As someone who went into a STEM field without any family connections to STEM, I have definitely been stuck eating carrots and not knowing why it didn't work.
Interestingly, the human brain tells itself carrot stories all the time:
tldr: patients with split brain hemispheres will reflexively make up explanations for decisions made by the other half of their brains. Fascinating stuff, and makes me wonder how many things I've done that serve my subconscious' ulterior motives.
I'd love to hear more about what kinds of carrots you were fed coming in from a non-STEM background. For me, the one I can remember was a family friend recommending I stick to an engineering field (mechanical, electrical, civil, etc.) rather than CS because "there was much more money to be made in those fields". Thankfully I stuck to what I liked, which was coding.
Even if you made less with coding, there's also a life balance question on the trade-off of doing what you like VS pure money quantity.
Long term, you want to enjoy your day to day, in any kind of endeavour and the good can get you through the bad.
I don't dispute the split hemispheres story but I don't think its particularly informative about normal cognitive function. I mean missing the connection between your brains is a pretty extreme situation.
Certainly a step above what a normal person could do in a 3D modeling program. The interesting thing about this type of stuff is that it would be harder for a professional to use those meshes as a base model; the topology doesn't lend itself to their process. For example -- the banana peels are puffy and two-dimensional. It would have to be completely restructured to be a convincingly peeled banana. So either the generated model has to be a finished product, or they are cost-effectively useless. CAD files are notoriously bad, and those are nice and mathematically easy to break down.
> So either the generated model has to be a finished product, or they are cost-effectively useless.
Not really. Depending on the use case and adequate tools it can be much faster to the alternative of making these manually as meshes and textures.
Using the banana as an example, if this can be converted to a volumetric model (voxels) the puffied side can be shaved off using sculpting tools and the model be converted to a mesh much faster than making it from scratch. While the end result wouldn't be good for looking at it up front, it can be perfectly viable for background props in a game, especially something that is viewed from a bird's eye view or a drawn out third person perspective (though even up front it'll look better than what you see in some games[0] - and that is AAA).
In fact there have been several games using photogrammetry already to construct 3D models out of taking photos of real places from various angles and converting them to point clouds and then to meshes - which after that they need to be cleaned up by artists. This all takes time, is costly and needs specialized hardware and software and yet developers do it. The linked paper is about a method that significantly lowers those barriers while giving decent results even if they still need to be edited.
You're assuming that this is always part of a pipeline that ends with a clean mesh representation that can be rendered using traditional techniques.
I think it's equally likely that we'll end up with replacing meshes - or with a hybrid pipeline where non-mesh representations coexist with something else.
I am thinking about realtime mainly but I think the same thing might apply to "offline" rendering (does anyone still call it that?)
Material Maker is surprisingly alone in the PBR material department for FOSS, I have started thinking about diving into the PRs just to get it up to snuff with Substance. I can hardly pay for Photoshop, Adobe!
Hi Evan, I enjoyed this blog post a lot. I released my first indie game this February, after working on it since graduating college. It has made 3x my normal job's salary -- I'm still torn about whether to make a sequel and go full time, or stick with my usual 9 to 5. Let me know if you have any good tips!
I think gamedev was also a very big escape for me since middle school, and your post reminded me a lot of those dark times.
I also agree that games are an art, I went from drawing -> modeling -> rendering -> programming, so it was easier for me to reach those conclusions.
Making a game to show off your cleverness is definitely not the best motivation, but I have found that it can improve the game's "experience" if you can harness that feeling. Straddling the line between personal interest, feasibility, and market value is maybe the most important thing to get right as a solo developer in my opinion. I could see developers who got lucky with their obsessions getting absolutely devastated with their lack of hits afterwards (something I'm afraid of doing myself!).
The comment about the twitter gamedev scene being driven by terminally online people is very accurate, although I still admire some of the more educational/resource oriented ones for their sheer willpower.
Depth is a useful parameter for controlnet, especially when you want really specific forms. I've found that it can hamper outputs because blank sections of solid color are interpreted as flat walls, when really I'm trying to make those parts ambiguous!
Observations from a long time fan and game developer:
1. Early on in the trailer, it shows a road segment being drawn across an existing road, with the intersection getting automatically added. This is a big step up from the original road system where every intersection must be placed at the end of a road segment. I imagine this will make it easier to create nice geometric patterns.
2. Some cities shown have surface parking taking up a whole plot. I hope this isn't just cosmetic - allowing more/less parking should really influence the economics and transport methods of each citizen.
3. In the data view mode, bright colors bleed onto the white building models. I suspect there's some dynamic ambient light bounce rendering going on here!
4. It looks like the old method of plot zoning is still around, showing as grid squares along the side of the roads. I would have liked to see non-square parcels that fill up the availible space, but I also understand why square plots would make it easier to fill with pre-made assets.
5. Speaking of pre-made assets, those skyscrapers look really similar and boring. Walk around any modern city with glass towers and you'll see a lot more variation and interesting nuances, while still being relatively performant to render in a game like this. I'm worried they will introduce actual variety via drip-fed dlc assets. Yes, mods can fix that, but you can't beat the visual consistency and performance of decent vanilla resources.
6. Looks like the town hall starts off as a huge parking lot with a small office in the middle, and can be expanded into multiple departments. Looks like a handy mechanic, and especially believable for North American development since a lot of government buildings are like 75% pavement.
I've had the pleasure of chatting with Jonas Hovgaard over the years. He has a real knack for simulation games and knows how to satisfy a niche while also creating wide appeal. I'm jealous of his meticulous approach to making complex systems with simple controls. Startup Company was a huge sleeper hit, Big Ambitions is looking to be a similar success!
Interestingly, the human brain tells itself carrot stories all the time:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-prospect/...
tldr: patients with split brain hemispheres will reflexively make up explanations for decisions made by the other half of their brains. Fascinating stuff, and makes me wonder how many things I've done that serve my subconscious' ulterior motives.