Humanoids workflow for Hellrule

I decided to create this infographic showing the workflow I follow to create humanoid characters for Hellrule.

(By the way, you can follow its development on my Twitter account or more directly by using the hashtag #Hellrule.)



P. S.: This was posted on Twitter, but given the ephemeral nature of tweets I'm posting it here so it can better resist the passage of time.

Flash Player and 1D rendering for Godot

UPDATE: This was an April Fool's joke.

These days I am busy implementing two new features that will take the Godot game engine to a new level.

1. Dedicated 1D engine

In order to keep going in the effort to equip Godot with the feature set expected by game developers, a new 1D engine will be added.

Benefits:

• Since everything can be done in 1D, eventually the 2D & 3D engines will be removed. (There will be a transition stage during which the three will coexist to set an easy path for migrating current projects.)

• Also, due to the lowered processing requirements, Godot will be greener, which is very important nowadays.

The same way 2D node types have CanvasItem as their supertype, those for 1D will be descendants of WireItem.

Some of the new 1D nodes in the node creation dialog.

2. FlashMovie node

For those still needing a state-of-the-art 2D & 3D renderer, the new FlashMovie node type will be added, allowing to embed any Adobe Flash application in a project.

To spend development time in what really matters, we won't create our own implementation, but embed the player through the ActiveX cross-platform, open standard.

Of course, when the 2D & 3D engines are finally removed, this will get an update by which only 1D Flash movies will be allowed.

A game created in Godot by embedding a game created in Flash. Easy and quick.

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Due to the impact of the changes they will probably be held back until Godot 2020 (expected release in 2030).

Global Illumination in Godot Engine @ Gamelab BCN 2018

My talk at this year's Gamelab is finally online!

Slides available on GitHub!

As I say in the video description I feel very thankful to these people:

• Juan Linietsky (reduz, Godot's main developer), for putting trust in me to do this and for giving me some reference material and support.
• Unai Landa (Digital Legends' CTO and technical track organizer), for the same trust-in-me reason.
• Attendees, for their attention and interest on the subject.
• Watchers of the video, for the same reason.

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Here, a picture of me in the speech room with my audience in the background:

Crafting this video was headache because I only had the audio recording. What I did was:

1. Exporting the presentation from PowerPoint as a videoclip (including transitions, etc).
2. Loading it and the audio into Adobe Premiere.
3. Making hundreds of cuts, frame loopings, etc. to synchronize what's being said to what's being seen.

It took me a number of hours, but having been able to reconstruct it was worth it. (Next time I'm considering using certain PowerPoint's feature about recording intervals during the actual speech.)

Sketchfab integrates with Godot

This is cross-posted from the official Godot blog. I'm putting it here since I was the one that took the job from Sketchfab.

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Sketchfab is a well-known site where you can browse a big library of 3D models and download them for use in your own projects. Many of them are free, covered by open licenses.

They have just announced their download API (announcement), which allows third-parties to integrate with it, giving any application access to hundreds of thousands of models in glTF, a standard format that many tools, Godot included, understand.

They have integrations for other famous game engines, like Unity and Unreal and have decided to provide an official plugin for Godot! It's also available on the Godot Asset Library. You can watch the video to get a better idea:

So it seems that more and more companies are taking Godot very seriously and it's becoming a big player in the game engine landscape.

In order to run the Sketchfab plugin, you'll need to wait until the upcoming Godot 3.0.3 is released since it contains some needed bugfixes, that were done after the last official version. If you are a Windows (x64) user and can't wait, you can get a build snapshot from the plugin repository, under which it will work.

Introducing onion skinning for the Godot game engine

You may already know about the great open source Godot game engine. I've been contributing to it since two years ago or so. Today I'm writing here to announce a feature I developed for the upcoming 3.0 version, and of which I'm pretty proud of: onion skinning.

So what's onion skinning?

It's a technique used in animation from its early days consisting in the ability to draw frames of animation on a semitransparent paper (onion paper) so you can see the previous frame through it. That provides the artist with a good reference to base his new drawing in.

Of course, this concept once brought to computers gets much more flexible: arbitrary number of see-through layers, ability to see the past and/or the future, etc. Every decent software package with an animation editor features it nowadays. And some people was requesting it for Godot.

This picture from the Adobe Animate CC documentation [CC-NC-SA] is fairly telling about the concept:

How it looks like in Godot?

This images are from the pull request I made and based on the main character from the 3D platformer example. (By the way, this works for both 2D & 3D.)

With the default past/present colors (that you can change in the editor settings), seeing one frame to the past and to the future.

Talk about Godot in Paris

The video of my talk about the Godot Game Engine is just published!

It's called Node Nuggets and you can enjoy it (or not) here:

Maybe you've come here precisely from there so this is nothing new for you. Please keep tuned for fresh content!