fun little project. geo nodes for a animations and much of the scene building, eevee for render #screenshotsaturday

late night geo node fun. some procedural walls.

I had a lot of fun with the first case study. Airborne Empire. Some UX issues, but crazy good fantasy. They manage to do alot with very little!

Can you still make indie games sustainabily with 20k new yearly releases on Steam? This and others was a question that popped up in our mind as we were releasing our latest game on Steam. To answer them, I did a deep dive in the Steam indie market shahriyarshahrabi.medium.com/deep-dive-in...

I feel like there are entire segments of PC games I dont know anything about. I have decided finally to play more smaller games. So made myself this little Steam suggester. You give it a criteria, it suggests you game to play. github.com/IRCSS/Steam-...

because data visualization are fun. Steam indie market 2025

I finished crunching through steam data of 140k games. The analysis has come down to 46 charts, plus extra seven slides from Newzoos and Matthew Balls report. This is going to be a long post 😅 Some good insights for indies though!

But the main issue with Blenders auto unwrap is not even that! If the topology transitions smooth enough from one point to another, it never triggers the 66 degrees angle base unwrap, causing overlapping faces. This will lead to bake and texturing artifacts that are a pain to fix

Of course the same topolgoy could unwrap better if you care less for avoiding stretches etc. Some applications like Simplygon/ RC give you better unwrap with default paramters, way larger faces, better iterative packers with more flexible island rotation etc

Strange is XAtlas is a single .h .cpp with no dependencies, so adding to a c++ project shouldnt be hard. Maybe issue with MIT license and blender licecnse. So here a visual example what can go right or wrong with an unwrap. Here is an unwrap that XAtlas does. Nice and packed

Blenders auto UV is better now due to the concave packer. But its still strangly behind the open source XAtlas, which somewhat matches industry leaders like Simplygon. I wrote a little wrapper with GUI/ CLI support to unwrap with Xtlas from within blender github.com/IRCSS/XAtlas...

I am crunching some numbers, looking at releases on steam. blog post comes later, but a fun graph is this one, its the reverse of Steam games expontential growth past few years. 75 percent of games released in 2025 have 0 reviews

And I am done with my little festival scene. A little bit of fun to relax abit. Model on my @sketchfab.bsky.social skfb.ly/pLUrI

I love the silhouette

My child was born so I have been really busy. But I managed to clean up the magic school demo scene and add it to the repo. So far everything was generated using 100 percent geometry nodes. Now its time to add in some hand modeled stuff github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

5 years ago we set out to find a game system to engage people with cultural heritage. Now, over 350+ cultural sites brought to over a half million players later, I put down the lessons we learned making Puzzling Places medium.com/realities-io...

I got my magic school scene as far as I could with geo nodes. So far zero modeling, all meshes, materials and textures are done procedurally/ mathematically. Still need to do art direction and add small hand modeled details

made progress on the front entrance

castles are really not build in a day. repurposed my overhangs to make a roof for the bridge and add some details to the corners. Still so much to go, I cant even imagine how I would solo make this without geo nodes within any reasonable time

Perfect example of why Google AI summary is a clear downgrade compared to a normal google search. I forgot how Rorschach was spelled, Google searched immedietly got me what I wanted, the AI summary gave some nonesense.

ignore the terrible lighting. but I realized I can reuse the node I wrote to add extentions as balkony or entrances can also be used for attic windows. Though I would need to add some control paramters

So added the extention too! time to go back again to the magic school scene. I hope this time I can just finish it 😅😅

added the lower part to the extention for the cases where its attached to a wall. Next is adding the extention balkony for when there is a door.

I havent had a lot of time to code, but making small progress on the building extention. Added a roof to the door and some controls

someone mentioned I should straighten the geometry nodes noodles lines. Yeah, I am never going back to curves.

Back from Amaze. Started working on a terrace type. Would like to easily be able to add extentions with windows and doors to the main buildings. Still quite a bit of work left

added flow speed based on the inclination of the river. Now I can use it for different type of streams. I still honestly think I should just paint the river in whenever I need it

fixed a small bug and brought the node tree to the other blend file. Current workflow is to fix in the main git tracked blend file and reimport the whole thing every time fixes are done. I should have set things up properly as asset library.

I repurposed the mill for the main centeral tower of the school. Added attic windows, control for frequency of the windows on upper floors etc. Not sure about the distribution of the attic windows yet. But we will see!

Couple of days of break, back at it again. I started doing the magic school scene for real, and immedietly had a to do list of 30 items. Added more controls for the shape the towers. Loving the vibe