luelly

[luelly]

hackathon project using chatGPT to drive character animation

#Youtube

[luelly]

we took an axidraw and connected it to midjourney and drew portraits of strangers at Washington square park !

#Youtube

[luelly]

a compilation of the past few months on and off experimenting with ml-agents.

the simple idea is that you give the algorithm the position of the agent (the cube) and the position of the reward (the ball) and you give the agent some actions it can take at each point in time, and it experiments on which actions to take until it learns to take the correct actions at the right time to get to the reward eventually.

it was pretty awesome seeing the agent learn and fail repeatedly and then eventually succeed. i imagine maybe similar to seeing your kid take their first steps.

results were pretty instant and predictable for getting to and chasing the ball, but the setup is a bit frustrating to iterate so it was a struggle to up the complexity. i tried to get the agent to both run away from an enemy (negative -1 reward) and get to the ball at the same time, but the creature never learned to run away. i think maybe i need to train the two behaviours separately but haven't gotten to trying that yet.

i also tried to see if putting 2 agents in the scene and giving them a negative reward upon touching each other would result in some emergent behaviour, such as running away from each other and going a different route to get to the ball instead, but the most that happened was the agents got stuck in this lock step state where they just inched towards the ball and not towards each other.

i want to go back to experimenting with adding more actions to the agents to let them fight each other a bit, to see if that would create more emergent behaviour.

but before i got to that step i got kind of impatient and i just decided to through them into a graybox scene with a character controller and run around and make them chase the ball. that was way more fun than having to do the whole ML setup again.

and then i added legs to them without retraining the agents and they were definitely struggling to keep up on them LOL.

my takeaway is that the set up of the ML training environment is way more effort than it looks. i'll need to give it a crack another time 🫡

#unity #unity 3d #ml-agents #reinforcement learning

[luelly]

an intro-to-shaders workshop i ran at AR House to teach residents how to use Unity’s shadergraph.

we started by using some flower models from sketchfab, then i showed everyone how to use UV scrolling and clipping to add movement into the material without needing to change the mesh. 

then we added a simple particle system and post processing at the end to add depth and pretty effects :)

#port

[luelly]

lunar luck club - an experiment and project in NPR, shading, and VFX. created to celebrate AAPI heritage and celebrate the lunar new year.

project tools: unity vfx graph for flower petals, unity shader graph for anime style rendering, photoshop layer modes recreation, vroid (for base model), 2d hand drawn assets for the hairpieces/accessories/flowers.

shout out to my talented friend jessie for drawing and shading the hair textures <3 

(process shots in the last 3 photos)

#port

[luelly]

started a monthly newsletter to collect all the cool links i find on the internet :) https://luelly.substack.com/p/-august-2021-luellys-monthly-game

#game dev

[luelly]

 some non tech-art projects i’ve worked on recently :) 

1. a twitch.tv based minesweeper game where you can play minesweeper with other viewers in stream using chat commands! made in a day for Global Game Jam 2021. 

2. 2D social game prototype - i used Normcore for the multiplayer setup and PlayFab for the login/friends system.

3. an AR based rhythm game - DDR for your face. 

#port

[luelly]

procedural plant generator for an internal hackathon, all made in blender :) super fun to do! huge thanks to @BayRaitt on twitter for teaching me the techniques used to do this. 

#port

[luelly]

assortment of shaders and VFX for an unreleased project.

#port #realtimevfx #vfx #unity #unity3d #gamedev

[luelly]

some dust trail VFX for an unreleased project

#unity3d #realtimevfx #vfx #port #gamedev

[luelly]

some terrain stuff - i modeled the sand/terrain in WorldCreator and added a custom Unity terrain shader, my co-workers modeled/textured the rocks, and I made a simple shader to work for low-poly rocks.

the sand shader has a tiling normal and texture on top of the splatmap texture to give it detail and definition. this makes the splatmap easier for artists to edit and define - we can use general different shades of darkness and lightness to sculpt the shape of the sand without needing to worry about blending splatmap textures. 

the rock shader is optimized for low poly rocks - it takes both a detail normal (mapped in worldspace) and an object normal so rocks have definition from a distance but still looks believable up close. this allows artists to iterate faster without needing to add excessive detail during the modeling stage.

#game dev #unity3d #technical art #port

[luelly]

explosions made with Unity’s VFX graph, using the subemitter module to chain them together.

background assets done by my very talented coworkers. 

particle shader referenced off of @CultureAttack on twitter

#game dev #unity3d #vfx #realtimevfx #port

[luelly]

some vfx experiments in unity. using a shader that dissolves using a noise texture based on the particle lifetime.

#gamedevelopment #gamedev #madewithunity #unity3d #vfx #realtimevfx

[luelly]

the character design and resulting 2d rig for a space runner game! 

#game dev #game development #character design #unity3d #unity

[luelly]

landscape studies in photoshop 

#illustration #painting #art #backgrounds #digital art #digital painting

[luelly]

digital painting master studies - the hard round brush. 

based on oil paintings by lawren harris & tom thompson 

#painting #digital painting #landscape

[luelly]

the bbq

#art #pencil crayon