Category: Game Development

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Godot FBX Importer Improvements In Godot 3.2.4

In Godot 3.2 FBX support was improved by implementing the open source AssImp library. In the upcoming release of Godot 3.2.4 we are getting an all new FBX importer. While based on AssImp initially, this project took over a year to developed, removed over 50K lines of non-FBX related code and made improvements across the board.

Developer Gordon MacPherson recently wrote about the experience on the Godot blog and detailed the following changes:

  • We rewrote all the mesh code to support all formats of FBX meshes correctly.
  • We built an entire abstraction for the FBX transform information, which was a very complex and convoluted undertaking to get working properly.
  • We designed a better handler for the animations which can compensate for the complex transform information, which means that we can handle animations correctly.

The project is ready for use but there are some plans in the pipeline:

  • Finish porting the rewrite to Godot 4.0 (we use the 3.2 branch in production, so that’s where this was developed and quality controlled by many users).
  • Locator bones. Right now, you need to bake your animation before exporting.
  • Improve material mappings (most are supported, some need mapping).
  • Fix bugs in the beta phase, we expect them.

Be sure to check out the blog post for details on the project, why they did it and why you should care. In the video below we put Godot 3.2.4 through the paces with a couple FBX tests, including this scene from Sketchfab. Unfortunately until Godot 3.2.4 is released, you will have to build Godot from source, just be sure to checkout the 3.2 branch from GitHub. Special thanks to IMVU for sponsoring the project.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60Ofqmytzu0?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Creature 3D Animation Software Now In Alpha

Kestrel Moon software, creators of the Creature 2D animation software have just released the very first 0.1 alpha of Creature3D. Creature 3D is a stand-alone 3D animation application, currently available for Windows 64 machines for free, for rigging and animating characters using procedural animation.

Features of Creature 3D:

Procedural Animation at your fingertips

Walk Cycles, Tail Animation, Ropes, Skin Sliding and Dynamic Flesh/Breathing Motion are a breeze with Creature3D’s state of the art Procedural Motor System. Take full manual control by tweaking both keyframes and animation splines.

Fast, Easy setup of Characters

Easily rig your Characters via Auto or Manual Rigging Modes. Add bones, then pick between Auto Weight or Manual brush painting for your Skin Weights.

Export your Animations to the World

Export your animation as industry supported mainstream FBX or GLTF assets which can then be imported into Game Engines like UE4 or Unity.

You can learn more about and download Creature here. If you want to get started with Creature 3D there are a few sample projects now available here. You can learn more about Creature 3D and see it in action in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqO37ZlDqiw?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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NVIDIA Release RTX Branch of Unreal Engine 4.25.4

The NVIDIA game development team just announced the release of the RTX GPU optimized branch of Unreal Engine. The 4.25.4 branch of Unreal Engine is the most current as of time of writing. The NVIDIA RTX branch is all about bringing RTX hardware optimized raytracing performance to UE4.

Details of the release:

  • Stability improvements
  • Hitching improvements due to async shader management
  • Transmissivity of light through foliage
  • Several generic SW overhead reductions for RT setup
  • Better culling default for instanced static meshes (foliage)
  • Minor fixes for light culling in reflections
  • Substantial improvements in GI and path tracing performance with high light counts
  • Unreal Engine 4.25.4 Update

There is also a experimental caustics branch with the following features:

  • The new hybrid translucency mode
  • Multi-bounce refraction optimization
  • Based on the latest NVIDIA RTX Branch
  • Mesh and Water caustics feature

More details of NVIDIA Unreal Engine support are available here. In order to access the RTX branches available on GitHub you have to first link your GitHub account to your Unreal Engine account with details available here.

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Unity MegaBundle X Racing Game Assets

There are only a few days left in Unity’s 10th Anniversary MegaBundle X that we previously discussed here. Taking a quick look through the assets in the bundle it becomes clear that there are a number of assets that would be perfect for people looking to create a racing game. Today we are going to look at the following assets from the bundle:

Edy’s Vehicle Physics

This asset contains the logic you need to control your cars, from fast drifting sports cars to city buses.

EasyRoads3D Pro

Quickly and easily create and populate road networks using a simple spline based approach, both in the editor and dynamically at run-time, with a terrain aware system.

Toon Racing

A collection of toon shader styled racing cars, rally cars and monster trucks. It also contains several props, track pieces and more for creating a full racing game with a consistent art style.

UniStorm

Add dynamic weather systems, day/night cycles, pouring rain and more to your racing game with UniStorm.

Oak Trees Pack

They’re trees. Oak trees. There are 5 of them, enough said.

The above links contain affiliate codes that pay GFS a small commission if you purchase anything (thanks so much if you do!). Of course be sure to use the Bundle Link and not individual asset links to get the savings, at least until November 12th. You can learn more and see all the above assets in action in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw0UUdXHO0E?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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GIMP 2.99.2 Released

GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, just released version 2.99.2 beta, a giant step toward the upcoming 3.0 release. The heart of this update is the move to the GTK 3 UI toolkit from the existing GTK2 version. This has many advantages, especially when it comes to increasingly common HiDPI devices.

Highlights of the 2.99.2 release include:

  • GTK3 based user interface, with native support for Wayland and HiDPI displays.
  • Major refactoring and cleanup
  • New plug-in API
  • Plugins now possible with Python 3, JavaScript, Lua, and Vala
  • More (color) space invasion
  • Render caching available for better performance

Be sure to check the complete release notes for further details on this release. You can also learn more about the 2.99.2 release and see GIMP in action in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdNo-k9TtDo?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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LDtk The Level Designer Toolkit

LDtk, or Level Designer Toolkit, is an open source MIT licensed Haxe based 2D level editor from the creator of Dead Cells. If it looks familiar that is because we recently covered it when it was known as LEd. In just a few short months though, LDtk has come a long way, including community ports to Linux and MacOS. With the 0.5 release (the re-brand version number), tons of new features were added to LDtk including:

  • Tiles flipping: in Tile Layers, you can mirror tiles before painting them by pressing X or Y (or Z). This also works from group of tiles.
  • Tiles stacking: you can now optionaly stack multiple tiles in a single cell of a Tile layer, reducing the need for multiple layers. For example, you could paint a brick wall, then enable stack mode (T), and add details like cracks or vines over the same wall. Be careful though: erasing of stacked elements can be tricky, so you should use a mix of multiple layers and stacking to get the best results.
  • New editing options bar: Grid locking, Single layer mode and Empty space selection moved to a new more streamlined button bar.
  • File association: project files now use the extension *.ldtk instead of *.json. Therefore, on Windows, double-clicking such files will open the app accordingly. If you prefer the .json extension, you can force it in each project settings (but will lose benefit of the file association).
  • Auto-layer rule preview: when you move your mouse over a rule, you will now see which cells in the current layer are affected, making their testing MUCH easier.
  • Tiled (TMX) export: this optional export now generates proper standard tile layers. However, to support LDtk stacked tiles feature (see above), multiple Tiled layers might be generated per single LDtk layer. Also, IntGrid layers are now properly exported to Tiled (as standard tile layers, with an auto-generated tileset image).
  • New color picker: it supports copy/paste, manual hex value editing and a much better UI (thanks to simple-color-picker).
  • Flood-fill fixes: if you hold SHIFT while clicking in a Tile layer, it will flood-fill the area using currently selected tiles (randomly, or by stamping group of tiles, depending on the current mode).
  • Flood-fill erasing: just use SHIFT+Right click to erase a whole contiguous area.
  • The layer Rule editor now overlaps left panel and allows level editing while being open (makes rule testing much easier). Press Escape to close it.
  • In Tile layers, you can press L to load a saved tileset selection (using S key)
  • Renamed the Level panel to World (for the 0.6.x future update).
  • It’s now possible to change the tileset or even the source layer of an Auto-Layer without loosing your rules.
  • Auto-layer baking: turn a complex Auto-Layer into a standard Tile layer (think of it as the flatten feature in Photoshop). Be careful, it’s a one-way operation.
  • Unified “Show/hide grid” and “Grid locking” options. You can now just press G to toggle grid (which also implies “grid locking” in supported layer types).
  • All options (such as “Grid on/off”, or “Compact panel mode”) are now saved to a JSON file in your app folder, in userSettings/.
  • Help window is now a side panel.
  • Opaque tiles are detected in tilesets for use in various optimizations (mostly related to the new tile stacking feature).
  • Fixed a crash when deleting IntGrid layer while an AutoLayer uses it as source.
  • Added some colors to UI buttons
  • New exit button icon.

You can learn more about LDtk releases here, including an even newer 0.5.1 beta release. As mentioned earlier the project is open source with the code released under the MIT license and available on GitHub. You can learn more about LDtk here with downloads available on Itch.io. You can learn more about LDtk and see it in action in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1pmIImzEts?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Six Great Game Development YouTube Channels

YouTube is an incredible resource for game developers, but sorting the gems out can be a challenge. Today we are going to highlight 6 excellent game development channels, especially if you are a Godot developer, as well as general game development guides, Blender, GameMaker and more.

AskGameDev

AskGameDev is a collection of game developers that set out to answer your questions about game development. They cover many of aspects of gamedev that are often not covered, such as how to run a Kickstarter, how to get or deal with a publisher, as well as several game development themed compilations. AskGameDev also have a website available here.

GDQuest

GDQuest are home to dozens of Godot tutorials, in fact Nathan from GDQuest is a member of the Godot documentation team. In addition to Godot coverage, GDQuest has tutorials on all kinds of FOSS software such a Blender and Krita. The GDQuest website is available here.

HeartBeast

HeartBeast started out as a GameMaker tutorial channel, of which there are dozens of high quality long form tutorial series. In more recent years, Heartbeast has been instead creating high quality multipart and stand-alone tutorials on Godot. HeartBeast also has a website available here.

BornCG

BornCG has been making high quality Blender YouTube tutorials on his channel created in 2008! In more recent years BornCG has been increasingly covering the Godot game engine, as well as creating modern Blender tutorials as well.

DevDuck

DevDuck is the newest channel on this list, less than two year old and already over 100K subscribers, an impressive feat! DevDuck is a professional developer that is documenting his indie game development experience on the side. He started off with Unity but switched to Godot and of course did videos explaining why and how.

KidsCanCode

KidsCanCode have the project mission to get kids started in coding as young as possible, often through the process of creating games. Early on they did mostly Python and PyGame tutorials but then switched to Godot in recent years. They also run the Godot Recipes on their site, a collection of snippets on how to accomplish specific tasks in Godot and GDScript.

You can learn more about all the above channels in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyBqcfRbt9s?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Unreal Engine Free Content for November 2020

Every month for the last couple years Epic Games have given away several assets for Unreal Engine with today being no exception. While the assets are completely free, they are only free until the first Tuesday of December. Once “purchased” the assets are yours forever.

This months free assets include:

Permanently Free Additions:

Unfortunately there is no video yet as YouTube Studio for creators is currently down and nobody can upload or edit videos right now. Once YouTube errors are fixed we will upload a video.

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Mastering Animation by CRC Press Humble Bundle

There is another Humble Bundle of interest to game developers, the Mastering Animation by CRC Press bundle. This is a collection of e-books around the concept of animation, from traditional to digital, comics, manga and anime, as well as animation related subjects such as legal and writing. The bundle is organized into the following tiers:

1$

  • Dream Worlds: Production Design for Animation
  • Animate to Harmony: The Independent Animator’s Guide to Toon Boom
  • Voice Over for Animation
  • Layout and Composition for Animation
  • Frame by Frame Stop Motion
  • How to Make Animated Films

8$

  • Animation from Pencils to Pixels
  • Designing Sound for Animation
  • The Art of Fluid Animation
  • Hybrid Animation: Integrating 2D and 3D Assets
  • Reel Success: Creating Demo Reels and Animation Portfolios
  • Acting and Performance for Animations
  • Animated Life
  • Making Toons That Sell without Selling Out

15$

  • Writing for Animation, Comics and Games
  • Directing for Animation
  • Acting and Character Animation
  • Animation in China
  • The Pocket Lawyer for Comic Book Creators
  • Animation: From Concept to Production
  • Independent Animation
  • Comics for Film, Games and Animation
  • Japanese Visual Culture
  • Lighting for Animation

All books are provided in PDF, EPUB and PRC(?) formats. As with all Humble Bundles you can decide how the proceeds are allocated between Humble, the Publisher, charity and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS using this link. You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECULX_nPf6c?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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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.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xr_DyiIQ7g?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]