Perlin noise is a classic procedural texture. It gives a wavy grayscale image, that has all sorts of uses in computer graphics. Commonly, it’s used to blend two textures together.
But what if you want to blend three or more textures together? Well today I have the answer.
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In the first article I showed how the Marching Cubes algorithm works in 2d.
In this tutorial, I cover how it can be extended to 3d.
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In Minecraft, you can dig in any direction – removing a block at a time with well defined edges. But other games manage to destruct terrain smoothly, without all the blockiness of Minecraft.
The following tutorial in Marching Cubes, a technique for achieving destructible terrain, and more generally, creating a smooth boundary mesh to something solid. In this series, we’ll cover 2d in this first article, follwed by 3d in the next , and Dual Contouring in the third. This last is a more advanced technique for achieving the same effect.
I’ve released a plugin generates a random arrangement of particles with a blue noise distribution. This is also known as Poisson Disk Sampling.
This distribution of particles guarantees no two particles are very near each other. It’s often considered a higher quality particle arrangement than Blender’s default uniform sampling. It’s particularly useful for organic arrangements, and randomly arranging meshes without collisions.
I’ve created a Blender plugin generates 3d beziers curves in elaborate “celtic” style knotwork, based off of a framework mesh. Tested with Blender 2.68a. It’s available on github.
Celtic Knots are a intricate decorative design found in Celtic and other cultures mosaics and manuscripts. The knots often include elaborate variations and unusual angles that the plugin does not attempt to create, so touching up the resulting path in blender may be necessary for some designs.
Refer to the tutorial for some instructions on how to use the plugin, and the gallery for some examples of what is possible.
Following my development of Resynth Tileset, I’ve been doing some thinking on the nature of tilesets, and the possible ways to auto tile them – that is, to paint tiles as is with a brush and letting the computer do the tile selection. Let’s review a few possible ways of doing so.
Just to be clear, I’m only interested at the moment in square, non-rotatable tiles. Rotation is another discussion, but excludes the more interesting tilesets. Adding alternative tiles is also not considered, though it is pretty easy to add in.
I’ve released a GIMP plugin on Github that allows you to create large tilesets really easily, like this one, based off of the Resynthesizer Plugin.
I saw a poster on TIGSource talk about manually cutting up sprite sheets, so I’ve dusted off a project from 2007 to solve it. Just load up a sprite sheet, select the background color, and export the results into a directory. It’s got a few extra features useful for what I originally wanted it for, too.
Just remember, this is from the archive, so way crappier than the stuff I do nowadays. I’ve barely touched it, except to brush off a few GUI bugs and delete menu options that don’t do anything.
But it does the job.
Announcing my newest finished project, Box2DWith. I’m collecting together various utility classes for doing all the stuff with Box2DFlashAS3, but found annoying. Demo, Docs