GC DevKit for HTML5 Games

Check it out:  https://vimeo.com/59646792

UI Design Links

I started looking into  UI designs for games and came across some cool articles that I would like to share:

http://gamedev.tutsplus.com/tutorials/aesthetics/game-ui-by-example-a-crash-course-in-the-good-and-bad/

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/#popular-alertboxes

http://carynvainio.com/?p=1028

Digital tutors has a nice UI design course for mobile devices:
http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?vid=12210

Chimera nCloth Wing Sim Draft

I performed this ncloth wing simulation on the Chimera a while back but never got around to posting it.  It definitely needs a lot of work.  The Chimera had a really high poly count and I remember the render took nearly two hours to simulate.  Because the original Chimera had a double sided wing, I had to simplify it so the simulation would not take so long.  To accomplish this, I made a copy of the original creature but deleted everything except the left wing.  I used the top portion of the wing and deleted the bottom.  In hindsight, I would have made a simpler geometry with less polys to reduce the run time.  This wing geometry was made into nCloth where I ran the simulation.  I used the simplified geometry to influence the creature.  I painted out the influence of the wing simulation on the geometry (white or black depending on the areas that I want simulated).    The settings need tweaking to get the right deformations.  At the time of simulation, some of the attributes that I adjusted included:  thickness, input mesh attract, deform resistance, drag, lift, friction, collision interations and max iterations.

A trick that I learned to get the right deformation is to create several nCloth simulations that are piped into the mesh.  From that point,  you can paint out the influence of the blendshape.  The idea is to get varying simulations that give you the look that you want.   You can paint in the influence of the simulation (paint blendshape weights) and also change the weight of the blendshape.  Pretty nifty trick.

Free Rigging Webinar!

Escape Studios is hosting a webinar with Jakub Krompolc on his work in Total Recall! And its free!
http://www.escapestudios.com/the-vfx-behind-total-recall-rigging-the-synths/