Where I've been

Hello Folks! (Or anyone who's reading this) I'm back from the dead! 

Well, if I'm being honest, I've been far from dead. In November of 2022 started working as a Junior Technical artist for Coatsink for an undisclosed project. TL:DR if I talk about what I'm working on I might die in legal fees.

Hello? It's me...

Enough chitchat, let's talk about the main topic:

Retro Modern Render Pipeline

Is a custom render pipeline made for making games with the different rendering styles from the 90's or early 2000's and helping creators use old fashioned conventions in a modern rendering style.

Retros Styles that will be available

I plan to support presets and shaders for the subsequent platforms:

• PSX (Affine Texture Mapping & lack of floating-point numbers)
• N64 (Low Poly Gouraud Shading + Up to 8 Directional per vertex lights)
• PS2 or Dreamcast
• GameCube (With libraries to create custom effects, remember the TEV in GameCube hardware is like a programable shader)

Reigniting Old Fashioned Conventions

I want to bring back pre-rendered backgrounds. These design conventions, used in JRPG's, Survival Horrors and countless other genres were made to create imposible scenery in games first step into 3D.

All of these are prerendered backgrounds. See the evolution from right to left.

Prerendered backgrounds evolved with hardware for a time, but eventually died because Realtime graphics reached a peak where these types of techniques weren't needed, and new game design standards emerged where these backgrounds fitted nowhere. 

The idea is to have two tools:

• One tool to create old-school backgrounds:
  • Camera & Collision import from 3D file.
  • Background import & camera linking.
• One tool to modernize prerendered backgrounds:
  • Camera, scene & collision import from 3D file.
    • Scene casts shadows on dynamic objects like characters to blend them with the bitmapped backgrounds.
    • Dynamic objects cast shadows on the collision meshes, to project shadows on the background.
  • Background import & camera linking.

When will it be available?

There will be not a date. I don't plan to do "releases", as this project is what I've decided to do to divulge further into graphics programming, Unity's graphics specifically because knowing my way around the scriptable render pipeline system would help with some of my daily tasks at work.

So, I will repeat! TL:DR I'm doing this on my spare time, it could be or not be finished in the future, I'm doing things just for fun!

GitHub Repository

Gameplay Loop

We finished making the gameplay loop today. UI and menus are work in progress.

Logo

I finished the logo design this afternoon. I think it fits well the theme of the game only using 3 colors.

That's all

Beautiful Shapes!

I just figured out how to do shapes... Tutorial in a few days!

Why I am doing VFX related stuff?

Recently the new portfolio posts I've been doing are all related to Realtime VFX. I think VFX is a good way to gain knowledge of Technical Art because it implies knowing about shaders, rendering, and programming. So it will be like that for a while.

Lightning AoE VFX - WIP

It will imply a lot of work, don't expect it to be released soon. The effect is a lightning attack intended for a First Person Shooter, currently in development in Unity using VFX Graph (I'm also thinking about doing it on Niagara). Lightning rays will use a shader, the ground marks will be made using decals and the clouds will use particles with a flipbook simulation using Embergen (or Houdini's pyro).

Lightning Shader Creation - WIP

Fireworks - WIP

Just wanted to do some fireworks, I'm currently looking for a way to add custom shapes to the explosions (if you know how, comment below, thanks).

Learning Niagara

Recently I started a short course (by Gabriel Aguilar) to introduce myself to Niagara (Unreal's new particle system).