Tag: Reviews

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PowerIK For Unreal Engine Hands-On

Today we look at PowerIK for Unreal Engine, a full body IK solver. PowerIK was recently released as part of the December monthly UE giveaways as part of the free forever category. On the Unreal Engine marketplace, PowerIK was described as:

Power IK is a full-body IK solver that lets animators push and pull any skeleton with any number of effectors.

Use Power IK to easily align creatures to uneven terrain, or dynamically modify their pose at run-time. Power IK is a robust and efficient solver that produces remarkably natural poses even under extreme circumstances.

PowerIK has the following features:

  • Unique proprietary full-body IK solver
  • Power IK Solver AnimGraph node
  • Built-in ground alignment
  • Power IK Rig Actor Component for making interactive rigs
  • Bonus! Procedural animation example blueprints
  • Bonus! 6 sample skeletal meshes with fully documented blueprints

While it supports Unreal Engine 4.26, the current install will give you an error when you try to run PowerIK. If this occurs, on Windows the fix is fairly simple. Navigate to your install directory for UE 4.26, then navigate to:

\Engine\Plugins\Marketplace\PowerIK\Source\PowerIKRuntime\sdk\lib\Win64

Copy the file POWERIK.DLL. Next paste it to the directory

\Engine\Plugins\Marketplace\PowerIK\Binaries\Win64

Now it should work just fine. In the video below we go hands-on with PowerIK using the example project currently available for download here. If you run into some trouble, the documentation is available here.

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VoxEdit Beta Hands-On

VoxEdit is a free 3D Voxel graphics editor you can freely download for Windows and Mac OS here, with a Linux version mentioned as “coming soon”. The application is actually designed as the content creation tool for The Sandbox a voxel based game platform where artists can monetize their voxel creations. That said, the modelling portions support exporting in OBJ, FBX and GLTF formats making it useful for use with other engines and DCC tools. The animation tools however cannot export except to the Sandbox marketplace.

The modelling tools have the following features:

  • All-in-One software (Model, Rig, and Animate)
  • Incredible performance
  • Available for Windows and Mac
  • Amazing voxel creation tools
  • High level of detail models
  • Advanced Renderer
  • Versatile Color Palette
  • Friendly 3D environment

These are the key features if you are using VoxEdit as a straight out voxel modelling tool. However if you are intending to publish on the Sandbox marketplace, the tool also has advanced animation features, as well as the ability to define and texture voxel blocks. Neither of these features however support exporting into “open” file formats.

If VoxEdit isn’t to your taste for Voxel modelling, be sure to check out BlockBench or possibly MagicaVoxel for alternatives. You can learn more about VoxEdit in the video below.

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Wave Engine 3.1 Released

Wave Engine recently released version 3.1. Wave Engine is a completely free to use 3D game engine capable of targeting most platforms and XR devices. We have been keeping an eye on this engine since 2015 when we featured it in the Closer Look series. More recently we looked at Wave Engine again in 2019 when WaveEngine 3.0 was previewed after a long period of silence. After another long period of silence we received the 3.1 release which brings .NET 5 and C# 9 support as well as graphical improvements.

Details from a guest post on the DotNet team blog:

We are glad to announce that, aligned with Microsoft, we have just released WaveEngine 3.1 with official support for .NET 5 and C# 9. So if you are using C# and .NET 5, you can start creating 3D apps based on .NET 5 today. Download it from the WaveEngine download page right now and start creating 3D apps based on .NET 5 today. We would like to share with you our journey migrating from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5, as well as some of the new features made possible with .NET 5.

From .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5

To make this possible we started working on this one year ago, when we decide to rewrite our low-level graphics abstraction API to support the new Vulkan, DirectX12 and Metal graphics APIs. At that time, it was a project based on .NET Framework with an editor based on GTK# which had problems to support new resolutions, multiscreen or the new DPI standards. At that time, we were following all the great advances in performance that Microsoft was doing in .NET Core and the future framework called .NET 5 and we decided that we had to align our engine with this to take advantage of all the new performance features, so we started writing a new editor based on WPF and .NET Core and changed all our extensions and libraries to .NET Core. This took us one year of hard work but the results comparing our old version 2.5 and the new one 3.1 in terms of performance and memory usage are awesome, around 4-5x faster.

Now we have official support for .NET 5 and this technology is ready for .NET 6 so we are glad to become one of the first engines to support it.

In the video below we review Wave Engine 3.1. All of the samples used in the video are available on GitHub. Please note this repository should not be cloned, it simply links to a different repository for each sample.

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GDevelop Game Engine Revisted

We first looked at the GDevelop game engine back in 2017 in our Closer Look Game Engine series. In the intervening years, GDevelop 5 has come a long way, bringing more and more features to this impressive open source cross platform 2D game engine. In the past year there have been over a dozen new beta releases to the engine including several community contributions. There have also been some updates as a result of the 2020 Google Summer of Code. While many of these releases aren’t large enough to justify a video, taken as a whole it is certainly time to revisit this game engine and the improvements it has seen.

Some of the highlights of recent releases include:

  • add support for a new asset store with hundreds of ready made game objects
  • new analytics system without requiring a third party solution
  • better support for right to left languages
  • support for dynamic 2D lights
  • customizable keyboard shortcuts
  • peer to peer communication extension
  • live preview (hot reloading) support
  • command palette for quickly launching editors
  • new editor themes

These are just a few highlights of the dozens of releases over the last few months. If you are interested in checking out GDevelop it’s available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Online. It is also an open source project with the source code available on GitHub under the MIT open source license. If you want to learn more or run into problems, be sure to check out their Discord server. You can learn more about GDevelop and see it in action in the video below.

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Hands-On With Sound Particles

Sound Particles is a one of a kind program for rendering 3D audio, capable of supporting thousands to millions of sounds in your simulation. Sound Particles has been battle tested used in big budgets movies such as Alita, Ready Player One and the new Star Wars films, as well as games such as Assassins Creed Origin.

Features of Sound Particles:

Sound Particles is a sound design software application capable of generating thousands (even millions) of sounds in a virtual 3D audio world. This immersive audio application will enable you to create highly complex sounds on the fly, which will ultimately enable you to design sound better and faster than ever.

Sound Design
The best 3D software for complex sound design. Used for film, videogames and virtual reality.

Postproduction
Working in postproduction? Use Sound Particles to add depth and richness to your sounds.

Immersive Audio
Supports immersive audio formats, such as Ambisonics, Dolby Atmos, Auro 3d and much more.

If you are interested in trying this unique audio application they have a fully functional demonstration available for Windows and Mac available here. All licenses are currently 50% off during Black Friday/Cyber Monday from indie to enterprise licenses. You can see Sound Particles in action in the video below. Sounds used during this demo were all downloaded from the excellent FreeSound.org website.

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Beepbox Easy Online Music Sketching Application

Beepbox is a free online tool for quickly generating music via sketching. It’s written in a combination of JavaScript and TypeScript with the source code available on GitHub under the very permissive MIT license. Getting started with Beepbox is as simple as going to the website and starting to lay down some notes. There are a variety of instruments available and you can layer multiple tracks of sounds to easily create music.

Perhaps coolest of all, as you create your song, the song’s data is encoded into the URL. You can simply share your songs URL and others can either open it in the player or they can open it in the editor and make changes. You can also download your song in .mid or .json formats for later updating, or you can export out into WAV format for use in your game engine of choice. In addition to BeepBox is there a modified more complex version called ModBox you can check out here. It is forked from the same source code but offers additional tools and levels of control at the cost of complexity.

You can learn more about BeepBox and see it in action in the video below.

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Blockbench 3D Modelling Application Review

BlockBench is a free 3d modelling, texturing and animation application for creating Minecraft style models. Blockbench is available on Windows, Mac and Linux, as well online.

Blockbench features include:

  • Blockbench is an all in one 3D Editor and Animator for Minecraft and other games and applications
  • Blockbench comes with a powerful animation editor. Animations can later be exported to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, rendered in Blender or Maya, or shared on Sketchfab.
  • Customize Blockbench with the built-in plugin store. Or create your own plugin and add a new feature or new format.
  • Collaborate with your friends on models, textures and animations – in real time, over the internet!
  • Blockbench is available in 12 languages, and the number is growing.
  • Create, edit and paint texture right inside the program. Create or import palettes, paint, draw shapes or automatically create templates.

You can learn more about Blockbench and see it in action in the video below.

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Nomad Sculpt

If you’ve ever dreamed of doing 3D modelling on the go, today’s product Nomad Sculpt may be perfect for you. Nomad Sculpt is a 3D sculpting application designed from the ground up to be mobile first. It brings all the functionality you would expect from a modern 3D sculpting application like ZBrush, Mudbox or Blender but it runs on your Android or iOS mobile device!

Key features of Nomad Sculpt include:

  • Clay, Crease, Trim, Smooth, Mask and many other brushes
  • Stroke customization with falloff, alpha and other options
  • Matcap rendering or Physically Based Rendering
  • Vertex painting, with roughness/metalness control
  • Multiresolution sculpting
  • Voxel Uniform Remeshing, along with subtractive boolean
  • Dynamic Topology, to refine locally your mesh
  • Robust layers that supports topology change
  • Designed from the ground up for a mobile experience
  • Support pencil pressure (Apple Pencil, Samsung S Pen, etc)
  • OBJ, STL and glTF support

Nomad Sculpt is available on the App Store and the Android Store. It is $15 for the complete version, but there is a reasonably full functioning, export disabled trial version available. You can also see Nomad Sculpt in action in the hands-on review below.

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Codecks Game Development Project Management

Codecks is a project management tool in the vein of Trello but aimed specifically at game developers. Modelled around the concept of a card game, decks are created for the various different tasks that need to be accomplished. Individual users interact in the form of hands, formed from cards either created locally or taken from community decks. There are also milestones as well as integration into several other technologies such as Github and Discord, as well as Trello import.

Key features of Codecks include:

Cards, Decks & Projects

Well designed collectable card games provide a great sense of the current state of your game. Let’s apply those design cues to project management.

Conversations & Notifications

Ever lost track of a comment thread? Conversations in Codecks are very explicit about who is part and whether it’s been resolved.

Time Tracking

Codecks’ optional time tracking allows you and your team to see how much time you’re actually spending on your tasks.

Search & Order

Use our advanced search and ordering options to dice and slice your work just the way you need.

Metrics & Reports

“Will we manage to release in time?” is a tough question. Especially in game development. Codecks is here to help.

Milestones

Plan for your release – one milestone at a time.

Codecks has a free tier available for teams up to 3 developers in size with several other pricing tiers available.

Codecks Pricing Tiers and Details

You can learn more about Codecks and see it in action in the video below.

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microStudio Game Engine Hands-On

microStudio is a game engine that runs entirely in your browser and makes it incredibly easy to get started creating 2D games, with a polished, well designed, comprehensive and documented set of tools. You can start as easily as going to microStudio.dev in your browser, clone an existing or create a new project and start coding, no account creation required.

Key features of microStudio include:

  • entirely browser based, no install or account creation required
  • simple Lua inspired programming language microScript
  • built in multi-file code editor with contextual documentation and syntax highlighting
  • run your game directly in browser or remote test on phones with live loading
  • pixel art editor
  • tile map editor
  • support for multiple devs with automatic synchronisation of changes
  • deploy your game as HTML5, or beta export support for Windows, Mac and Linux

You can learn more about microStudio and see in it action in the video below (or Odysee here). If you want to learn more or encounter a problem check out their discord server.