factorysettings

Gamedev in TD progress...

Added 2022-03-15 09:04:38 +0000 UTC

Dear friends,

Herewith I'll give you an update on the gamedevelopment in Touchdesigner. It's going quite well actually, better than I expected. I manage to create a collision system without the bullet physics. First thought that bullet solver was the go to tool for collision, but the system I got know is way more adaptable to newly implemented geometry.

I'm basically collecting two values:

1. the depth to the character

2. the angle the character is looking at a face (normal to camera)

I just placed a second camera on the chest and used a renderselect to take the same render but with a different camera. RenderselectTOP is quite convenient because it doesn't have to recalculate al the hard work again that the renderTOP already did.

So the closer the character gets to a wall, the darker it gets, and fully blue means that the character is perpendicular to the wall. That's basically all the info I need to let the character stop moving and/or direct slightly to the right/left by adjusting the angle. What's great about the 'normal to camera' pass is that the colors will shift while rotating, blue gets slightly more red when looking from a right angle to it, and less blue when from the left. Of course I've cropped both images to one pixel, exactly in the middle, for performance sake.

Adapting the character to height works, but I'd like to have it a little bit more dynamic. I've renderen a depth pass in Blender from the area I've implemented. More black means 'go up', so a gradient will in- or decrease in height. It works just fine, but it would be great to keep it in TD. I could put another camera above the head but I don't want to make it al messy with all these camera's, but hey, if it works, and doesn't give to many performance issues, why not?

Before I'm releasing a beta I'm currently working on the character. Due to licensing I can't provide this character so I have to adapt the rig to a different model from our own. I could use a placeholder, but that's kind a lame, so almost there!

Thank you all for making this possible! Exciting times, imagine what if we replaced the character with a car......

Best,

Stefan