Principal Technical Artist
If you’re thinking “I’ve herd of Tangents before”, and you’ve not spent a lot of time animating or learning calculus, then there’s a good chance it’s from Tangent Space Normal Maps. In this short I’m going to take a quick look at tangent space, and relate it back to the Cross Product.
I had originally began writing this as part of the Cross Product post, but realised it was enough of a topic to also break out onto it’s own short. The Polygon Soup is an interesting one, especially if you’d never considered how or why 3D meshes are stored under the hood…
In my last “Math For 3D Artists” post, I took a look at the Dot Product which is a simple, and immediately useful for artists, especially when writing shaders.
The Cross Product however is a powerful tool in the 3D rendering pipeline responsible for a lot of triangle calculation which makes what 3D artists do, work. In this post I’m going to explore what the Cross Product enables, and a more accessible use case for artists in Shader Graph.
The Dot Product is a useful little function which is helpful for game artists to understand. In this post I’m going to look at at what the Dot Product is, how it’s used, and more importantly, what it’s useful for.
Being still mid-30s, I don’t get to throw around the word “decade” a lot when reflecting on my life. When looking back on my career and a decade* of Tech Art, things feel a little surreal for me.
In this post I look back on the beginning of my career as a junior animator, and how I moved into Tech Art.
Autodesk’s Maya is full of keyboard shortcuts, but none of them are as the potentially destructive as paste – ctrl-v.
I finally reached a point recently where I’d lost enough time to this, so I decided to fix it.
Had an interesting one this week with Unity’s lightmapper, and trying to bind parameters to complex shaders. This is one of those problems which makes sense in hindsight, but isn’t clearly documented.
Treat this more like notes / thoughts then a walkthrough. I also won’t be sharing much code here, but will happily answer questions on my socials.