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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی

@ircss.bsky.social
1.2K followers 62 following 345 posts

Creative Lead in Realities IO, made Puzzling Places and Superflight ircss.github.io

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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Looking at peoples 9 games, I think most people just want to be teenagers again. I realized there are so many amazing games I have played over the years, but nothing beats the late nights in counter strike, or that first vespa in vice city.
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
And here the winter version of The magic school demo scene I made on my @sketchfab.bsky.social The scene was almost fully made with geometry nodes. All the buildings, landscape and natural elements etc. skfb.ly/pOr68
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The magic school demo scene I made is up on my @Sketchfab The scene was almost fully made with geometry nodes. All the buildings, landscape and natural elements etc. Here the summer version: skfb.ly/pOr6q
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
fun little project. geo nodes for a animations and much of the scene building, eevee for render #screenshotsaturday
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
late night geo node fun. some procedural walls.
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I had a lot of fun with the first case study. Airborne Empire. Some UX issues, but crazy good fantasy. They manage to do alot with very little!
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Can you still make indie games sustainabily with 20k new yearly releases on Steam? This and others was a question that popped up in our mind as we were releasing our latest game on Steam. To answer them, I did a deep dive in the Steam indie market shahriyarshahrabi.medium.com/deep-dive-in...
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
I feel like there are entire segments of PC games I dont know anything about. I have decided finally to play more smaller games. So made myself this little Steam suggester. You give it a criteria, it suggests you game to play. github.com/IRCSS/Steam-...
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
because data visualization are fun. Steam indie market 2025
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
I finished crunching through steam data of 140k games. The analysis has come down to 46 charts, plus extra seven slides from Newzoos and Matthew Balls report. This is going to be a long post 😅 Some good insights for indies though!
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
But the main issue with Blenders auto unwrap is not even that! If the topology transitions smooth enough from one point to another, it never triggers the 66 degrees angle base unwrap, causing overlapping faces. This will lead to bake and texturing artifacts that are a pain to fix
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Of course the same topolgoy could unwrap better if you care less for avoiding stretches etc. Some applications like Simplygon/ RC give you better unwrap with default paramters, way larger faces, better iterative packers with more flexible island rotation etc
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Strange is XAtlas is a single .h .cpp with no dependencies, so adding to a c++ project shouldnt be hard. Maybe issue with MIT license and blender licecnse. So here a visual example what can go right or wrong with an unwrap. Here is an unwrap that XAtlas does. Nice and packed
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Blenders auto UV is better now due to the concave packer. But its still strangly behind the open source XAtlas, which somewhat matches industry leaders like Simplygon. I wrote a little wrapper with GUI/ CLI support to unwrap with Xtlas from within blender github.com/IRCSS/XAtlas...
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
I am crunching some numbers, looking at releases on steam. blog post comes later, but a fun graph is this one, its the reverse of Steam games expontential growth past few years. 75 percent of games released in 2025 have 0 reviews
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
And I am done with my little festival scene. A little bit of fun to relax abit. Model on my @sketchfab.bsky.social skfb.ly/pLUrI
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
I love the silhouette
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
My child was born so I have been really busy. But I managed to clean up the magic school demo scene and add it to the repo. So far everything was generated using 100 percent geometry nodes. Now its time to add in some hand modeled stuff github.com/IRCSS/Blende...
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
5 years ago we set out to find a game system to engage people with cultural heritage. Now, over 350+ cultural sites brought to over a half million players later, I put down the lessons we learned making Puzzling Places medium.com/realities-io...
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
I got my magic school scene as far as I could with geo nodes. So far zero modeling, all meshes, materials and textures are done procedurally/ mathematically. Still need to do art direction and add small hand modeled details
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
made progress on the front entrance
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
castles are really not build in a day. repurposed my overhangs to make a roof for the bridge and add some details to the corners. Still so much to go, I cant even imagine how I would solo make this without geo nodes within any reasonable time
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Perfect example of why Google AI summary is a clear downgrade compared to a normal google search. I forgot how Rorschach was spelled, Google searched immedietly got me what I wanted, the AI summary gave some nonesense.
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
ignore the terrible lighting. but I realized I can reuse the node I wrote to add extentions as balkony or entrances can also be used for attic windows. Though I would need to add some control paramters
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
So added the extention too! time to go back again to the magic school scene. I hope this time I can just finish it 😅😅
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
added the lower part to the extention for the cases where its attached to a wall. Next is adding the extention balkony for when there is a door.
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
I havent had a lot of time to code, but making small progress on the building extention. Added a roof to the door and some controls
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
someone mentioned I should straighten the geometry nodes noodles lines. Yeah, I am never going back to curves.
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Back from Amaze. Started working on a terrace type. Would like to easily be able to add extentions with windows and doors to the main buildings. Still quite a bit of work left
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
added flow speed based on the inclination of the river. Now I can use it for different type of streams. I still honestly think I should just paint the river in whenever I need it
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
fixed a small bug and brought the node tree to the other blend file. Current workflow is to fix in the main git tracked blend file and reimport the whole thing every time fixes are done. I should have set things up properly as asset library.
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
I repurposed the mill for the main centeral tower of the school. Added attic windows, control for frequency of the windows on upper floors etc. Not sure about the distribution of the attic windows yet. But we will see!
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
Couple of days of break, back at it again. I started doing the magic school scene for real, and immedietly had a to do list of 30 items. Added more controls for the shape the towers. Loving the vibe
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Everything on my todo list is done, time to go back and properly make the magic school scene. Tonight I added more scale control for the cliff side and added an extra layer of voronoi noise to the second cliff. This will make it easier to make giant landscapes
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
I prefer painting the path in the texture mostly but for large landscapes its nice to have something like this so made one. I would probably remesh at the end and bake.
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
For my magic school I need still two things, one of them is a bottom for the floaty towers, hence I added this module. Second a better rocky cliff. I am still not happy with the landscape I have 🥸
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
Without all the extras, this is kind of how that works
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
So, here is the river. Its a spline, so you can just extend it and it adopts to the landscape using geo node, and unrwaps it in a rivery way for the procedural materials to do their magic
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
One day I will just ship a game that looks like this. Like these hipster cafes that decided their deco style is unpainted walls and broken furniture!
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
This is the reason I needed the extra shore line edge loop. Technically I could use the new ray cast node in the material of blender 5.1 and just sample the depth map for shore line as you would in game engines, but that would require geometry under the river
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Time for rivers. The mesh auto fills the space of the river channel. I also inserted an edge loop at certain distance from river bank so that we can do the stylized foam on the edges
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
realistic waterfalls are hard 🥲I will settle for stylized
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
begining of a waterfall
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
back in Etretat again
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
And suddenly we are somewhere else
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
I could probably do the Wave with this setup. Also if you look at all the noise settings exposed, you have ALOT of leeway to get a different look by just playing around with those
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
Very happy with the second cliff type. This should make the whole landscape generation a bit easier. I low key had Etretat in mind
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Making the demo scenes, the toughest things was always the landscape. So I am making a second type of cliff, this time using a whole different method. If nothing else, we get table cloth out of it😃
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
based on the little magic school scene I made, I realized I need a way to not have doors on the gothic structures so that I can git bash them. Potentially I would need controls also for the window sizes because they can gt a bit out of hand
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Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
Here how it looks in the night. Windows of course dont always make sense since they are not aware of eachother. But I would take this as a base and start modeling over it anyways
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