Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou @TheAllenChou Twitter profile

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

Teaser for new tutorial. It's not about the exposure avoidance but some optimization techniques. #GameDev #MadeWithUnity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Forgot to bounce the mud, a cardinal sin. #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX #MudBun #BoingKit

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

Raycast-based brush selection & highlight looking good so far. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

New tutorial is out! It's about one of my favorite optimization techniques: delayed result gathering. #GameDev #MadeWithUnity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

I'll be presenting "Melee AI in The Last of Us Part II" at @Official_GDC . Be sure to join if you're interested! #GDC2021 #GameDev #TheLastOfUs #TheLastofUsPartII

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

5 years

Switcing over to a quaternion spring eliminates 180-degree rotation target pops, as opposed to an angle-axis vector spring. Now the ears can smoothly twist together as she spins! #Unity #GameDev #programming #MadeWithUnity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

Boids! Current SDF operations supported: evaluation, gradient, raycasts, snap to surface. Still exploring gameplay possibilities. Gameplay operations run on the CPU. Mesh generation & rendering run on the GPU. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

Boing Kit now supports twist propagation. Surprised it took me this long to notice it missing. Probably because rotation back-propagation based on relative position looked good enough in most cases. Asset page: #BoingKit #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

1 year

Browsing through my old articles and found this funny little clip. If you've seen my #GDC talk this year, you might recognize this as a basic form of post selection: pick an unexposed cell with the shortest path. Article: #GameDev #MadeWithUnity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Texture blending is now working in mesh render mode. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

Downward raycasts against SDF isosurface from the sphere. Contacts & normals visualized by the box. No GPU readback. Most core SDF evaluation re-implemented on the CPU. BVH optimization, jobification, Burst-compiled, all the good stuff. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

I've been meaning to make this snow train #MudBun demo forever. Now that there's HDRP support, might as well throw in some depth of field & volumetric lighting! #GameDev #MadeWithUnity #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Smooth mesh, flat mesh, normal-facing circle splats, and camera-facing textured splats. #GameDev #MadeWithUnity #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

5 years

First post in new #gamedev tutorial series is out! This time the topic is: Trigonometry Basics - Sine & Cosine. #math #programming #madewithunity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Another #MudBun & #BoingKit combo. #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

I'm giving a talk on melee AI in The Last of Us Part II at GDC this year. #GameDev #TheLastofUsPartII #GDC21

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

2 months

٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

1 year

Squash & Stretch plugin for Godot is up: #Godot #MadeWithGodot #GodotEngine #GameDev

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

2 years

I'll be giving a talk at #GDC on @Naughty_Dog 's post system, used for picking good spots in the game world for AI & gameplay purposes (kind of like Unreal's EQS if you're familiar with that). #GDC2023 #GameDev

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Quantize! #GameDev #MadeWithUnity #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Upcoming (long-overdue) update to Squash & Stretch Kit: URP & HDRP support! Omni-directional squash & stretch effects that just work on any object. #SquashAndStretch #Animation #VFX #MadeWithUnity #GameDev

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

Testing more SDF raycasts. Works on noise volumes now. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Adjustable tightness for material blends. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

New tutorial is up! This time it's about another one of my favorite optimization techniques called time slicing. #GameDev #MadeWithUnity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

MudBun 1.1.28 is out! New render mode: ray-traced voxels (experimental & URP only). #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Turned the leaf material from the Sky Island demo into a preset, which will come with the next MudBun update. First time messing with it up close and it's prettieh <3 #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

2 years

Before they go live on GDC's website, here are the slides for my talk "Picking A Good Spot: Naughty Dog's Post System" if you're interested in how to effectively & efficiently pick a good spot in the game world for gameplay purposes: #GDC #GDC2023 #GameDev

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

1 year

Squash and stretch in 3D. #GodotEngine #GameDev

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Twisted noise. Inspired by a recent VFX hotness by @lateasusual_ . Was wondering how I'd attempt this in MudBun, and it dawned on me that I just needed to twist the YZ coordinates of samples along the existing noise-along-curve brush. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

It looks pretty much the same, but the noise is now cached in a 1MB volumetric texture, with a 35% performance boost. Good trade! #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #programming #MudBun

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

8 years

A rex is doing yoga outside our office right now.

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

1 year

Yooo I'm super stoked to see that my #GDC talk this year is among the free content on GDC Vault! If you missed my talk and are interested in picking good spots for gameplay purposes effectively and efficiently, you can watch my talk here for free! #GameDev

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

This is what prompted the threshold fade on curve noise. I wanted to create this flame effect with just one curve brush. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Based on @danielsantalla 's stopmotion shader. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Dynamic voxel density/resolution. Sparse adaptive voxel tree is officially working. Hello, borderless marching cubes! #GameDev #MadeWithUnity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Ever since the amazing @AlexStrook and @ThomasG_art shared their beautiful work on stylized volumetric foliage, I keep getting asked if similar effects can be done with MudBun. So here's my humble non-artist attempt. Breakdown in replies. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

1 year

OK I lied about calling it a day. Or did I? It's technically the next day now. Anyway, have an omnidirectional stretchy box. #GodotEngine #GameDev

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

1 year

Hey, #Godot users. Since you can only attach one script to one node, coming from Unity, I'm inclined to compose nodes under an "object" node as "components," where each child manipulates the parent. The alternative is nesting nodes that manipulate themselves. Which do you prefer?

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Marching cubes (3D) vs. marching squares (2D). #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

MudBun open beta version 0.7.4b is out! New feature highlights: textured mesh & splats, collider generation, mesh generation, and auto-rigging. Get it here: #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Even as an intermediate result, I think this is such a fun look. Can't stop playing with it. Definitely shipping it as an option. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Auto-rigged flan. #MudBun #BoingKit #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Radial noise calls for...sonic spin dash! #GameDev #MadeWithUnity #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

5 years

New tutorial is up! This time it's about the tangent trigonometric function, triangles, and cannonballs. #gamedev #programming #math #madewithunity #trigonometry

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Stopmotion ramen, with obligatory bouncy combo with Boing Kit. Extra thick noodles because I don't have enough voxel density. Come to think of it, the idea of ramen most likely came from the stopmotion shader tutorial by @danielsantalla . #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Mudbun v0.9.11b is out! New features: preset render materials & UV generation. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

Adding scale effects to Boing Kit along with the existing effects on position and rotation, because why not? Left: Off Right: On #BoingKit #MadeWithUnity #GamdDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

MudBun beta version 0.8.5b is out! New Features: quad splats, dual quads, surface nets, dual contouring, normal quantization, smooth normal blur, splat property jitter. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

2 months

I've been studying geometric algebra on and off, and recently I'm starting to feel the desire to share what I've learned about GA and its applications in games. Before I can find time to write, here's a dump of resources I find useful. 🧵

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

2 years

I think all the solid brushes are in good shape for CPU raycasts, including various noise brushes & the particle system brush. Time to move onto distortion & modifier brushes. The mesh generation & rendering are still all GPU-based. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

It's finally working! Ray marching SDF on pixels rasterized from mesh that is generated using the same SDF. Exciting! #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

5 years

New #gamedev tutorial is up! This time it's about inverse trigonometric functions, slope angles, and facing objects. #math #programming #madewithunity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

Am I too late to the Half-Life: Alyx liquid party? Always wanted to try this in MudBun. A box and a particle system are intersected with a capsule to create the liquid. Physics is faked by bouncing the box with Boing Kit. #MudBun #BoingKit #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

MudBun open beta has officially started! Go grab the package and have fun :) #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Left: constant SDF regeneration Right: auto-rigged #MudBun #BoingKit #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

1 year

Quaternion spring. #GodotEngine #GameDev

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

I just can't stop appreciating how good dual contouring is at preserving sharp features even at low voxel density compared to marching cubes. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Splat texture blend. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

SDF raycasts on the CPU means it's now possible to click-select using actual raycasts! Shall be a good alternative to selection via invisible gizmos. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

1 year

Of course the first thing I'm building is a bouncy library. #GodotEngine #GameDev

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

There. Fixed the shadows. #GameDev #MadeWithUnity #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

Squash & Stretch Kit is now 50% during New Year Sale! #SquashAndStretchKit #GameDev #MadeWithUnity #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Slime bunny now goes into cracks. Made with #MudBun and #BoingKit , as requested by folks on Reddit. Without resorting to fluid sim, I did what I think is the next best thing: using a subtractive brush group. Asset store page: #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Marching cubes -> dual contouring -> auto-smoothing -> *HIGH PRECISION MODE*! Blast it with binary search and gradient descent to get a super high-quality mesh. This demo runs at 440fps (2.27ms per frame) on my RTX 2080. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

The undo-redo dance. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

7 full years at @Naughty_Dog and counting! 🎉

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

More intersection operation with shapes (noise) and colors (emission & transparency). #MudBun #GameDev #MadeWithUnity #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

MudBun v1.0 is out! New features include: decal render mode, SDF texture generation (for GPU particle collision), curve nose twists (vortex). #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Have a mossy rock :) #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

Having too much fun with this new clay material + low update rate combo. Have some claymation fire. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Fog reveal. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

5 years

Shiny! It didn’t feel that long ago that I’d joined this amazing team.

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Chimney smoke version 2. I think it looks much better using real particle systems rather than scrolling noise. #MudBun #GameDev #MadeWithUnity #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

No wonder the sense of depth felt off. Forgot to turn on shadows. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Colliders are now constructed using asynchronous GPU readbacks so it's much more efficient at run-time. Also added options to create rigid bodies with one click. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Some subtractive and additive grooming. There's nothing inside the floof! #MudBun #BoingKit #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

1 year

Last week marks my 9th full year since joining @Naughty_Dog ’s kennel! Shipped 4 games. Super talented peers. Extremely fun R&D subjects. I consider myself very lucky to have joined my dream game studio right out of graduation.

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

I already have the infrastructure for both SDF and noise on the GPU. It would be a crime if I don't put them together. #GameDev #MadeWithUnity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

5 years

Also works with ordinary transform hierarchies, not just skeletal bones. Left: high pose stiffness Right: low pose stiffness #Unity #GameDev #programming #MadeWithUnity #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 months

Today marks my 10 full years at @Naughty_Dog . Working with and learning from the best is living the dream ❤️

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Just messing around with noise & Boolean operations. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Another preset render material that will come with the next MudBun update: floater splats. Played a bit more #DreamsPS4 and wanted to experiment further with floaty fluffy textures and color jitter. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

Annnd DONE! First working iteration of ray-traced sparse voxel trees with some bells and whistles. Thanks to @TheKristofLovas for the inspiration. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

New splats option: original normal blend. It blends from the geometric normal to the less-noisy original normal for a smoother look, a common trick for foliage. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

One problem with screen-space dithering is that overlapping objects with identical opacity will only show the object in the front. Jittering the sample position of the dither pattern by each object's hash can mitigate this problem. #MadeWithUnity #GameDev

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

5 years

A sneak peek of my upcoming #gamedev tutorial on the tangent trigonometric function. This is a unit circle with a tangential line, and the length of the line segment highlighted in blue is equal to the absolute value of "tangent of theta". #math #programming #madewithunity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

3 years

More messing around with ray-traced voxels. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

5 years

Blinky blink😉 #Unity #GameDev #programming #MadeWithUnity #VFX #bunny

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

5 years

Part 1 of Physics Constraints in Games is up. It covers derivation of general physics constraints and ends with point constraint as an example. Will re-record the talk in English once I get back. #gamedev #physics #math #madewithunity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

It's kind of like a CT scan. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

5 years

One more sneak peek of my next #gamedev tutorial on basic trigonometry. This example demonstrates projectile simulation & trajectory prediction/visualization. Full source will be avaialble on #programming #math #madewithunity

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Ming-Lun “Allen” Chou

@TheAllenChou

4 years

Welcome to the 2D mesh preset family: SDF Ripple & Outline. #MudBun #MadeWithUnity #GameDev #VFX

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