Tsunami’s got outlines!

Nothing really fancy going on here, just bog-standard extension of vertex positions along normals, flip the face culling mode and render solid black. I thought about doing it as a post-processing effect using a Sobel filter, but I like having the lines get smaller on the objects as they get farther away.

Sadly, it wrecks havoc with non-volume geometry, such as the antennae. Thankfully this is easy to work around by just modifying the model, but I might put an edge case in to handle this sort of thing later on, if I should really need it.

Well, I put my Labor Day weekend to good use. I gave up on trying to shoehorn Ogre into doing what I wanted (which was really impossible to begin with, since it would have never done portables) and have started just floating my own engine. I toyed with the idea of extending some of my existing rendering code, but even though I’m not going to use the engine directly, I learned a LOT from my time poking at OGRE and picked up some great ideas for library structure and design. So, I decided to start over, and, four days in, I’m making some good time.

That is an image of my previously demoed bug model rendered in the new engine. There isn’t any outlining in place yet (should be done fairly soon), but as you can see geometry and texturing are largely in place. He’s also spinning, but you can’t see that here for obvious reasons.

Also, this is using my own file format, which is something I should have done a long time ago. I was shopping around for a good model format to replace lib3ds, as it’s animation support is just horrid, when somebody at gamedev suggested I try writing my own export plugin for Blender. I love Python, I wrote the entire exporter (geometry and pose skeleton w/vertex weight info) in one evening.

Up next are:

• Outlines. NPR for the win!
• Skin deformer and keyframe animation. The reason I was looking Ogre in the first place, but I’m actually looking forward to writing this now that I’ve got my sleeves rolled up. Having my own export scripts and a custom-tuned format simplify the task to an incredible amount.
• Proper Entity instancing with scripting hooks.

Some quick Sam & Max sketches I did for Telltale, for when they stop by.

Hi guys!

I’ve implemented a patch for next-gen gallery that allows you to display thumbnails independent of galleries. This does not replace the single-pic functionality, but is rather meant to complement it.

Note, NextGEN Gallery can do this out of the box now, so I’ve removed my patch. The instructions have been updated to do it the built-in way.

To install the patch, simply copy the ngg-functions.php file in zip below to your next-gen gallery plugin folder. If prompted, overwrite the existing file. This patch is for the 0.97 version, but it should work with other version with minor modifications.

REDACTED (Yeah, yeah, I just had to use that word)

Usage

Simply add “[thumb id=x]”, where “x” is the id of the image you want to display, to any post or page. For example:

[thumb id=12]

becomes

I’d personally like to see this added to next-gen gallery as a permanent feature, as I think this would be useful for a lot of people, so if you find this fix handy, show some love for it over at the WordPress forums ^^.

Done in less than 2 minutes for warm-up. I’ve really been enjoying warm-up drawings lately, and a lot of them are turning out surprisingly well.