Unity AI Animation 🤖, MetaHuman Plugin 🎭, Wide Steam Store 🎮
Visual Realism & Character Craft 🎨
Rendering Glass, Caustics, and Rainbows in a Custom Ray Tracer
Sebastian Lague upgrades his ray tracer to handle realistic glass—fixing NaNs, addressing tricky refraction bugs, and adding absorption. He demonstrates frosted glass, visualizes caustics (including cardioid and water patterns), and compares stack-based vs stochastic handling of transmissions. The episode wraps with spectral experiments to produce authentic rainbows. Source code is in early access, with a public release on September 12.
Edit MetaHuman Faces Like a Pro: New Maya Plugin Deep Dive
Epic unveils the MetaHuman for Maya plugin, a UI-driven workflow for assembling rigs and editing neutral poses, skin weights, and ~300 expression poses—using DNA as the single source of truth. Fix blinks and mouth gaps fast with mirroring, locking, downstream previews, and an ML joints-matching tool. Load animations to refine expressions in context, then export DNA and conform in Unreal for automatic updates. No scripting or FBX juggling—just faster, cleaner iteration.
AI Animation & Engine Techniques 🤖
Unity AI Animation Generator (Beta): Real-World Tests, Tips, and Limits
Unity’s AI Animation Generator (beta) can produce usable humanoid clips from text prompts and video-to-motion, but expect cleanup. The reviewer replaces idle/walk/run/wave with generated animations, fixing loop pose, root motion, rotation offsets, and cycle sync to build a smooth blend tree. Quality varies and trails mocap, clips cap at 10 seconds, and the editor/docs could be stronger. Crucially, Unity needs to clarify usage rights for shipping games.
Godot ENet Multiplayer: Spawning, Authority, Sync, and RPCs Demystified
Turn a single-player Godot project into a peer-to-peer multiplayer game using ENet. This workshop walks through hosting/connecting, spawning players with peer_id, assigning authority to prevent cross-control, and syncing state via MultiplayerSynchronizer (always vs on_change). Learn reliable RPCs for chat/data, smooth movement with interpolation, and bandwidth profiling—plus practical tips for node path consistency, camera ownership, port forwarding, and headless servers.
Publishing & Feedback Strategy 📣
Steam Store Pages Go Wider with High-Quality Video in Descriptions
Steam is modernizing store pages: layouts expand to 1200px wide (with a 780px main column) and now support .mp4/.webm uploads in the description area. Animated assets can run up to 12 seconds, with Steam auto-transcoding and resizing for desktop, Deck, and mobile. Valve also batch-converted ~292k GIFs, cutting file sizes by an average of 87%. New alignment controls and preview updates help you fine-tune visuals; the beta may roll out broadly in a few weeks.
How to Get Tough, Useful Feedback Without Going Insane
Unfiltered online feedback can derail indie devs’ focus and confidence. This post recommends “filtering your inputs” by building a private, aligned beta-testing community that delivers tough but polite critique in good faith. The best testers share your game’s goals, provide actionable details, and help improve the work without overwhelming you. Protect your headspace to ship better games.