Taking in a Stray - Dev Diary
- Thread starter NandabaCanti
- Start date
- Jan 4, 2018
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- 755
Heh, sorry lads, that was a one off tit for science. =P
I'm still working on this game in the sense that I haven't abandoned the project, but I've spent the past month or two doing tons of sculpting/modeling practice to level up my skills as it were. That and getting comfortable with the new version of Blender (2.8) that should be released shortly, which I've pretty much really fallen in love with at this point, despite a few remaining warts they still need to work out.
Most of the story details worth sharing at this point have already been shared in previous posts. Much more than that and it would just get into straight up spoilers, I try to stick to sharing more big picture overview and background type stuff here, leaving the more detailed stuff to be discovered in game when the time comes.
I tend to spend about 6-10 hours a day on average in Blender with various practice art projects and I'm starting to get faster and my knowledge of anatomy keeps getting better, so I'm fairly happy with the progress I've been making. I do still need to start spending some more time on texture painting, which is probably still my weakest area of skills when it comes to getting models to a finished state. But I haven't figured out the best way to practice such things in an efficient manner, so I tend to keep putting it off. I'm thinking I might furnish one of the rooms of the house and use that for my texture painting practice. That way I'd get a nice assortment of small to moderately large objects to work with.
Anyhow, here's a few screenshots of a small handful of the practice sculpts I've been working on. Some are based on character sheets I found online, while for others I used ripped game models as reference, then some where just purely drawn from imagination. A lot of times I've left off before getting to things like the fingers and toes, as they are too fiddly for sculpting in most cases, they need really high density to be done well and that makes the scenes pretty unworkable usually if I don't isolate the high detail areas into separate meshes like I did with the first one here. Generally I just model the fingers/toes with traditional box modelling and work them in as I'm doing the retopo.
I also messed around a bit with making a fairly realistic looking eye model recently. The iris is generated with nodes, I left it gray scale to make it easier to customize later. I still need to add a fair bit to it, but I like how it's coming along so far. I used 3D scan data of an actual eye to model the shapes, so it's pretty accurate. Even though it looks like a single piece, there is actually an inner and outer part and I used refraction to make the inner shape fill the outer one, so it actually causes that effect where the iris fills the lens when seen from the side like a real eye. It was made for Eevee as well.
This was another thing I made a while back for a little informal competition on a friend's discord channel I was on for a few weeks. The theme was perspective, so I wanted to mess around with creating an optical illusion.
There are dozens of other things I've been working on during this time, but these should give a decent idea of the sort of stuff I've been up to. A lot of it is still really rough, but good enough for what I was going for, which was to just stay busy with honing my skills until I feel my work is up to the standards I'm holding myself to.
I'm still working on this game in the sense that I haven't abandoned the project, but I've spent the past month or two doing tons of sculpting/modeling practice to level up my skills as it were. That and getting comfortable with the new version of Blender (2.8) that should be released shortly, which I've pretty much really fallen in love with at this point, despite a few remaining warts they still need to work out.
Most of the story details worth sharing at this point have already been shared in previous posts. Much more than that and it would just get into straight up spoilers, I try to stick to sharing more big picture overview and background type stuff here, leaving the more detailed stuff to be discovered in game when the time comes.
I tend to spend about 6-10 hours a day on average in Blender with various practice art projects and I'm starting to get faster and my knowledge of anatomy keeps getting better, so I'm fairly happy with the progress I've been making. I do still need to start spending some more time on texture painting, which is probably still my weakest area of skills when it comes to getting models to a finished state. But I haven't figured out the best way to practice such things in an efficient manner, so I tend to keep putting it off. I'm thinking I might furnish one of the rooms of the house and use that for my texture painting practice. That way I'd get a nice assortment of small to moderately large objects to work with.
Anyhow, here's a few screenshots of a small handful of the practice sculpts I've been working on. Some are based on character sheets I found online, while for others I used ripped game models as reference, then some where just purely drawn from imagination. A lot of times I've left off before getting to things like the fingers and toes, as they are too fiddly for sculpting in most cases, they need really high density to be done well and that makes the scenes pretty unworkable usually if I don't isolate the high detail areas into separate meshes like I did with the first one here. Generally I just model the fingers/toes with traditional box modelling and work them in as I'm doing the retopo.
I also messed around a bit with making a fairly realistic looking eye model recently. The iris is generated with nodes, I left it gray scale to make it easier to customize later. I still need to add a fair bit to it, but I like how it's coming along so far. I used 3D scan data of an actual eye to model the shapes, so it's pretty accurate. Even though it looks like a single piece, there is actually an inner and outer part and I used refraction to make the inner shape fill the outer one, so it actually causes that effect where the iris fills the lens when seen from the side like a real eye. It was made for Eevee as well.
This was another thing I made a while back for a little informal competition on a friend's discord channel I was on for a few weeks. The theme was perspective, so I wanted to mess around with creating an optical illusion.
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There are dozens of other things I've been working on during this time, but these should give a decent idea of the sort of stuff I've been up to. A lot of it is still really rough, but good enough for what I was going for, which was to just stay busy with honing my skills until I feel my work is up to the standards I'm holding myself to.
- Dec 6, 2017
- 170
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- Jan 4, 2018
- 677
- 755
Heh, thanks. Barring death or catastrophe, I will eventually see this through. I'm not entirely satisfied with my skills yet, particularly on the 2D side of things for texture painting and such, so I don't really want to push further forward with this just yet until that changes. That's the main reason I've never bothered to start a patreon or anything like that. I'm fine with continuing to subsidize my own training and early development until I can get a proper base game out there for people to try out.
I think I might have thought up another way to practice texture painting though. Since I want to go for a style that's a bit inspired by anime/VN backgrounds. I've decided to start ripping a bunch of BGs from VNs to both study and use as reference for quickly thrown together low poly 3D reproductions of the scenes. I think part of the reason I keep putting off working on textures for my own game models is that I don't want to screw them up. So spending a bit of time focusing on stuff I don't care about as anything other than practice could dissolve away a lot of that stress and anxiety - freeing me up to just have some fun experimenting. Once I find my rhythm with a decent texture painting workflow, I can switch over to the plan I mentioned in the last post, of picking a room or two to fully furnish and start putting my newly acquired skills to use in getting back on track with this game.
I think I might have thought up another way to practice texture painting though. Since I want to go for a style that's a bit inspired by anime/VN backgrounds. I've decided to start ripping a bunch of BGs from VNs to both study and use as reference for quickly thrown together low poly 3D reproductions of the scenes. I think part of the reason I keep putting off working on textures for my own game models is that I don't want to screw them up. So spending a bit of time focusing on stuff I don't care about as anything other than practice could dissolve away a lot of that stress and anxiety - freeing me up to just have some fun experimenting. Once I find my rhythm with a decent texture painting workflow, I can switch over to the plan I mentioned in the last post, of picking a room or two to fully furnish and start putting my newly acquired skills to use in getting back on track with this game.
- Dec 6, 2017
- 170
- 118
- Jan 4, 2018
- 677
- 755
September 2019 Update
When I was ready to hit post on this, I realized how crazy long it became, so I might as well mark it as an official progress update, lol.
Rarely a day goes by where I'm not spending 6-12 hours messing around with different art projects to improve my skills. I feel I've been progressing by leaps and bounds with sculpting, but still only just trudging along with the texture/painting side of things. I ended up sculpting a new model for the main girl from scratch a while back, and been cleaning it up here and there ever since, this is what she currently looks like. I have two versions of her, one with the breasts hanging natural, and a second with the breasts as if they were in a bra, so I could start sculpting clothes for her as well. I have some starter sculpts for a bra, panties, socks, pants, a knit cap, and some glasses, but they are still too rough for me to want to bother sharing those atm, so here is just her base segmented sculpt with the two breast versions.
I've messed around with a preliminary sculpt for her vag as well.
I also started to test out some ideas for how I'd like to do her hair. I think I will be going with a curve based mesh setup. Here is a quick test image I came up with trying out making a few strands.
I started to mess around with making some more background stuff. The following is a quick sculpt of a claw foot for an old fashion tub and I brought it into the scene with the tub I made a while back to see how closely it would fit with it, I will have to tweak it a bit after I retopo it to make it fit snug against the base of the tub on both ends, but I like how it's going so far. And as a bit of a bonus, I also had a bit of fun messing around with making a rubber ducky sculpt, heh.
I started to try out something kinda interesting, a seamless repeating sculpt for a stone retainer wall that will run down into the park pond from along side the road that runs along above. I set it up to repeat I think like 3-4 times here, and just started to rough in the stone placements. Still got to give them more depth and detail, but I like how it is starting to come along. Once I got the rough sculpting done I can retopo just one repeat of the pattern and bake out maps for it that should also be seamless and then I can make that low poly version follow and repeat along a curve that I can use to make it fit the area I have in mind for it just right.
On the texture front I managed to get a few promising results, but still got a long ways to go. The following are a (poorly) repeating woodgrain, a test of a way to paint foliage, an example of a similar foliage texture put to use, and a very quick example of one way I can approach painting some pubes after someone made a joke about bushes when they saw the previous pictures, heh. Then finally a very basic grass setup that still needs a bunch of extra work, I want to do a dirt texture I can mix in patches of to break up the grass a bit more and I also plan to paint some small clumps of grass and weeds I can stick on particles that I can plop down sparsely over the top of the ground as well for a bit of extra detail and interest.
A friend who was recently working on trying to get a good looking jizz material got me interested in trying as well. Unfortunately I couldn't get this to work with Eevee, so it is in Cycles only for now, but I kinda like how it started to work out after an hour or so of messing about with it. The sculpt was just a quick couple minute thing I tossed together to have something to test with, so don't mind the low quality of it. I also didn't want to mess around with setting up a proper environment, so I just took a screenshot of the viewport preview, instead of rendering it out so it is pretty grainy still.
Then there was also a lot of non-game stuff I've been messing with, in part just for fun and also to test out the new sculpt tools in the Blender sculpt branch and now the latest experimental nightly builds for 2.81 which had a lot of the sculpt branch improvements merged. I made something of a sculpt blank/template I could use as a quick starting point for new sculpts. And then I also ended up messing around with several fanart sculpts that are in various stages of completion, none of them are textured, the ones with different colors are using matcaps set to use the object colors, so each color is on a different sculpted object. I ended up making Tron Bonne from the Mega Man Legends series, she is the furthest along so far, basically ready to be retopo'd and textured. Then a rough sculpt of Centorea from Monster Musume, starting to mess around with how I want to approach adding her hair/tail at this point. And a quick 1-2 hour sculpt of Ahsoka Tano from The Clone Wars.
So that's a good chunk of the better looking stuff I've come up with over the past few months or so. There is a ton of other stuff I worked on that didn't turn out so well and are thus not really worth sharing. I also got distracted for a while porting a bunch of Mega Man Legends assets into Blender and cleaning them up to get them in a state fit for sharing. Always loved that game, so when I heard someone finally came up with some tools for ripping models and environment tiles, I jumped at the chance to eventually realizing a 20+ year desire to see the entire island the game takes place on as a single continuous map. Still got a long ways to go on that, but it is something I now only spend a few hours a week on, instead of taking up most of my day as it did for the first month or so after I started on it. >.<
I'm kinda tempted to do something of a second business idea, which would be basically releasing free template assets that folks could use to jump start their creative process and get faster higher quality results. Stuff like that sculpt template above, but also in a ton of different varieties for different styles from realistic to cartoonish and in several different body types for both males and females. I'd also probably do parts for various monster hybrids as well, such as that horse body from the Centorea sculpt. Probably would even include some stuff that would be useful for furries and the like. I'd like to have not only sculpt templates, but also low poly rigged versions of the various body parts that can be resized and merged together to get a good starting point for those who would rather work with mesh instead of sculpting. I'd also mess around with creating easy to edit texture files where each color is on it's own layer, to make it simple to customize as needed. I'd also like to have good templates for a wide variety of clothing options. And probably a bunch of simplified low poly starting points for architectural elements, furnishing and other props.
One of the pluses to this is that I'd mostly be making things I need for my own games at the start anyhow and just saving out more generalized intermediate stages of those things that would be of use to others to help them save a lot of time and effort getting started with their own asset creation. I also just love to sculpt characters, so the sculpt blanks are a huge time saver for me as well in the long run and I can't see a good reason to keep them just for myself when I know so many others could benefit from them.
It's a bit early yet, to say what will come of this, as I got a lot of things to figure out and preparations to be made. But I'd like to have a wiki setup for it, where I can catalog my templates in a well structured manner that should be fairly easy for users to navigate and find what they need. I'd also like to have a community contribution section, both for people to share their variations on stuff I release as well as any original stuff they'd like to share as well. I'm thinking I'd also use the wiki to come up with some tutorials to give people ideas of some good workflows using the various templates and such. I'd also probably like to set up a twitter (or similar) account for announcing updates/additions to the template library and maybe a reddit to allow whatever sort of community pops up around this to help each other and show off their work. I'd also have to figure out which donation services I'd want to use to help support this and if I'd want to dual purpose it for both my game projects and the asset template library or set those up separately. So a lot to think about and figure out.
But I have no intentions of abandoning my game projects, especially this main one. Progress on the game itself is slow atm, but it will remain an important goal for me until I finally finish it.
When I was ready to hit post on this, I realized how crazy long it became, so I might as well mark it as an official progress update, lol.
Rarely a day goes by where I'm not spending 6-12 hours messing around with different art projects to improve my skills. I feel I've been progressing by leaps and bounds with sculpting, but still only just trudging along with the texture/painting side of things. I ended up sculpting a new model for the main girl from scratch a while back, and been cleaning it up here and there ever since, this is what she currently looks like. I have two versions of her, one with the breasts hanging natural, and a second with the breasts as if they were in a bra, so I could start sculpting clothes for her as well. I have some starter sculpts for a bra, panties, socks, pants, a knit cap, and some glasses, but they are still too rough for me to want to bother sharing those atm, so here is just her base segmented sculpt with the two breast versions.
I've messed around with a preliminary sculpt for her vag as well.
I also started to test out some ideas for how I'd like to do her hair. I think I will be going with a curve based mesh setup. Here is a quick test image I came up with trying out making a few strands.
I started to mess around with making some more background stuff. The following is a quick sculpt of a claw foot for an old fashion tub and I brought it into the scene with the tub I made a while back to see how closely it would fit with it, I will have to tweak it a bit after I retopo it to make it fit snug against the base of the tub on both ends, but I like how it's going so far. And as a bit of a bonus, I also had a bit of fun messing around with making a rubber ducky sculpt, heh.
I started to try out something kinda interesting, a seamless repeating sculpt for a stone retainer wall that will run down into the park pond from along side the road that runs along above. I set it up to repeat I think like 3-4 times here, and just started to rough in the stone placements. Still got to give them more depth and detail, but I like how it is starting to come along. Once I got the rough sculpting done I can retopo just one repeat of the pattern and bake out maps for it that should also be seamless and then I can make that low poly version follow and repeat along a curve that I can use to make it fit the area I have in mind for it just right.
On the texture front I managed to get a few promising results, but still got a long ways to go. The following are a (poorly) repeating woodgrain, a test of a way to paint foliage, an example of a similar foliage texture put to use, and a very quick example of one way I can approach painting some pubes after someone made a joke about bushes when they saw the previous pictures, heh. Then finally a very basic grass setup that still needs a bunch of extra work, I want to do a dirt texture I can mix in patches of to break up the grass a bit more and I also plan to paint some small clumps of grass and weeds I can stick on particles that I can plop down sparsely over the top of the ground as well for a bit of extra detail and interest.
A friend who was recently working on trying to get a good looking jizz material got me interested in trying as well. Unfortunately I couldn't get this to work with Eevee, so it is in Cycles only for now, but I kinda like how it started to work out after an hour or so of messing about with it. The sculpt was just a quick couple minute thing I tossed together to have something to test with, so don't mind the low quality of it. I also didn't want to mess around with setting up a proper environment, so I just took a screenshot of the viewport preview, instead of rendering it out so it is pretty grainy still.
Then there was also a lot of non-game stuff I've been messing with, in part just for fun and also to test out the new sculpt tools in the Blender sculpt branch and now the latest experimental nightly builds for 2.81 which had a lot of the sculpt branch improvements merged. I made something of a sculpt blank/template I could use as a quick starting point for new sculpts. And then I also ended up messing around with several fanart sculpts that are in various stages of completion, none of them are textured, the ones with different colors are using matcaps set to use the object colors, so each color is on a different sculpted object. I ended up making Tron Bonne from the Mega Man Legends series, she is the furthest along so far, basically ready to be retopo'd and textured. Then a rough sculpt of Centorea from Monster Musume, starting to mess around with how I want to approach adding her hair/tail at this point. And a quick 1-2 hour sculpt of Ahsoka Tano from The Clone Wars.
So that's a good chunk of the better looking stuff I've come up with over the past few months or so. There is a ton of other stuff I worked on that didn't turn out so well and are thus not really worth sharing. I also got distracted for a while porting a bunch of Mega Man Legends assets into Blender and cleaning them up to get them in a state fit for sharing. Always loved that game, so when I heard someone finally came up with some tools for ripping models and environment tiles, I jumped at the chance to eventually realizing a 20+ year desire to see the entire island the game takes place on as a single continuous map. Still got a long ways to go on that, but it is something I now only spend a few hours a week on, instead of taking up most of my day as it did for the first month or so after I started on it. >.<
I'm kinda tempted to do something of a second business idea, which would be basically releasing free template assets that folks could use to jump start their creative process and get faster higher quality results. Stuff like that sculpt template above, but also in a ton of different varieties for different styles from realistic to cartoonish and in several different body types for both males and females. I'd also probably do parts for various monster hybrids as well, such as that horse body from the Centorea sculpt. Probably would even include some stuff that would be useful for furries and the like. I'd like to have not only sculpt templates, but also low poly rigged versions of the various body parts that can be resized and merged together to get a good starting point for those who would rather work with mesh instead of sculpting. I'd also mess around with creating easy to edit texture files where each color is on it's own layer, to make it simple to customize as needed. I'd also like to have good templates for a wide variety of clothing options. And probably a bunch of simplified low poly starting points for architectural elements, furnishing and other props.
One of the pluses to this is that I'd mostly be making things I need for my own games at the start anyhow and just saving out more generalized intermediate stages of those things that would be of use to others to help them save a lot of time and effort getting started with their own asset creation. I also just love to sculpt characters, so the sculpt blanks are a huge time saver for me as well in the long run and I can't see a good reason to keep them just for myself when I know so many others could benefit from them.
It's a bit early yet, to say what will come of this, as I got a lot of things to figure out and preparations to be made. But I'd like to have a wiki setup for it, where I can catalog my templates in a well structured manner that should be fairly easy for users to navigate and find what they need. I'd also like to have a community contribution section, both for people to share their variations on stuff I release as well as any original stuff they'd like to share as well. I'm thinking I'd also use the wiki to come up with some tutorials to give people ideas of some good workflows using the various templates and such. I'd also probably like to set up a twitter (or similar) account for announcing updates/additions to the template library and maybe a reddit to allow whatever sort of community pops up around this to help each other and show off their work. I'd also have to figure out which donation services I'd want to use to help support this and if I'd want to dual purpose it for both my game projects and the asset template library or set those up separately. So a lot to think about and figure out.
But I have no intentions of abandoning my game projects, especially this main one. Progress on the game itself is slow atm, but it will remain an important goal for me until I finally finish it.
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I'm slowly getting into the worlds of 3d and programming so this thread is very interesting to me. Also, the game is definitely shaping up to be something unique and possibly gorgeous (yay Godot!) 
I read that you could use better texturing tools than what blender currently offers, give
Good luck, uradamus!
I read that you could use better texturing tools than what blender currently offers, give
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a shot. Seems like a powerful piece of software, and it's open source too! You either compile the program yourself or pay about $17 if you just want to download the program straight away. Good luck, uradamus!
- Jan 4, 2018
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Ya, ArmorPaint has a lot of promise; I've been meaning to give it a proper look one of these days. But it's meant to be something more like Substance Designer/Painter to generate and apply more realistic PBR materals. What I want to do is more along the lines of stylized hand painting straight onto the unwrapped models, especially for the characters and props, I'll probably be doing most of the tiling texture stuff for the environment in Krita. The brush engine and layer setup and a bunch of related features are supposed to be getting an update at some point in Blender itself, which is what I'm mostly waiting for, at least on the asset creation side of things. That's a big part of why I've been focusing more on just straight up 2D painting work for now, to tide me over until then and build up my general painting skills and 2D confidence.
I feel pretty good about where open source 3D stuff is going to be in the next year or two, but both Blender and Godot have a bit further to go before they are were I want them to be able to make TiaS the way I want it. Right now though the best alternatives either come at a price (such as 3D-Coat for 3D hand painting) or they are too demanding for my system (UE4). But once Blender and Godot hit some of their planned roadmap goals, they will be more than enough to meet my needs.
I feel pretty good about where open source 3D stuff is going to be in the next year or two, but both Blender and Godot have a bit further to go before they are were I want them to be able to make TiaS the way I want it. Right now though the best alternatives either come at a price (such as 3D-Coat for 3D hand painting) or they are too demanding for my system (UE4). But once Blender and Godot hit some of their planned roadmap goals, they will be more than enough to meet my needs.
- Dec 1, 2017
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- Jan 4, 2018
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Hi, sorry, haven't checked the site in a week or so. I still plan to make this game; though I'm still not satisfied with Godot at this point. Hopefully 4.0, which should be out before the end of the year, will change that. If not I think I will instead go with UE4, now that I should have hardware to handle it well enough. The last several months I've ended up doing a number of private commissions, both to get some money to finally update my system and to hone my skills. I'd show some of the results, but the client has been rather protective of their characters and didn't give me permission to share any of it.
More recently I've been concerned about what will happen here in the US with all the unrest leading up to the elections, which has prompted me to start spending time refreshing my knowledge of survival skills and picking up archery. If the socialists manage to take over and the country goes completely to shit, I'll probably head for the hills and live off the land until it blows over. Hopefully people come to their senses and my concerns are proven unfounded. But I'd rather not get caught unprepared, just in case.
I've also recently been spending more time collecting references and trying to nail down the texture style I want to capture for my games, practicing drawing (mostly on paper) and doing more anatomical studies to keep chugging forward with my art progress. I want to start doing more texture painting soon, with plans to focus on things I could put to use with the game if they turn out good enough.
More recently I've been concerned about what will happen here in the US with all the unrest leading up to the elections, which has prompted me to start spending time refreshing my knowledge of survival skills and picking up archery. If the socialists manage to take over and the country goes completely to shit, I'll probably head for the hills and live off the land until it blows over. Hopefully people come to their senses and my concerns are proven unfounded. But I'd rather not get caught unprepared, just in case.
I've also recently been spending more time collecting references and trying to nail down the texture style I want to capture for my games, practicing drawing (mostly on paper) and doing more anatomical studies to keep chugging forward with my art progress. I want to start doing more texture painting soon, with plans to focus on things I could put to use with the game if they turn out good enough.
- Jan 4, 2018
- 677
- 755
So it looks like Godot 4.0 has been pushed further out in the last few months since I last looked into it, they were initially planning for a release before the end of this year, back earlier this year. But from what I recently saw from what one of the devs posted on reddit a month or so back, they aren't expecting to start releasing beta builds until possible late Q1 or even Q2 of 2021. So now I'm not sure what I want to do. After seeing that and talking with a friend who has started to test some stuff out with the latest 3.2.3 release, it seems they have improved some things that were bugging me with previous releases and have done a lot of work on documentation, but I'm not sure yet what sort of state it is in now for what I need. I'm messing around with getting some stuff together to do some more tests, but until then I won't know for sure how suitable it is.
Made a generic low poly dummy model with old school extrusion modeling techniques recently to possibly use for messing around with a basic character controller to run some tests with, both to try out some mechanics and to have something against which I can judge the scale of buildings/props that I come up with while trying to nail down a set of standard scales to stick to for assets I make for my game projects. This model came out to 750 faces (a little under 1.5k tris), though I may still cut in a few more spots to allow for better volume maintaining while bending, like on the inside of the wrist, and maybe some small changes to the shoulders. This isn't for TiaS, just something purely for testing things out with whatever engine I settle on.
I'm a bit tempted to come up with a fairly small game project to test things out with, possibly one of the previously mused ideas, like the one for a low poly small town exploration game. Another I was contemplating is modeling the Kame House Island from the Dragon Ball series, maybe do a simple game where you play as Master Roshi trying to perv out on a handful of the Dragon Ball girls who've been known to visit his island, like Lunch or Bulma, lol. Something that hopefully wouldn't take more than a few months to flesh out something basic, to put the engine through it's paces and see how it stands up in terms of usability and performance.
I'm not sure yet though. It's been kinda hectic lately and went through a bit of a downturn in my art motivation this past week. Kinda been in the mood to work on some writing lately, but at the same time I don't want to slack on art, so struggling to find some focus and drive to get some art done, but without the motivation it's hard to settle on something that can reliably rekindle that spark in the short term. That is partly why I'm kinda leaning towards that low poly town idea, mostly because I was watching some videos of a guy who does these 10 minute low poly challenges in Blender, and they seemed like a fun sort of thing to work on. Can do a whole bunch of those each day, making a wide variety of props and environment stuff to flesh out a town fairly quickly if I can stick with it. The downside is that if I follow his approach, the faces would just get assigned to solid colors and really texture work is still the area I feel I need the most work to reach the level I want to be at for what I have in mind for TiaS. Which makes the DB idea kinda appealing, since there wouldn't be a ton of modeling and I'd have to paint a bunch of anime style textures. I don't know though, got to stew on it a bit and see which direction I get drawn towards in the coming days. Might do some of those quick low poly things in the mean time to see if they do anything for my motivation or not.
Made a generic low poly dummy model with old school extrusion modeling techniques recently to possibly use for messing around with a basic character controller to run some tests with, both to try out some mechanics and to have something against which I can judge the scale of buildings/props that I come up with while trying to nail down a set of standard scales to stick to for assets I make for my game projects. This model came out to 750 faces (a little under 1.5k tris), though I may still cut in a few more spots to allow for better volume maintaining while bending, like on the inside of the wrist, and maybe some small changes to the shoulders. This isn't for TiaS, just something purely for testing things out with whatever engine I settle on.
I'm a bit tempted to come up with a fairly small game project to test things out with, possibly one of the previously mused ideas, like the one for a low poly small town exploration game. Another I was contemplating is modeling the Kame House Island from the Dragon Ball series, maybe do a simple game where you play as Master Roshi trying to perv out on a handful of the Dragon Ball girls who've been known to visit his island, like Lunch or Bulma, lol. Something that hopefully wouldn't take more than a few months to flesh out something basic, to put the engine through it's paces and see how it stands up in terms of usability and performance.
I'm not sure yet though. It's been kinda hectic lately and went through a bit of a downturn in my art motivation this past week. Kinda been in the mood to work on some writing lately, but at the same time I don't want to slack on art, so struggling to find some focus and drive to get some art done, but without the motivation it's hard to settle on something that can reliably rekindle that spark in the short term. That is partly why I'm kinda leaning towards that low poly town idea, mostly because I was watching some videos of a guy who does these 10 minute low poly challenges in Blender, and they seemed like a fun sort of thing to work on. Can do a whole bunch of those each day, making a wide variety of props and environment stuff to flesh out a town fairly quickly if I can stick with it. The downside is that if I follow his approach, the faces would just get assigned to solid colors and really texture work is still the area I feel I need the most work to reach the level I want to be at for what I have in mind for TiaS. Which makes the DB idea kinda appealing, since there wouldn't be a ton of modeling and I'd have to paint a bunch of anime style textures. I don't know though, got to stew on it a bit and see which direction I get drawn towards in the coming days. Might do some of those quick low poly things in the mean time to see if they do anything for my motivation or not.
- May 9, 2017
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Find your work through a mistake in search, such a sweet mistake, Godspeed Uradamus. Your project is very interesting.
- Jan 4, 2018
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Heh, thanks. I've recently got started with working with Godot some more, a few issues I had with it previously have since been resolved with the latest release, I think mostly thanks to work they have already been integrating in preparation for 4.0 later this year. So I'm on a bit of a coding kick for the time being.
Right now I'm messing with making some tools that can help me with another project I've been helping with for a few years now. Basically a Mega Man Legends vanilla remake in Godot that is mostly being spearheaded by a friend while I mostly focus on ripping/cleaning/porting the assets. We've been running up on some roadblocks though due to some holes in our understanding of some of the related asset file types that need to be filled to finish a few areas off, particularly animation files and a few things with textures and ground tiles. So I started to make some tools to help with dumping/reading assets from the game's .bin archives while working on reversing those file types.
Even though it isn't directly related, just learning how to create all sorts of useful game development related tools using Godot is something that should prove invaluable with this and several other projects down the line. I've also been on a bit of a kick to improve my coding fundamentals as well by going through stuff like the Nand2Tetris computer science course, which starts off with elementary logic gates and goes through the various intermediary steps of building a simplified - but fully functioning - OS and basic programs, such as classic games like Tetris, to run on it. There are a lot of areas in regard to things like boolean algebra and parsing that I always wanted to have a better grasp of, that will also help with projects like this. As I'm considering putting together a markup language that would be ideal for visual novels and dating sim style games, since this incorporates elements from both, and have several other projects that it would be useful for later on.
- May 27, 2020
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