i'M gOiNg To MaKe MoRe PoStS. Also, project updates like the Pixar128 VMT Pack and prerendering!
I think I said something about posting more, and that’s going to take some reworking of how I update the site files for it to feel more second-nature to post whenever I get the inkling to say something. In the meantime the organizer of Blaugust 2025, Krikket over at Nerd Girl Thoughts, posted the results of Blaugust 2025 and assigned awards out to those that posted. I got an award for first-time participants and also received a Rainbow Diamond Award for making at least 31 posts for the whole month of August! While I’m probably not doing that much posting again (as she even says on the blog, it’s a lot!) I’m ready to go for when Blaugust 2026 rolls around.
Thanks to Krikket for organizing this event, I joined it on a whim and it was extremely fun to make sure I said at least one thing every day. If anyone wants to see the awards, I’ve put them in the only appropriate place for Web 1.0 site awards - under the new Site Awards section of the Cool Links page. Go take a look!
Now, what’s some non-blog stuff I’ve been doing?
The Pixar128 VMT Pack is a Source-compatible set of CC BY 4.0 textures released by Pixar as Pixar One Twenty Eight. I wanted to use these in Hammer++ so I could build levels with them using GodotVMF, but this required converting the textures provided into VMTs. So I did the legwork! While the original textures provided by Pixar are covered under their CC attribution, use of the VMT files are provided under a similar license with an additional restriction - no usage in, with, or for any Generative AI. You want to use these with GenAI, you do the fuckin’ legwork.
Enough of the legal jargon though, check out the textures in action! Click on the thumbnails to see larger images.
Having a varied set of textures really helped with quickly prototyping some rough levels in Hammer++ that I then imported to Godot using GodotVMF. If you use these textures in a project, please let me know! I’ve set up a preview of all the textures included on the pack’s page so you can see if it’s got enough variety for your needs.
This was a little experiment I did on a lark after a Bluesky post from Eniko musing on the idea of doing modern background prerendering. I ran with the idea and had a proof-of-concept up later that night!
The setup in Blender involves a few crucial components. The main one is the visual geometry that will be rendered out to flat PNGs, but those renders alone aren’t enough. There are three other invisible components in the Blender scene that are exported to this Godot scene: collision meshes for actors to interact with, cameras that will perform the rendering of the angles in Blender and provide in-game angles, and trigger meshes tied to cameras so that, on contact, the player can change the angles and displayed images when moving about the scene.
Combine all of these, and you get a full scene a capsule can move around in!
You can see there’s a huge flaw when the angle goes low though. The player capsule isn’t occluded by the background! There’s multiple solutions for this issue such as displaying a smaller cut of the background image as the foreground, hiding the capsule when it goes behind the cutout. However that takes some extra manual labor and I want to make this process a bit lighter on my end. My next plan is to render out two images per camera angle. One will be the usual background, but the other will be a Depth Map.
If I set this up right, I can use this depth map combined with shaders to not render any geometry pixels that have a depth less than that of the prerender’s depth map. With that trick, we now have geometry occlusion baked into every prerender angle! Except, I haven’t implemented that yet. And to fix that I need to return to this instead of the billion other side projects I have. Still though, the potential is there! I’m happy I got this much done, and it’s already extremely impressive as-is. Maybe I need to direct this at a real project to get the technique finished…
To make up for the long stretch of not updating I shoved a bunch of goodies in here, but I’ve still got more to share and blab about. I can’t guarantee the updates will be as often as Blaugust again, but I think I can manage like one a week. Thanks for reading, and look forward to more upcoming projects! Speaking of, I really need to get out an update for Palette Studio. Yeah, that could be next.
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