Merry Christmas! 🎄⛄

This newsletter might appear too late in your inbox because Santa was busy delivering toys. Had to do it myself.

Anyway, I hope you had a good and safe start into the new year. May the compilers be stable, the engine crashes few and the results MIND-BOGGLING!

Source: @glassbottommeg.bsky.social‬

Do you have New Year's resolutions? My aim is to finally follow/finish a course which I bought a while ago, but then my game happened. :D

My good old "Fluffy Airborn"-article got an update presenting the fluffy trees in Tiny Glade and a tutorial how to replicate it.

My good old Fallout-article got an update, presenting a fantastic use of parallax occlusion mapping decals to blend geometries together.

Lars wrote an article for his students, summarizing different profiling tools like Intel VTune or RenderDoc. This is a perfect excuse to highlight some things I documented in this area:

1. Intel GPA wasn't mentioned but is a very useful tool which even allows auto-injection! It's my #1 tool when it comes to investigating games.
2. In my last talk I show a live demo about how to use GPA, RenderDoc and NSight to inject into the rendering.
3. A while ago I released my Tech Art course documents which also cover the profiling tools from Unreal and Unity.

Julian Bragagna makes amazing Houdini Tutorials on his blog and I added the one about for-loops and bounding boxes to my "read later" list.

Giovanni made an in-depth tutorial about the vortex effect from Balatro.

Beautiful example about what you can do with Godot! There is even a demo on itch!

Stumbled across this VFX and I can't stop looking at it. World class!

A look across the "Tellerrand". This artist paints images which look like low poly Half Life 1 stuff. Love it!

That's it! Hope you liked it :) See ya!
Simon (riding the golden train, tschoo-tschoo!)