My game engine · In development
PlushEngine
A game engine I can keep building on.
C# gameplay, a shared data model, and an editor I can change when something gets in the way.
Luke Stilson · Technical artist
Technical art & tools
I’ve spent most of my career making tools that help other people make things. Most of what’s here is personal work: my own tools, games, and experiments.
For my professional roles, see Studio Work →Experiments & Dev Log
Tests, prototypes, and notes from whatever I’m working on. What I tried, what worked, and what I’m still figuring out.
From the dev log
Foliage in Plush
Tree Studio in Blender, then the foliage in Plush. Two recordings from the experiments.
Read the entry →
From the dev log
Render textures in Blender
Blender realtime camera texture in Eevee — a custom build.
Read the entry →Blender tools
OpenVATVertex Animation ToolkitFree & open source · Blender extension
OpenVAT
OpenVAT is a Blender-native toolkit for baking Vertex Animation Textures (VATs).
Blender Extensions · November 5, 2026 snapshot.
In development
Aether
Texture baking and material creation, bringing xBake and TextureLab together.
Released Blender extension
Attrio CSV
Geometry and attributes ↔ CSV.
In development
Sprite Toolkit
Images, layers, and pixel-aligned scenes in Blender.
Tutorials & walkthroughs
All tutorials →![No Rig Required - Vertex Animation for Gameplay [OpenVAT] video thumbnail](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/NGniucSk4hU/hqdefault.jpg)
Watch on YouTube ↗OpenVAT / Unity
No Rig Required - Vertex Animation for Gameplay [OpenVAT]
Vertex animation for gameplay, using OpenVAT. The Unity side of the workflow gets its own attention here: taking baked motion into an engine and making it useful in a game.
Watch on YouTube ↗Geometry Nodes
Understanding Geometry Nodes (Part 1)
The system behind the nodes. A longer explanation to go alongside the short Geometry Nodes clips on Instagram.
Watch on YouTube ↗Datablocks & users
Understanding Blender's Data API (Part 1: Datablocks and Users)
A look underneath Blender’s interface: datablocks, users, and how the pieces of a scene relate to each other. A useful starting point for understanding what a script is changing, and why one edit can show up somewhere else.
Experiments & Dev Log
All entries →
PCA for shape key reduction
Ok update: 52 ARKit shapes compressed to 16 worked pretty well!
Read the entry →About
I've spent most of my career making tools that help other people make things.
I like figuring out how things work, why they work the way they do, and whether there's a better way to do them.
Tutorials and experiments on YouTube ↗Open-source work
If one of my tools has been useful to you, you can support the work on GitHub.