https://nilsek.com/Recent content on Nils EkHugoen-usMon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://nilsek.com/posts/ik-rig/Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://nilsek.com/posts/ik-rig/<p>Animation done externally will not always fit the environment that the characters will exist in, and this was the case for my 6th game project at TGA. Our biggest enemy had six big legs that would not fit in the environment while moving around. This was what inspired me to create a system to procedurally animate this character depending on its movement, model and the environment around it.</p> <figure class="video"> <video muted preload="metadata" autoplay="true" loop="true"> <source src="https://nilsek.com/videos/IKVid.mp4" > </video> </figure> <h2 id="fabrik">FABRIK</h2> <p>To solve inverse kinematics you can do all the math and find all possible positions of the joints to achieve the desired result. Though this is much too expensive and hard to implement. A much faster and performant algorithm is using Forwards And Backwards Reaching Inverse Kinematics (FABRIK).</p>https://nilsek.com/posts/foliage-painter/Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://nilsek.com/posts/foliage-painter/<p>While my group was working with set dressing our game Spite: The Curse of Tzalozel, many people became irritated with the pipeline. The game takes place in a forest so many plants were necessary to make the forest look alive and placing every plant hand by hand was tiring and it became easy to accidentally place plants that floated a bit above the ground and all of this took a lot of time. So for our next game project I set out to create a tool that would make iterations faster and accurately place instances in a scene, and also support a large amount of instances with no performance issues.</p>https://nilsek.com/posts/ecs/Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://nilsek.com/posts/ecs/<p>During the summer of 2025 I created the first draft of my Entity Component System hoping that I would be able to use it in the upcoming game projects at The Game Assembly. I was lucky enough to get a group that was positive towards implementing it in our game engine created by the school and use it to manage game objects in our custom game engine and since then I have iterated on the system to fit the needs of our group as well as improve the performance of the system.</p>https://nilsek.com/posts/vertex-painter/Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://nilsek.com/posts/vertex-painter/<p>One texture repeated over a large area can easily look repetitive, and creating one large texture for the entire surface is not plausible. There are multiple ways to break up repeating textures, such as decals, detail normals and Vertex Paint. This tool allows the developer to draw color data on vertices of models in a scene, this data can later be used in shaders when the object is drawn to change the looks of the model.</p>https://nilsek.com/posts/steelovereden/Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://nilsek.com/posts/steelovereden/<p>The sixth game project I made at The Game Assembly. This game is a first person shooter that takes place 300 years after the earth was abandoned due to nuclear war. From the safety of space humanity has lately started to observe activity back on earth and starts to send down scout missions to find out what is going on. One of those sent is you, Sergeant Iris.</p> <p>Created in my group&rsquo;s custom game engine built with C++ and DirectX 11.</p>https://nilsek.com/about/Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://nilsek.com/about/<p>I first got an interest in programming at around 8 years old building my own games in Scratch, a block based programming language. I later found people in my hometown who knew a lot more about programming than I did. Over a long time I learned from them, summer camps outside of projects and from projects that I was either making on my own or with others.</p> <p>I have also played percussion from a young age and have played in a jazz band, a symphony orchestra and more.</p>