OK, so it’s been a little more than two months since the last Dev Log, but this time, we’ve got a little more than just progress updates to share!
Namaqualand is out!
After more than a year in the making, we’re finally happy to share our latest asset collection!
A rocky South African Desert, blooming with wildflowers and succulents.
I’ve written a more detailed blog post about the trip and the project as a whole as well, which you can read here: https://blog.polyhaven.com/namaqualand/
Qwantani HDRI Trip
At the Southern point of the Sterkfontein Dam, just shy of the Drakensberg mountains, is a reasonably sized hilltop that sits a short 10-minute hike from a holiday resort I visited several years ago: Qwantani.
Jarod and I revisited this location in August for a week with the sole purpose of capturing more HDRIs from the hilltop.
The weather was mostly clear the whole week, which is not super exciting, but we did at least capture what we came for (including testing out our new astro lens).
We’re still working on stitching all the HDRIs, but you’ll see them released over the next few weeks.
Into the Deep End of Game Design
In a blog post I wrote earlier this year, I explained a bit about the idea of Poly Haven getting into game development. But in a nutshell:
We’re exploring the idea of making video games as a means to prove the usefulness of our assets – to show that the assets we make can indeed be used for the purposes we intend them – much like how the Blender Studio creates open movies to prove and improve Blender itself.
At the same time, we’d like to explore if we can use this as a potential method for funding the creation of our 3D assets. Funding a team that makes free content has always been one of our biggest challenges (I did a talk about it a few Blender Conferences ago), and we’re wondering if selling video games might be a good way to support this.
So, starting in October, we jumped into the deep end of game design: a 5-week sprint to make a game, any game, and get a clearer picture of what this idea might look like (and how much we’re in over our heads).
The game that we make this month will be shared exclusively on Patreon to give us some stakes and accountability. Since this is more of a learning experience than a real game project, we won’t be publishing the game anywhere else.
No one on the team has any experience making games. Working on assets for games, yes, but nothing remotely connected to the task of designing and implementing gameplay at all.
We don’t intend to become game designers ourselves. Poly Haven, at its core, will remain an asset platform. Rather, we want to be able to relate to and better work with designers and developers we hire or collaborate with in the future.
The broad idea is this: Learn a bit about game development this year (through this 5-week sprint and a jam or two) so that next year we can hire some talent and try to make something worthwhile that suits Poly Haven’s mission too.
Other Projects
Those are the three big ones, but to give you an update on the other things happening in the background:
- The moon scans are still in the works, we’ve made some progress but plan to tackle it fully after the game sprint.
- The fabric scans are almost there, we’re just waiting for a final few scans before we can set up the materials in Blender and upload them.
- My Blender patch for the asset drag&drop handler still hasn’t been reviewed, however another similar patch landed which ads a handler for append/linking in general. This could feasibly be used instead for all the features of our add-on that were relying on my patch, so I’ll be looking into it soon.
- We’re still planning to recategorize all our models, but since this may have some unknown impact on users on our site and in our add-on, we’d like to wait and figure out new categories for textures and HDRIs first too.