Will Kolb's Blog

Shade Smooth > Mark Sharp

I Built A TF2 Mod (Built meaning compiled)

I have tried to build a source engine mod probably 5-6 times since I started programming in late 2000s early 2010s and I’m finally ahead of the curve and I was able to get a mod built before valve did something that wasn’t in the public c++ repos that broke everything! (See https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/tree/master) This is […]

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Unreal Stuffs

I’ve been playing too much xcom and I felt like my c++ skills were waning so I thought it would be a fun quick project to quickly spin up a turn based squad commander system. The camera First thing that is distinctive about xcom is that it’s an isometric game, therefore the camera is fixed […]

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Leaning Updates

(Writing as I’m doing this fyi) I wanted to re-write the leaning in the game. Right now the movement is all very snap, which has some skewing to it but i wanted a more gradual lean in. (Normally I would use https://blueprintue.com, but wordpress is weird about iframes) Now you can see here the process […]

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Chaos Physics 1…me 0

Spent a bunch (like 1-2ish hours) of time trying to get the chaos physics working with the tree and… It kinda works but the issue comes into the in game interaction. The damage levels seem to be weirdly arbitrary and aren’t assigned to a root bone but the pieces themselves Also the definition of “damage” […]

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Tree part 3

Recording myself modeling another tree. Then I realized I probably shouldn’t be posting videos with copyrighted music, so I made a song to go along with the tree recording (I used some of the pre-canned abelton clips for bass and vocals which feels like cheating but I wanted something kinda alright and fast, the drums […]

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More Tree For Thee

I made a better tree, not perfect (it still has the weird branch in the upper left) but its more passable than the other tree I made. I also found in unreal the “Foliage” system ( see https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/procedural-foliage-tool-in-unreal-engine ) which is the opposite of the “Landscape” system used for grass. Essentially it lets you spawn […]

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THE WOODS!

Jumped back into unreal but I’m heavily procrastinating the game parts so I started messing with some of the environment tools in unreal. Specifically I’ve been poking at the grass setup tools (https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/grass-quick-start-in-unreal-engine). Not too complicated essentially, your environment drives a few inputs and outputs in your landscape material. So I whipped up a quick […]

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Table Part 2

Remade the table this morning: The “Tris” number is something I forget to mention yesterday which is the thing that directly correlates to how hard a renderer (such as Unreal Engine) has to work to render something. Note the number is around 500 (which honestly might still be too high). The table yesterday: Hopefully that […]

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How to not to Model a Table

Look at this table! Seems good right? …Right?……RIGHT? I can promise you this is not good, you see when you make 3d models you can’t just “Make” the models. You need to plan and thing it through, the big things are:1.) Keep the model as many simple shapes as possible2.) Avoid complex faces that are […]

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