Varun's Blog

I'm continuing my experiment in procedural generation by "exploring" a fascinating algorithm for generating procedural trees. The rapidly-exploring random tree algorithm, or RRT for short, is a Monte-Carlo method traditionally used for autonomous navigation. However, before I dive into the code, let me show you this algorithm's result in an image. (Source: Wikipedia) It's a fractal! A  stochastic  fractal, to be precise. And so began my journey to replicate this algorithm, not for robotic navigation, but for artistic purposes. I decided to write the code for my implementation with Python since the PIL library makes it easy to quickly generate images. import random import math from PIL import Image, ImageDraw WIDTH = 500 HEIGHT = 500 RECURSIONS = 125 class Node : def __init__( self , x, y): self . x = x self . y = y self . parent = None def __repr__( self ): return ( self . x, self . y...

Infinitely procedurally generated terrain can be a lot of fun in games. I can't tell you how much fun I've had exploring worlds in games like Minecraft . Unfortunately, as so many overly-ambitious indie developers will tell you, it takes a lot of work to make procedural worlds performant without a lot  of work. Thankfully, there's a solution: multithreading. Wait, don't leave! Multithreading is a lot simpler than you might think, and in this post, I'll show you how to create infinite, procedural terrain in Unity with just a few lines of code that's fast, beautiful, and even has LODs. The code is below: using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Threading; using System.Linq; using UnityEngine; public class TerrainGenerator : MonoBehaviour { public Material material; public int chunkSize = 64 ; public int rangeMultiplier = 2 ; public NoiseFilter noiseFilter; public float [] LODDi...

  Active ragdolls is the name given to wobbly, physics-based character controllers which apply forces to ragdolls. You may have seen them implemented in popular games such as Human Fall Flat  and Fall Guys . This post introduces a technique I developed to create active ragdolls for a personal project, implemented in Unity. The system I will demonstrate is surprisingly simple and only requires a small amount of code. Unity has these beautiful things called Configurable Joints , which are joints that can, as the name suggests, be configured, with simulated motors on the X and YZ axes providing force to the joints. What we can do with this is map the motions of a regular  game character with an Animation Controller (an "animator clone") to our active ragdoll. Doing this means we only have to animate the animator clone for the active ragdoll to automatically be animated with it! Firstly, I created a ragdoll from a rigged character. (Side note: Mixamo is a great tool to q...