the Epic Games MegaGrant project in April 2019. About three month later, i recieved an e-mail from them, stating they would
need more time for reviewing the tool. This year I received another e-mail stating that my project was approved for the MegaGrant! It was a
couple month ago, but I didn’t make it public until I revived the official badge from them.

The process was very simple. For the application, I just had to fill in an online form. They reviewed the project without any question or
notification. Once approved, they sent me two forms (one for taxes and another one for banking information), and a digitally signed letter. I
filled all the forms and signed the letter and send all the documents back to them, and that was all. People from Epic were always very
gentle, and helped me a lot if I did not understand something from the forms. They answered all my e-mails soon, and in a very friendly way.

The only problems I had were with my bank, because strict regulations exists in my country about receiving money from another country.
The process overall is really simple, and people from epics helps you in everything you need.

As to the near future of Laigter:

– Ability to preview animations with lighting. For now, only framed based animations are going to be supported.
– Brush for painting textures. You will be able to use textures from sites like https://3dtextures.me/ to paint textures into your sprites.
– Toon lighting preview.
– Theming support (dark and light themes for now)
– Ability to change display language in runtine (now, the language from your system is selected, if available)

Laigter is available on Itch.io and is open source under the GPL v3 license on Github.  Check out Laigter in action in the video below.  Congratulations on the Epic MegaGrant win!

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Art GameDev News 2D Applications

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With the massive recent releases of Blender 2.8x it is time to start looking towards the future and that is exactly what the Blender Foundation have been done.  With a pair of posts to their developer blog addressing the upcoming future of Blender.

First is the announcement of LTS versions and with Blender 3, adopting a more standard numbering convention:

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.

As well as details on the new versioning:

Along with this, I also propose to accelerate a bit our release numbers this decade.

This summer we’ll do Blender 2.90 (new particle nodes), and in summer 2021 the Blender 3.0 series begins! By then we will implement a more conventional release numbering.

I suggest to do minor releases (3.0, 3.1, 3.2, … 3.7) for two-year periods, and then move to a new major release. Blender 4.0 could be there in 2023 already!

Additionally there was some discussion on the “biggest projects” over the next year, the type of features you can expect to see in the next few releases of Blender.  There was also some tentative discussions on upcoming User Interface changes from their User Interface Workshop.

Finally there is some unfortunate news about Blender founder Ton Roosendaal who is taking a bit of a break due to help issues:

Last week Monday night I was hospitalized with an acute immune system failure. It was critical and severe but quickly fixed up and diagnosed to be excellently treatable with common medicines. Because of my weak immune system I’m confined to a special over pressured area in the hospital, to prevent germs or viruses from reaching me. Basically it’s the safest place in Amsterdam now!

Last week I migrated all Blender Foundation/Institute operational tasks to Francesco Siddi. He will take over ongoing projects and communication for me until I’m back in April. I would appreciate it if everyone would respect my rest for this month. I can’t handle thousands of good health mails or personal messages now! Social media will do fine 🙂 I know you care!

Wishing you a quick recovery Ton!  To learn more about all of the above be sure to check out the video below.

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Art GameDev News Blender

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Hot on the heels of Quixel Bridge 2020, Quixel have just released Mixer 2020.  Just like Bridge 2020, Mixer 2020 has also been made completely free!  This version contains a massively updated UI, a revamped 3D brush system, the Smart Material system and most importantly, the ability to directly paint on your own imported meshes, making Mixer much more of a competitor to Substance Painter in functionality.

From the Quixel announcement blog:

The wait is over! We’re excited to share with you the first Mixer 2020 preview release introducing the first look at early 3D support.

This first release unlocks features for texturing single objects and restyling Megascans assets, with Multi-channel 3D Painting, Megascans Smart Materials, Real-time 3D Curvature, Material ID Masking, Seamless Texture Projection and so much more.

For some odd reason, all of the download links on Quixel.com currently point to the 2019 release.  If you want to try the 2020 version it is available for download here.  Windows and Mac versions are available.

You can learn more about Quixel Mixer 2020 and see the new painting functionality in action in the video below.

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GameDev News Art Applications 3D

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Serif have released the 1.8 update for the entire series of graphical applications, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher, including the iOS versions (see Affinity Designer for iPad in action here).

Details of the 1.8 update from the release announcement:

Continuing with our focus on the professional workflow, our latest update adds some killer new features and improvements to the Affinity line-up, with something for everyone.

Convert and handle Adobe files better with Smart Object import in Affinity Photo and IDML import in Affinity Publisher, take advantage of the improved ability to share your work with collect linked resources, and output with confidence using the new preflight pro print feature.

Graphic designers will love the accuracy of our re-engineered expand stroke feature and massive improvements to our vector capabilities, while Affinity Photo lovers will be pleased to see the addition of manual lens corrections, much improved metadata handling as well as support for Nik Collection 2.5.

The entire Affinity suite of applications offer an economic alternative to Adobe’s line of applications without the need for a subscription.  If you are an existing Affinity customer, the 1.8 update is free!  You can learn more about the 1.8 updates in the video below.

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Art GameDev News Applications

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Humble are running a new bundle of interest to game developers, specifically artists, the HUMBLE SOFTWARE BUNDLE: NATURAL & DIGITAL PAINTING KIT bundle.  This bundle is a collection of software and addons for creating digital art as well as replicating natural media.  As with all bundles this one is organized into tiers, if you buy a higher dollar value tier you get all of the tiers below it.

1$ Tier

18$ Tier

• Flame Painter 4
• Amberlight 2
• Several particle brushes for Flame Painter 4

20$ Tier

• Rebelle 3
• Flame Painter Connect Photoshop Plugin
• Several Papers for Rebelle 3
• More Brushes for Flame Painter 4

Rebelle is a natural media painting application, Flame Painter 4 is a particle system brush based painting application (that can be plugged into Photoshop), Amberlight is extremely interest but hard to describe, while Inspirit is basically just a toy.

As with all Humble bundles, you can decide how your money is allocated, between the publisher, humble, charity and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS if purchased using this link.  You can learn more about the bundle and see the four main applications in action in the video below.

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Art GameDev News Sale

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Quixel Bridge 2020 was recently released, the first major release since being acquired by Epic Games late last year. Quixel Bridge acts as a… well bridge, in between your 3D and texturing content and your games engines and tools of choice, with plugins for most applications including Blender, Max, Maya, Unreal Engine and even Unity. With the release of Quixel Bridge 2020, it is now completely free for everybody.  Even if you don’t use Megascans, Quixel Bridge can be an excellent tool for organizing and managing your graphics content, especially now that a subscription is no longer required.

Details from the Quixel release announcement:

Better, faster, and free forever

We’ve improved the 3D viewer to give you more accurate real-time PBR shaders, plus inertial rotation and zooming.

Additionally, we’ve also updated the Maya, Blender, and Cinema 4D integrations with new improvements and bug fixes. We have also finally introduced support for the Alembic file format, and you can start downloading and exporting .ABC files right away.

But most importantly, Bridge is now completely free for everyone, forever. A paid subscription is no longer needed simply to access, download or export your content at any time.

Free unlimited Megascans for use in Unreal

And finally, the entire Megascans library is now completely free for use within Unreal Engine. Just log in with your UE account and you are all set!

We’re beyond excited to offer the entire Megascans library, Bridge and Mixer completely free of charge. And, in combination with Unreal Engine, creating any world imaginable has never been more exciting!

Check out the video below to learn more about Quixel Bridge, including how to install and use Bridge with Blender and Unreal Engine 4.24.

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GameDev News Art Applications

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The long running open source GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, just released version 2.10.18.  After skipping the release of 2.10.16 due to a critical bug, there is a fair bit in this release.

Release features include:

• Tools are now grouped in the toolbox by default
• Sliders now use a compact style with improved user interaction
• Vastly improved user experience for the transformation preview
• Dockable areas now highlighted when a dockable dialog is being dragged
• New 3D Transform tool to rotate and pan items
• Much smoother brush outline preview motion on the canvas
• Symmetry painting enhancements
• Faster loading of ABR brushes
• PSD support improvements
• Consolidated user interface for merging down and anchoring layers
• Update check to notify users of new releases available
• 28 bug fixes, 15 translation updates

You can learn more about the 2.10.18 release in the release notes available here.  GIMP is available for download on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and Solaris.  GIMP is open source under the GPL v3 license with source details available here.  You can learn more about GIMP and the 2.10.18 update in the video below.

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Art GameDev News Applications

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