I love the silhouette

My child was born so I have been really busy. But I managed to clean up the magic school demo scene and add it to the repo. So far everything was generated using 100 percent geometry nodes. Now its time to add in some hand modeled stuff github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

5 years ago we set out to find a game system to engage people with cultural heritage. Now, over 350+ cultural sites brought to over a half million players later, I put down the lessons we learned making Puzzling Places medium.com/realities-io...

I got my magic school scene as far as I could with geo nodes. So far zero modeling, all meshes, materials and textures are done procedurally/ mathematically. Still need to do art direction and add small hand modeled details

made progress on the front entrance

castles are really not build in a day. repurposed my overhangs to make a roof for the bridge and add some details to the corners. Still so much to go, I cant even imagine how I would solo make this without geo nodes within any reasonable time

Perfect example of why Google AI summary is a clear downgrade compared to a normal google search. I forgot how Rorschach was spelled, Google searched immedietly got me what I wanted, the AI summary gave some nonesense.

ignore the terrible lighting. but I realized I can reuse the node I wrote to add extentions as balkony or entrances can also be used for attic windows. Though I would need to add some control paramters

So added the extention too! time to go back again to the magic school scene. I hope this time I can just finish it 😅😅

added the lower part to the extention for the cases where its attached to a wall. Next is adding the extention balkony for when there is a door.

I havent had a lot of time to code, but making small progress on the building extention. Added a roof to the door and some controls

someone mentioned I should straighten the geometry nodes noodles lines. Yeah, I am never going back to curves.

Back from Amaze. Started working on a terrace type. Would like to easily be able to add extentions with windows and doors to the main buildings. Still quite a bit of work left

My favourite game event Amaze is starting tomorrow! Hit me up if you are around!

added flow speed based on the inclination of the river. Now I can use it for different type of streams. I still honestly think I should just paint the river in whenever I need it

fixed a small bug and brought the node tree to the other blend file. Current workflow is to fix in the main git tracked blend file and reimport the whole thing every time fixes are done. I should have set things up properly as asset library.

I repurposed the mill for the main centeral tower of the school. Added attic windows, control for frequency of the windows on upper floors etc. Not sure about the distribution of the attic windows yet. But we will see!

Couple of days of break, back at it again. I started doing the magic school scene for real, and immedietly had a to do list of 30 items. Added more controls for the shape the towers. Loving the vibe

Everything on my todo list is done, time to go back and properly make the magic school scene. Tonight I added more scale control for the cliff side and added an extra layer of voronoi noise to the second cliff. This will make it easier to make giant landscapes

I prefer painting the path in the texture mostly but for large landscapes its nice to have something like this so made one. I would probably remesh at the end and bake.

For my magic school I need still two things, one of them is a bottom for the floaty towers, hence I added this module. Second a better rocky cliff. I am still not happy with the landscape I have 🥸

So, here is the river. Its a spline, so you can just extend it and it adopts to the landscape using geo node, and unrwaps it in a rivery way for the procedural materials to do their magic

One day I will just ship a game that looks like this. Like these hipster cafes that decided their deco style is unpainted walls and broken furniture!

This is the reason I needed the extra shore line edge loop. Technically I could use the new ray cast node in the material of blender 5.1 and just sample the depth map for shore line as you would in game engines, but that would require geometry under the river

Time for rivers. The mesh auto fills the space of the river channel. I also inserted an edge loop at certain distance from river bank so that we can do the stylized foam on the edges

realistic waterfalls are hard 🥲I will settle for stylized

begining of a waterfall

Very happy with the second cliff type. This should make the whole landscape generation a bit easier. I low key had Etretat in mind

Making the demo scenes, the toughest things was always the landscape. So I am making a second type of cliff, this time using a whole different method. If nothing else, we get table cloth out of it😃

based on the little magic school scene I made, I realized I need a way to not have doors on the gothic structures so that I can git bash them. Potentially I would need controls also for the window sizes because they can gt a bit out of hand

Another demo scene. I can finish these in around one and half hour. I did realize here that I need new front type for the gothic structures that has no door and window, and new tower tops. But over all very happy with what the tool can do so far

It was annoying that the doors were all the same size, so I randomized it

Have a baisic house generation along spline wokring, as usual all geometry nodes. It still needs a few improvement, but slowly I just want to get start with the next pahse.

Windows has been utter trash recently, each update worse than before. from constant kernel crashes to randomly changing monitor resolution. That said, happy acciedent, kinda digging this DOOM 2016 on ultra low resolution

I have somewhat of a thing that distributes the foundation of the houses. A lot of work still left but starting to do something

Little geo nodes tips for resampling curves with irregural distances. First decide per edge how long each edge should be as weights. Then normalize using attribute statistics node and finally set per point position in a repeat zone

I am trying to do some quick scenes with my procedural houses tools to get a feel for what I would need. I probably should tackle house placement along splines or blocks next because manual work is a pain. This scene is inspired by Simon Hintermanns work.

added wind to the geo plants, rendered the video, realize the wind animation is barely visible 😅well whatever its there.

I was gonna call it a day with the farm stuff. But then I looked at this shot and though, "we need a wind system for the plants!" Guess thats next

I am done with the farm stuff 🥳 Sunflower, wheat, corn, pumpkin, windmills, fences and wooden bridges. All done 100 procedurally in geometry nodes, blener with thousands of nodes. Nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

And fully procedural pumpkin. Geo node + material editor combi. Nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

I cant believe it took me so long to realize Blenders curve to mesh's curve profile is baiscially a function revolution. So instead of just making dumb tubes from curves I can make anything like a base for a pumpkin! Give me back my life before this 😅

Geo nodes could be both easy and hard. I really struggle explaining it to 3d juniors who ask me for resources to be able to do the same thing. How do I explain that the fourth column of the matrix is for position, without teaching the whole of linear algebra?

This is probably the best book I have read on marketing! Backed by a bunch of studies and very easy to follow actionable steps

I think I am getting somewhere. The albedo values are alot more reasonable. The sun still blows away though. Maybe thats just a question of good post LUTs

So I have decided to tackle the issue with sucking at the whole tone mapper + pbr thing in blender once and for all. Started using the sky texture. Its so crazy bright! Now I am thinking mayb my albedos are all too bright.

Puzzling Places is on popular upcoming on Steam 🕺💃I am slightly anxious for the launch as usual! 😅Wish us luck and leave us a review ♥️

added a drop down menu to switch between low poly and high poly wheat. Now that I look at it... isnt that baisically corn ... 🧐

geo node tip, use float curves to real time modifiy the shape of things you are creating

I am so fortunate that Puzzling Places pipeline is unlit with no tone mappers. Here the colors I get from the color transform (left), colors I am setting (right). PBR also gets on the way. Without LUT, it takes alot of work and skills to nail that vibrancy in PBR + tonemapper