Star Wars - Redemption ( FanMade Project )
Note : Project's updates won't always be at the top of it, so when an update come, scroll to explore what's new !
"Star Wars - Redemption" is the temporary title I've found for a fanmade project inspired mostly by the clone wars TV serie and, of course, star wars universe. At the beginning it was just about a jedi in a clone outfit and the more I spend time on it, the more new stuff is added to this base concept. I'll add all things about it here, it's the project's main page. But you may see individual assets on separated projects if you want 
As it's a fan project I don't spend the time I'd want on it, the evolution will be chaotic in terms of regularity ^^ Sorry in advance !
The project may take place between Ep2 & Ep5 or more, I'm not done yet with the story.
I work on it with Thomas Chaumel who is the animator behind most of the moving characters & objects in Redemption ( I do animation as well but...let's say I'm at a smaller level of XP ^^")
Des Bisous ! ♥
Note : you can follow the project's evolution on artstation : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/gO4Pm
And of course, constructive criticism is always appreciated
Disclaimer : https://www.artstation.com/vexod14/blog/GYLq/star-wars-redemption-disclaimer
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Another one, I really like making things fly high in the sky
Also, a trailer can be done with really subtle sound effects, with the "less is more" in mind, maybe just a few notes of a theme that I could compose, I don't know. Yet I need to stay focused on what needs to be done, I'll worry about this with legit & important questions when time comes
A really special shot to me, as it was one where my friend & mate Thomas Chaumel helped me a lot with precise feedbacks all the time. I've learned new animation tricks thanks to him, which helped me so much bringing Mevenn to what I had in mind for her attitude, leadership and acting (even if that's still really short ^^)
Big update !
So, here we are. The demo is finally available in its very first public version !
Please take the time to read the following lines :
- The demo is given for free, all you need to do is to register here on artstation, go to my store here : https://artstn.co/m/y138n and pick the demo. If you want to share the demo to a friend, please share the link to the free product instead of copying files on a USB key, it helps me having an idea of how many players tested it (it should also help reporting bugs later on, tracking who gets what...etc. Thanks in advance)
I wish you will enjoy exploring this little project !
- Since it's "inspired by" star wars (but not only), you may reckognize environments, starfighters, destroyers...etc. Yet I didn't want to stick to existing designs at a "fanatic"-precision, so you may notice differences between official designs and those from Redemption
- The demo comes in a v1.0, meaning we plan to add some more stuff to it in the near future. Yet a demo is a demo, not a AAA game. We will polish unfinished things, fix as many bugs as we can, add what's missing today regarding our ToDo-List, but it will stop there. Please refrain from making feature requests, we won't add them. Bugs can be reported here and we will see how many we could fix for a last version.
- The game should run fine on most configs, if you experience any lag, please go in options, set a different game quality ("screenpercentage" doesn't work yet) and launch a level (this will apply new settings). The game runs smoothly on a 2080 RTX with a i7 9th Gen & 8GB of RAM so if you've got this (or better) it's good ! By default game quality is set to Epic, the "Ultra" mode is here for "Cinematic" quality, but is visually not this better, only sharp trained eyes will seea difference.
)
- At the moment, the game only offers to explore levels & collect little flying creatures called "ForceGhosts". To finish a level, you need to find them all and reach the end trigger box.
-Trigger boxes aren't always placed at the end of a level, since some levels have a "loop" flow, but every time the box is on the biggest "Exit door" of the level (not necessary a door visually...but I guess you've got it
This first public release is here to thank all of the fans of the project who have been waiting patiently for this, as well as a simple tribute to the fantastic & inspiring StarWars universe.
I don't know what I would be today if this Far far away Galaxy didn't exist. It's something that is part of me, of a lot of people, and I wish this addition will serve at its best the most of us !
Here is the game cover, you have the file amongst some more in the final folder if you want to change for fresh wallpapers
Also it's funny but here's the Cover in akeytsu ^^ Yep. It's a great tool to do a lot of things +D
Also, what a better opportunity than this one to refresh some old artworks?
With the release of this demo, we've made a Trailer. And it's almost as heavy as making the game, it involves especially a different approach of animation, since you're making shots and not realtime game cycles, it's okay to have a bad pose when you turn around, the superior rule is to take care or arcs, posings, motion through frames. Bend your characters if you need to make them follow strong arcs, don't be affraid of breaking their arms & legs. Well. Here's that trailer:
That's all for today, now I'll go take some sleep before well deserved holidays
Des Bisous ♥
Little new guy added to the cast
Each skin variant painted as usual with our beloved 3D-Coat ♥ Yet I didn't follow completely the original designs (as you might have noticed, I like to take some artistic freedom when it comes to fan art ;))
I've also rigged/skinned/animated it through akeytsu, it was super simple (it's just about a big pelvis, no bend, two limited arms...but it was interesting to bring some life to this =))
The model is available on both artstation & flippednormals, simply search for "vexod14" once there
Rendered using Marmoset Toolbag 4.03, modeled with 3dsMax
I also did a new posing for the artstation thumbnail of Mevenn, sinci now she holds two lightsabers and has evolved in terms of posing, I thought it was the good moment to refresh it :
In the meantime, I'm working hard to bring out more content in SWR, the demo made great impression so far over all the fandom, but it wasn't accomplished as I envisioned it.
Cheers guys !
Cool stuff you have, gratz ^^
Huge Congrats 🙂
Massive effort with everything involved in bringing this project through too fruition, although I sense there's more to come...
@sacboi You're extremely right ^^ There's a lot more to come, and the next months will be probably the most challenging I'll ever know about this cool project (the final version is coming slowly since august 2021, with tons of improvement & fixes...but man, there's still so much left to be done ^^")
Here's some progress I've done recently :
That's another unplanned part of the project. I've made the Jedi archives on Coruscant (my favourite level I guess as it's really into SW's mood), and decided to make statues, starting from sculpts. But, well, I thought these statues could also be NPC (if possible, that's a point I have to discuss with Thibaut, my programmer friend helping on the project. If not they'll just act as dead corpses but I'd really, really, really love to see them fighting clones alongside Mevenn. The result could be really cool =))
Wow, this is an incredible project! Thanks for sharing so much of your process, it's truly inspiring!
I love the exaggeration in the anims and the environment art and texturing is just beautiful!
Looking forward to seeing more!
Thanks ! I'm always happy to bring some help to the table =D
Here are some more progress on Jedi assets :
(last one is my personnal favorite =))
Some updates on the Jedi character "generator" I'm making (well, not a super deep one, just something I can quickly mess with. Not every species will be there, like Twi'lek or Togruta, even if I'd love to make an Ahsoka-like or an Ayala Secura, I simply don't have time to make each one of them, not now ^^"
I made these screenshots directly on 3DCoat (sorry for the strange FOV...damn these shots angles sucks), you can expect some refinements in the final version of course (like alpha pass on cloth/hair), here are a few versions I've came up with after a very few tweaks ;)
Voilà voilà, des bisous ♥
Hi there =)
So I've finished these characters and made a few renders, just to see roughly what's possible to do with 3 outfits, 9 boots, 5 beards (important !), 1 TwiLek (Super Important), Zabraks, 5 hilts, various skin tones and both male & female variants...and damn. That delivers a lot of possibilities, it's so coool ! I can legitimately lights up tons of lighsabers with unique characters behind, it's freaking cool !
You can view these on artstation : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OmxKZg
Des Bisous ♥
Just made a quick lineup with Mevenn. I love the geonosis mood with lightsabers ^^ It's a rough paintover of course ;)
Hello la compagnie !
I've pushed an update on the state of the project here : https://www.artstation.com/blogs/vexod14/49Xj/star-wars-redemption-work-in-progress-18
Here is what's new compared to what I already shown here
So, some new levels, in terms of pure art. Just cause I wanted to bring on more levels now I've defined a solid way to produce them =) (And you probably don't know my penchant for making overkill details & stuff no one but me will notice x)) New levels added consists in :
Jedi Temple on Coruscant, and LucreHulk's corridors. I've also added a lot of new things on existing levels, but I prefer keeping this under the hood and let you dicover it through the next version of the demo =)
First level is showing magnificent blue holobooks, one of the high places of Order 66. I found cool to create this interior environment,it was like playing the sims except you can craft everything you want. I learnt a lot while making this, especially on the texturing process. Making env. Art is definitely a technical problem to solve first, making sure your shaders meets most requirements, having the good texture palette (that's how I see an atlas, just a painter's color palette. Offering enough texel density & surfaces when covering most of the room).I initiated this level last year for just a single shot of the trailer, keep in mind that I simply wanted to show like... a wall behind Mevenn, and perhaps a balcony and a sculpted bust. I ended up making the whole place. It's always like that, I plan a little thing, then I add a lot over the first idea. Pfew !
I started off with a simple shape to kinda mimic the good old battlefront 2 level from Pandemic Studios, just to have a starting point for servers blocs. Then I brought a box around them and started to build some things. I wanted to bring the player close to the server towers in confined clusters, that's why you see a 1st floor. And this was only a starting point made roughly at the end of the day. Next was about to be much more exciting and it brings the Archives level to another pleasing state of nostalgia exploration. Archives was already good as is and "Servers Room" was only meant to be a bonus, for when I will have time to build it... and I finally added this to the level in nearly a little week of work (put apart the Jedi Statue sculpts ^^)
Statues are completely using the Jedi characters assets I made before them, but they are static and uses only a single UVSet without mirroring/overlapps, since I wanted to control completely the surface and avoid unwanted "butterflies" patterns. There came a wonderful tool of 3DCoat : UVs. Cool point is they are synced with paint layers, so if you rearrange them, 3DCoat will automatically bake old texcoord to new one for each layer. It's awesome how it saves a lot of time ! This way I could simply repack my textures per statue, reduce drawcalls and improve the final look while keeping normalmap/AO baked data =) It's wonderful ! An important point to keep in mind when doing this is to avoid to rotate or flip UV islands, else you will break the bake of your normalmaps (it's obvious if you know how normalmap works but, well, a simple tips just in case =))
Just because "pourquoi pas ?" =D Simply the Roughness render pass. These clones look terrific !
Star Wars - Redemption is an overgrown original idea. (You can note that somewhere ; In French I would say "c'est une idée originale qui n'arrête pas de partir trop loin". Haha)
Next environment is the "Lucrehulk's Corridors", giving the demo a deeper Prelogy mood. I loved crafting this level, as it's the first memory I have of the entire Star Wars franchise. Yep. I didn't start with A New Hope but with Phantom Menace, the first shots over Naboo, Qui-Gon Jinn & Obi-Wan slicing BattleDroïds with John Williams music to emphasize the whole thing...this has rapidly become a strong good memory.
In case you wonder, yes, I love both trilogies but the prelogy is definitely my favourite one for dozens of reasons (if you want to discuss this...let's go in the comments ^^")
So here is a little glimpse at the last assets I did for the level, but it's globally the same routine : Roughly lay out ideas in 3dsmax with a quick blockout, test "Lego" pieces and see if it feels right, then start the pipeline...
Make a texture palette, model assets, unwrap, integrate. Done
Except here I wanted to refine a technique I used on Lumberia Assets : make use of a second UVmap to add dirt over the base surface. This greatly helps selling the asset as part of its world and not just a 3D asset with tiling stuff everywhere.
Making big environments of course you will use tiles a lot, but it's better if you can hide them as much as possible. One solution would be to make everything by hand on a 8K map, pretty un-optimized and not the best time saver...another is to mix UVs to actually texture your asset, using fewer maps. Like really fewer. It's also way faster than painting 8K maps per asset of course ;)
I keep this for really important props and characters, but tiles are textured the same way : by hand. Smartmaterials are a base, just a base. It's up to you to take your best brushes and give these automated texture a better & more personnal look ;)
The diff with how I approached this technique on Lumberia is on details put into the dirtmap. Lumberia has a shy paint look, I wasn't completely sure of the direction I wanted to take, and I had only straight dirt gradients. A lot of variants, colors...etc, but here what really helped me is I decided to add circular and rectangular dirt shapes, and when you have domes, boxes and curved areas, this rapidly becomes helpful. Else it simply requires more vertices on the geometry, just to support a second UVmap...I don't like it, especially if I can avoid it.
Here's the comparison of with and without this "Dirt" effect :
Looks better, right ?
Now here's how it looks once polished :
As always I used akeytsu to rig/skin/pose the characters, I continue to encourage every animator to get their hands on it. Please note that akeytsu is going to have a free version soon, so you should be able to mess with all the rigs I did in their very best conditions =) Also yes, these Jedis are about to come on my stores aslike Mevenn, clones, and any fan-arts : under limited/standard & editorial licenses only (no-commercial. Still cool for your personnal training and offers wider actor choices for anim challenges ;))
Two little tips about skinning though =) I don't remember if I've said this somewhere else, but : use QUADS. But only for skinning, else it's simply a non-sense (especially when you rely on normalmap bakes), always remember geometry is made of triangles, not quads. Quad mesh facilitates skinning for a simple reason : smooth algorithms. When you smooth a vertex weight, you basically ask the software to look at nearby vertices weights and lean towards their values, this way you'll reduce the gap between them and reach a smoother joint influence through your mesh. Nearby vertices are defined by connected face, using a quad you preserve edgeloops & flow, so your texture remains nice when deformed. If you smooth a triangulated mesh, things can rapidly become bad. But don't worry, you can of course skin roughly your triangulated model, then transfer skin on a remeshed model to fix weavy weights, and transfer back to your tri-mesh =) No need to have the best flow ever, just quads and a model at least as dense as the final one, also no UVs needed here, as we only need it to support skinning data ;)
Second tips : use "global" retopo to ensure smooth connection between cloth parts/layers. Here I had to keep the cloth bands following the Pelvis/Stomach/Spine/Torso, so I used a global mesh underneath to copy/paste skinweights, then I removed influences from shoulders and gave them to extra cloth joints. Just so I can adjust these parts if needed and avoid them to always depends on arm-cloth. If the jedi is in a relaxed pose, then I need to keep the shoulder cloth up =)
Also, as I wanted to have modular possibilities on my character like changing the length of the sleeves, their meshes needed to be split out of the main body part. Thanks to the same global mesh I could transfer the connected area weights and avoid having ugly seam when deforming each sleeves =)
Finally, if you look closer you can see meshes only has one side. This simply helps keeping final mesh thickness because I'll source a single vertex for two targets, so both will end up with the same weights and reduce drastically front/backfaces overlaps fights
Isn't she beautiful with these skinweights ? Fun fact : twilek version wasn't planned at all. It was... (guess what ?)
A bonus. Hohoho =) But a really good one, that's my favorite version of the female Jedi Knight ♥
That's all for now folks =)
Des Bisous ♥
Dude! you ever sleep 🤓
"c'est une idée originale qui n'arrête pas de partir trop loin" - well yeah, that's really what passion does for you 👍️
Haha ^^" Honestly last days were chaotic in terms of awaken/asleep phases, I hope to find back a decent balance as soon as i'll be done with this demo ^^"
that's some serious sweat equity. cool to see ambitious passion projects like these, nice work you've guys done with this.
wow ! amazing work here !
lil' update on the clopne troopers phase 2 : they now have theor commanders properley set up and ready for a solid Order 66 =D
High/Lowpoly, Uvs done with 3dsMax
Rig/Skin/Anim done with Akeytsu
All textures done with 3D-Coat (+Curvature bake), 4K UVset for clone armor & Arc trooper stuff, 2K for DC15S & DC15A, 1K for DC17 handblasters
Bake done with Marmoset Toolbag 4 (IDMap/NormalMap/AO)
lighting/renders done with Marmoset Toolbag 4
Hello Force users !
Here's my take on the N-1 Starfighter, made for the fan project Star Wars - Redemption of course. This one was quite challenging because of its excellent design shapes (to me it's THE one), it was also a real pleasure as always when doing fan art, but especially this one because you can use colors you rarely mix up together (that fresh & rusted yellow...♥)
I didn't model the cockpit because for the demo it was overkill, but that's something I'd like to do one day. References on the lower part near foot pedals are quite hard to find though ^^"
I made it with :
- 3dsMax (Higl/Low/UVs)
- 3DCoat ( Handpaint PBR textures)
- Akeytsu ( Rig/skin/anim)
- Marmoset (Normal/AO Bake/Still & solo renders)
- Unreal Engine 4 (rendering/integration/VFX/blueprint controls...etc)
Hope you'll enjoy this as much as I do =)
Full post here : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/NGzq6q