Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Photos aren't the only thing you can explore in Viewfinder #madewithunity #gamedev #edwardhopper pic.twitter.com/iLKS8eMWmb

— Matt Stark (@mattstark256) June 21, 2020

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Remember Viewfinder, that cerebellum-straining indie game in development by Matt Stark featuring some insanely cool recursion effects? After some delay , Matt is still tinkering away it and adding new mechanics — including this one above: 

In Viewfinder, you will be able to "capture" paintings from off a wall, and turn them into real objects in the 3D game world. (A 1929 Edward Hopper painting, in this case.) Here's roughly how Mr. Stark does this:

"Blender has a tool that lets you generate UVs using a camera projection," Matt explains, "so that's how I got the painting texture applied to the mesh.

"The tricky bit was making a mesh to fit the painting — at first I thought it would be easy cause the painting's a bunch of geometric objects, but it turns out the painting's perspective is a little wonky in a bunch of places." (That's Hopper for you.)

The capture method is similar to how he described it here: "When the player takes a photo I duplicate the environment, make it greyscale and slice the meshes to remove anything outside the photo. When they place it into the world I slice the environment's meshes to make a hole for the photo." 

Follow Matt for updates for when Viewfinder will finally be reading for playtesting, though I will surely mention it here too.