Custom brushes in Photoshop
October 15th, 2009
When I started texturing these latest characters I had a lot of trouble getting a nice fur effect quickly. I usually don't use a lot of custom brushes, but they can be very powerful. Here is the ambient occlusion (AO) base texture I started with-- it needs more fur detail! This is the character with AO in-engine: Here is ...
Wolfire Selected For Game Connection Lyon
October 14th, 2009
In June, amidst my adventures at E3, I happened across an official looking section of the show floor called Game Connection. I walked over to find out more, and the friendly representative explained that Game Connection is an event designed to facilitate meetings between people working in the gaming industry. They describe it as speed dating between developers, publishers, distributors ...
Riverhurst
October 13th, 2009
Hale, the creator of Foothold, recently unveiled a new masterpiece called Riverhust. With 12,178 objects, it has four times the detail of Foothold (which only contained a meager 3,233 objects) and uses a clever technique to simulate the appearance of water. Every house along the river bank has been built to scale to accommodate a walking tour for ...
Is John a robot?
October 11th, 2009
Shortly after I began my tour of duty on the Meebo widget last year, a character who often goes by the name Krumbs and is responsible for at least a couple of the ridiculous Meebo conversations you've seen, hypothesized that I was most likely a robot. He then elaborated: "You're probably just a carboard box with buttons taped ...
Overgrowth Icons
October 10th, 2009
When we made the first Overgrowth alpha a long time ago, we needed an icon. Aubrey quickly whipped up a stylized Overgrowth "O". This was, of course, a rough draft: Overgrowth, Alpha 1 However, we haven't had time to make it super cool yet. In the meantime though, the amazing Tim Soret contributed his own take on the icon ...
Overgrowth Soundtrack: Combat 4
October 10th, 2009
Continuing our series of Overgrowth music posts, we've added another Overgrowth piece to our YouTube channel. The songs are composed by the talented Mikko Tarmia and often feature Anton Riehl on the flute. Today we are revealing combat track number 4. No laughing is permitted when I say you should listen to it in HD. This song sounds like ...
Transparent shadows using stippling
October 8th, 2009
Most modern games use a form of depth-map shadow mapping, because it's efficient on modern graphics cards, and simple to implement. However, it doesn't easily support transparent surfaces. This leads to some inappropriately harsh shadows on materials that are meant to look softer, such as leaves in trees: Here are the shadows isolated: To soften the shadows, I ...