It's a pretty deep rabbit hole too. I remember reading about the Uncharted 4 chickens being animated similarly, but storing the vertex positions over time in a texture.

It's all vertex color :)

Wanted to try out to mimic the Mario Galaxy method seen in this video (at timestamp).

It nails a specific "feel" of the water, with the small ripples, I don't see in many other games.

youtu.be/8rCRsOLiO7k?...

Water shader I did a few months ago

A surprisingly efficient way to give a lot of personality to each different critter is to add a bit of perlin noise to the movement. Makes it all feel very natural.

Higher noise frequency -> more hectic
Higher noise strength -> more erratic

Here's a comparison of different settings:

An old random experiment I'm very happy with:
I wanted to make critters you cannot "interact" with as a player.

So I made a simple script where the critters idle around a specific area, and if the player gets too close, they go to a hiding spot, and spawn back later if the player is away.

Would love to work on it again though!

Wanted to make something simple on Game Maker, but things easily get out of hand even with a closed system like this.

I find it hard to organize a clean library of game features and keep track of everything. I wonder how people do it on big projects ):

Some old prototype:
You're on an island with a handful of items that can interact with another.

You interact by holding and waving items around with the wasd keys.

It was meant to be a micro crafting/puzzle game with a tightly closed loop of objects. Very inspired by Minit's minimalism.

The "animation" is just a set of sines on XYZ position, rotation and scale. You can honestly do pretty much everything you want with the right pivots.

The sound is the cherry on top that ties everything together, kudos to the incredible sound people of Toca.

A simple script for knocking props:
I needed objects to have wobble animations with a "soft" reset if another player knocks the same object.

So it's just a looping "wobble" that can just vary in intensity. Knocking the object just increment the slowly decaying wobble strength.

Hello! I'm Félix, I do 3D Art for games: Modelling, Shaders, Vfx, Animation but also a bit of code & design, you name it.

I'm currently very much looking for new work so feel free to reach out!
I worked at Toca Boca and previously on Anarcute and at Klondike.
See you around 👋✨

And with some very creative UV mapping, It also works wonders with little insects and other critters!

V axis is strength and U is an offset of the sine motion. Some examples of mappings for different fishes:

For the 1st fish, you want the head of the fish to stay steady (uv 1,0) and the rest of the body to progressively lag behind until the tail which moves a lot (uv 0,1)

Hope that makes sense 🙈

Based on the fishes in ABZU, the animation is a set of sines motions and extrusions. It uses the UVs to preset an intensity and offset of the motion (see next post).

It's surprisingly versatile and convincing! On top of being super cheap to make and run :)

Some fishes animated by shaders! Explanation in the thread:
(Models by Spelkraft, @dorianbeaugendre.bsky.social & me)

Best trick I learnt is: You can achieve the shaded side of the cloud by comparing the sun direction and the tangent of the skybox hemisphere, then using it to slightly offset a "shaded" copy of the clouds.

Particularly visible here, with also a bit of fake cloud transparency :)

The clouds are just a layered bubbly noise, mapped on a hemisphere with super stretched uvs (more visible at the end of the video).

Does a great job of giving a sense of the clouds going over the horizon.

Let's start with a pretty skybox :)

This one I wanted to work like AC New Horizons, with big puffy clouds and many controls over light, wind, cloud coverage, etc...
Notable tidbits below:

Hello 👋
I'm back from the dead ✨

I'm no longer working at Toca Boca and am looking for work! If you are ever in need of a 3D artist and dev, feel free to reach out!

In the meantime, I will start posting some cool 3D and code from the projects I have worked on over these many years.