View attachment 922658
You must be registered to see the links
Hi everyone, since we're approaching the final update for PT I haven't been sharing any previews as it's all mostly related to the story conclusion for key characters. However, I still want to show some of the things I've been working on and my thoughts heading into the next game.
After PT is completed, I have some specific technical goals I want to achieve for the next game. PT was a guinea pig for learning the foundational skills in creating a game. I've used 3 different render engines and the quality in visuals, poses, expressions and writing is vastly different throughout the game. I've been learning and seeing what works best for me and what doesn't.
For the next game my technical goals and areas of focus are...
1.
Visual Consistency: The migration to Blender means that I'm sticking to the Cycles render engine.
2.
High Quality Renders: I've been taking shortcuts for PT in an attempt to balance learning new skills with rendering content in a reasonable time. I may take the time to learn how to improve texturing or lighting for one asset without going back and redoing all other assets for the sake of time. Next game will have everything I've learned in the past two years applied from the get go with no shortcuts for the sake of time.
3.
Animation: Actively improving my animation ability. This is where I expect to see drastic differences in quality from version 0.1 to version 1.0. Animation will be the main guinea pig for the next game and I've recently begun taking courses online in between working sessions on PT.
4.
Composition: Actively conscious of my render composition while pursuing more fundamental knowledge. Just pointing a camera in the general direction of the action and hitting render is just not good enough. I want every single render to be interesting and something to be proud of. I want color and prop placement to be a conscious choice with intent. Looking at PT, I feel that the majority of renders are nothing more than fillers with no direction that just give a general idea of the scene.
5.
Story Telling/Character Building: In PT, the story and writing were an afterthought. The main driving force behind making that game was to develop fundamental abilities as a dev. I'm now pursuing literature and other learning material on fundamental story telling, character building and dialogue.
The following is what I will lightly dabble in but will not be a focus. There's so much I want to accomplish but it's unrealistic to have so much on your plate as a one man team without heavily increasing time between each update. As you saw, the jump from Daz to Blender alone added an additional 6 months to the usual 3 month update timeframe.
Secondary Focus:
1.
Special FX: I've practiced some basic liquid simulations for the money shot in Blender. I will continue to play around with this but it will take a backseat to everything else. I've spend some days in Houdini, which is the industry standard for special FX. Although I want to eventually incorporate asset destruction, blood, fire, smoke and anything else that we would normally see outside the standard slice of life game, there isn't enough time to dive deep into this yet. I may fiddle around with it here and there for an occasional special render.
2.
Sound: I originally wanted to compose my own soundtracks and buy a foley mic to record my own sound fx. Instead I'll resort to license free music and other available sounds to get used to working with sounds first.
Examples of recent experiments:
I've been experimenting in two key areas for improving visual quality for the next game.
Particle Hair: The blonde girl with lama hair was my first attempt at designing hair from scratch. It came out
pretty bad but fortunately I've discovered tools that will let me convert Daz hair into particle systems so I won't have to pull a Zohan again.
The main advantage to particle hair is that Blender has a native hair shader that creates much more realistic and efficient results. Additionally, you can simulate particle hair so that it collides and interacts with the environment, rather than being the gravity defying work of wonder we're accustomed to.
This is a test I was doing with Dani. Although there are tools to convert existing hair to particle, there is still a lot of manual editing and tweaking to give good results. I'm not quite there yet but the experiments so far have been promising.
Skin Textures: The past month I've been working on improving skin textures to make them a bit more realistic and to avoid that Daz plastic Barbie look. My goal is to manually edit existing Daz textures for further customization, adding blemishes, moles and to generally break up that perfectly photoshopped super model look that's prevalent. Additionally, I'm experimenting with mixing in professional high quality textures to bring out skin pores and other micro level details.
This is just an exaggerated test to check if my attempts have any promise. Here I've "carved" random lines/words into her right cheek to see how it renders. I've applied some pore maps just to see how they look. It obviously doesn't look quite right yet. The final results will be much more finely tuned.
The eyebrows are just drawn on textures. Manually creating particle hair eyebrows will add another realm of realism as light will be able to properly interact with them.
Anyways, these experiments can be set aside as I dive back into rendering PT content for our final update. Just wanted to share some insight into what I've been doing and my thoughts going forward.
Cheers,
Dom