Game Dev Digest Issue #95 - Animation Made Easy

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Animation, whether its procedural, physics based, or using animation clips, there is something for you in this issue. Plus more on C# scripting, VFX, shaders and tons more. Enjoy!

It’s showtime! New tools for cinematic creators - Creators of film, TV, and animation – you need specialized tools to tell your stories. Announcing an Open Beta for you. Read on to discover some of the latest workflows and features that make Unity easier and more powerful for cinematic artists.
Unity

Game Programming: Delayed Result Gathering - I wish I had known two particular optimization techniques when I was working on my game projects back at school: delayed result gathering and time slicing.
allenchou.net

Triangle Solver - I made an interactive triangle solver. It also outputs code for you to copy/paste into your projects :) try it out now
Freya Holmér

Learn About Pattern Matching In C# - In this article, you will learn about pattern matching in C#.
c-sharpcorner.com

How To - Basic Inventory in Unity (Part 1) - An inventory system can be tricky to achieve, especially if you are a beginner, so, for those of you that keep scratching their heads, here’s a tutorial on how to create not one, but two types of inventories.
blog.gamedev.tv

Unity UI test automation: how to write tests for your game interface - The Unity Test Framework provides a basic way to write automated tests for your game. While it's fairly easy to test simple game objects with Unity, making sure the user interface works as expected is another story.
gameconductor.net

A Day of Maintenance (Jam Version) - In Unity, turns out there's a straightforward way to implement your own pre-build checks, and block a build if they fail! Hooray!
bighandinsky.itch.io

Load, unload and change assets at runtime with Addressables - Addressables are “the right” way to properly manage dynamically loading assets within your game. It also helps tremendously with memory allocation. In this tutorial, you will get an overview of what the Addressable system is, the benefits in using it, and how to dynamically load/unload an addressable.
gamedev-resources.com

Simple Mesh Voxelization in Unity - In this article, I explore a naive approach to mesh voxelization in Unity. Mesh voxelization is a helpful tool to determine mesh connectivity and volume. We can use this information to create pathfinding grids, heat diffusion maps, global illumination, simplified physics representations and more.
Bronson Zgeb

Input in Unity made easy (complete guide to the new system) - In this in-depth guide you’ll learn everything you need to know about getting started with Unity’s new Input System, how it compares to the old system and whether or not you’d be better off using one of the Unity Asset Store’s purpose-built solutions instead.
gamedevbeginner.com

Paper Lanterns - This is a small shader graph tutorial on how to recreate my Paper Lantern shader.
Kelvin van Hoorn

Tech Art Chronicles: What Are SDFs Anwyay? - So what in the world is an SDF? SDF stands for Signed Distance Field.
joyrok.com

Boss Fight Books - Great books on classic video games. [more at the Hacker News discussion]
bossfightbooks.com

The Hub For All Things Video Game Development! - We are a platform where video game development and creation talents come to share their previous game dev projects, connect & collaborate with others, get hired by studios and grow your career in video game development! Whether you are a programmer, soundscape designer, game designer, artist, script writer, game tester, level designer or any other skill that makes games, Quickscope is for you! Sign up now to begin growing your career in video game development!
quickscope.gg

Videos

Bringing characters to life with animation - Discover how we infused life in Chop Chop's characters using all of Unity's animation tools, handling a variety of use cases like walk cycles and locomotion, using tools and weapons with IK, layering different animations, randomization, and dealing with complexity in the Animator Controller state machine.
Unity

Basics of Partial Derivative Shader Funcs in Unity! DDX, DDY, FWidth | Game Dev Tutorial - To continue investigating mipmaps, I want to introduce the partial derivative shader functions in Unity URP! These functions, DDX, DDY, and FWidth, seem magical! You can pass any variable to them, and they'll give you the amount it changes over one screen pixel. Let's see how they work, how they relate to mipmaps, and how to use them for interesting effects!
Ned Makes Games

Improving my VR Sword Art Online RPG game (Unity) - Hi, I didn't really like my game environment from the last video, so this week, I decided to improve the look of my game. Video was a little bit rushed because I wanted to hurry fixing my broken APK XD. But yeaaaa you guys can play the demo of this game in the link below now.
Jasony

Simple Shader Graphs - Water Ripple Effect / Super Mario 64 Painting [LET'S A GO!] - Check out this AWESOME water ripple effect which is similar to the effect used in Super Mario 64 when jumping into a level painting.
Seth Funk

Assets

Mega Bundle Sale! Mega Bundles to chart your course - Save up to 95% on level-design assets to chart your course, create vast environments, and stylize your storytelling.

$14.99 Bundle - save up to 76%
This bundle contains: Loading Screen Studio, Swarm Of Bats, Umbra Boundary Builder, and Runtime Transform Gizmos.

$29.99 Bundle - save up to 83%
This bundle contains everything from the $14.99 bundle, plus Dungeon Maker, Fog Volume 3, Jujube Map Editor | 3D Level Designer, VertPaint, and Simple Waypoint System.

$39.99 Bundle - save up to 95%
This bundle contains everything from the $14.99 and $29.99 bundles, plus Grabbit - Editor Physics Transforms, TerraWorld - Automated Level Designer, Mesh Deformation Full Collection, Asset Usage Finder, Medieval Village Environment, Impostors - Runtime Optimization, Advanced Terrain Grass, Fullscreen Editor, Mantis LOD Editor - Professional Edition, Sci-Fi Effects, Technie Collider Creator, TileWorldCreator, uContext Pro, Task Atlas, and DreamOS - Complete OS UI.
Unity

Mixture - Mixture is a powerful node-based tool crafted in unity to generate all kinds of textures in realtime. Mixture is very flexible, easily customizable through ShaderGraph and a simple C# API, fast with it's GPU based workflow and compatible with all the render pipelines thanks to the new Custom Render Texture API.
alelievr Open Source

NPR Labs - Cel, Toon, Sketch, Hatching, Low Poly, Wireframe, and Stylized shaders.
candycat1992 Open Source

Unity Tweens - An extremely light weight, extendable and customisable tweening engine made for strictly typed script-based animations for user-interfaces and world-space objects optimised for all platforms.
jeffreylanters Open Source

Unity Web Browser - Adds a functional web browser to Unity without any issues or hassle.
Voltstro-Studios Open Source

EZSoftBone - A simple kinetic simulator for Unity, you can use it to simulate hair/tail/breast/skirt and other soft objects.
EZhex1991 Open Source

Hairibar.Ragdoll - A Unity package for making ragdolls and animating them with keyframed animations. See it in action. [or how about Active Ragdolls by Sergio Abreu García]
hairibar Open Source

WAV Loop Editor for Unity - Edit .WAV file loop metadata in Unity.
Unity has limited support for looping metadata in .WAV files. It allows specifying a loop start and end point which will be used when inside the loop (Audio will still be played back from the start). A very common use case is music with an intro that should be skipped after a loop, which requires precise timing. Most other tools that support this functionality are either not widely available, unmaintained or complicated to use, so this tool was created to allow editing loops with a simple interface directly in Unity.
SkaillZ Open Source

Curved-UI-Utility - A Unity package that makes it easy to curve your HUD and give a more immersive first person experience.
Caeden117 Open Source

MasterMemory - Embedded Typed Readonly In-Memory Document Database for .NET Core and Unity. 4700 times faster than SQLite and achieves zero allocation per query.
Cysharp Open Source

MagicOnion - Unified Realtime/API framework for .NET platform and Unity.
Cysharp Open Source

Figma To Unity Importer - Tool that imports nodes from Figma into the Unity. Before using I want u to notice, that the project is raw, and I can't promise you that I will develop it intensively. Some features are not ready yet. Some features are impossible to quickly recreate in Unity.
ManakhovN Open Source

HUMBLE SOFTWARE BUNDLE: MEGA SOUND DESIGNER LOOP CRATE VOL 2 - Loot Crate Vol 1 did so well, we’ve made another, featuring more than 13,000 royalty-free assets you can use to make music magic! Discover Mixcraft 9 Recording Studio, Voltage Modular Ignite, DCO-106 Synthesizer, and more in the new Mega Sound Designer Loop Crate Vol 2 bundle. Plus, your purchase helps support Little Kids Rock & Stop AAPI Hate!

$921 WORTH OF AWESOME STUFF
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Humble Bundle Affiliate

HUMBLE SOFTWARE BUNDLE: ROYALTY-FREE RPG GAME DEVELOPMENT ASSETS - Creating an RPG but don’t have a deft hand at art assets? Not everyone can be an artist or visual designer. Not to worry, thanks to GameDev Market and the RPG Game Dev bundle you’ll gain access to thousands of assets like Omega Modern Graphics Pack, RPG Game 1700+ Icons, Medieval Fantasy Characters, and Customisable Pixel Art Character Kit to help add some spark to your creations! Plus, your purchase helps support Child’s Play, AbleGamers, and our May Charity of the Month, Active Minds!

$436 WORTH OF AWESOME STUFF
PAY $1 OR MORE
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Developing an Escape Room-Inspired VR Game in Unity - Vladimir Koščica talks about the intricacies of designing a multiplayer game that also supports VR and explains why lighting and texturing are crucial for setting the mood in the game.
80.lv

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