Home 3D Art Showcase & Critiques

[Game] Blood, Sweat, Gold -- modular character system + environment

grand marshal polycounter
Offline / Send Message
Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
This will be the artist devlog for a turn-based action strategy PC game scheduled to launch early access around September/November 2018. 

The game has been in development for more than a year by a sole programmer/developer and is in a fully playable state (some bugs crawling around, of course), but it lacks 3d assets that 1. look current gen, and 2. are optimized. 

The most important thing in this game is characters, as the primary focus for the player is to recruit characters, train them, and keep them alive (perma-death) long enough to build an experienced mercenary fighting force. However, each players experience will be unique, as both the strategy map and characters are procedural generated. So then, the mission is to strike a balance between creating good looking characters that don't seem like cookie cutter pieces, but also get enough unique characters with variations finished and polished to an acceptable degree by launch. Right now the plan is one outfit with texture variations, along with one unique face variation per week.

The player will be able to choose their characters face/body type, hair/beard, and swap head armor and outfits. To meet these demands, I've developed a system based on some archived threads from this site, although being new to 3d art, a good deal of trial and error prototyping has been necessary to work out all the kinks and develop a solid plan. So, after three weeks of prototyping, now I am beginning to build the first characters, and since a modular character system is both a complex undertaking and also something that is no doubt very interesting to indie/hobby dev's, I will record lessons learned and techincal notes here, as well as post the characters. 

Critiques are of course welcome, but keep in mind I am working in turbo-mode here, and so the most useful critiques are generalized ones that I can apply to future models, or put away until after the essential production is done and it's polishing time. 

Notes about the art style : 
1. Realistic
2. 10-11th century (chainmail is the highest form of armor)
3. Emphasis on the desperation of the peasant class involved in the game.
4. Three distinct body types (though all rigged to same skeleton) - "Soft" man, "Hard" man, "Great" man. AKA peasants, experienced fighters, huge motherfuckers.

First prototype character

First prototype outfit, beard, hat

second prototype outfit


With problems of rigging and in-engine performance and operation figured out, I started the first of three base characters last week. Here is the textured game model:


Replies

  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Notes about a modular workflow: 

    Seen here is two minor variations on the same texture. As I work on texturing each character, I keep very meticulous layers inside Substance Painter, and I separate channels completely. For instance, the redness in the second image is a separate layer sitting on top of the splotchy yellow layer in the first image, and that splotchy yellow layer sits over yet another layer. Added altogether you get one look, while subtracting any gives another. If I do combine colors and, say, roughness in one layer, I make sure to annotate that for easy understanding down the road. Most the time for fill layers though I only work with one channel type at a time, so that if I change my mind I can make easier workarounds that way.

    I make sure to save these Substance Painter projects out into a neat hierarchy so that I can easily come back at a later date to build more variations without having to redo any work. How to organize and set up the hierarchies is the hard part, and I really didn't know how to do it until we got well into prototyping enough to figure out precisely how we needed to name and organize for the in-engine scripts to to work and also to meet the games design criteria. This would seem like something you'd have to sit around thinking about, but it's really too complex and confusing if you haven't done it before. You just have to get started, then the answers start to appear. Don't waste time trying to get a complex thing totally straight in your head. Prototype and it starts making sense, piece by piece.


    Eyes, teeth are 256 material. Bodies/outfits are 2k. If from the top-down perspective the 2k level of detail is lost, we will LOD to 1k materials -- or of course if there is performance issues. Hair and beards will belong to 2k atlases, and will consist of meshes for volume with just enough haircards for a fuzzy silhouette from typical game camera distance.
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    The peasant base model. Wanted to do a lot more wrinkles, but that will have to wait for more time later. 
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
     I have little experience with rigging, and these are really good animations so my lousy rigging really shows, but nonetheless I have made some improvements over the course of several characters. I'm hoping to have a week or two at some point to just scour over the animations and polish the rigging as much as I can.



    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tctiv4S-ZJw&feature=youtu.be
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    The Legend. 

    For rigging purposes, right now this guy is the same size as the others, but in game the plan is to upscale him just enough to make him very distinguishable on the field. 

    Any MMA fans can probably tell who was my main reference. I chose Fedor because he does not look like a modern weight lifter, but has a very imposing, bear-like presence. The kind of guy with a lot of natural power, even if living in less than ideal conditions. 

    I found a way to get the body hair done very quickly using some of Substances fur generator materials and a few layers with mask. Pretty simple, but probably not obvious to raw beginners who might be more inclined to do everything by hand. Of course, going the slow way gives more custom and higher quality results, but the goal for this project, right now, is to meet a certain quantity, and thus I can't spend two weeks on each character. In total, the texturing took me about 2 hours, which I think is pretty fast! The key is that I basically have a system now, and I just plug in new colors, textures, and make little tweaks. Also, I hold onto the Substance projects, so I can come back later and do something like turn off the body hair, or intensify some of the color noise layers to give a more weather-beaten look, or make him look sweaty, or dirty, etc. All very fast to do as long as you have the layers organized, named appropriately, and you don't cram too many things into a single layer that you wouldn't remember later.

    Next will be a few of low-tier outfits. Peasant garb, bandit rags, stuff like that.



  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Peasant outfit. Next up, short sleeve tunic, baggy trousers, tall soft leather boots. And hopefully a coif. But will be out of town for 2 weeks. :(

    These were made in MD, which I still kind of suck at. But after some hours playing around I'm able to get the results I wanted. By the end of this project, I think I'll be a pretty good seamstress.
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    snip* 

    I shared some workflow advice, but it was actually wrong! I fixed the mistakes that I had made, but I'll wait until the end of this project to do more detailed breakdowns to avoid putting out bad info.
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Big stupid hat. It's just something quick for testing. Let a guy have some fun, ok?

    Getting the modular system to work is a big, complicated task of organization and lots of back and forth between the artist and the programmer. You really have to have strong communication, otherwise you're going to get frustrated with the tiresome back and forth of trying to define a system of organization with painstaking detail, and then design the tools to implement it in engine. 


    Here is what the basic structure looks like. It seems simple enough, but it really depends on a variety of factors, most importantly the game design. Anyway, after I finish this project, I'll do a detailed breakdown and maybe even a step-by-step tutorial to cover all the annoying technicalities when building modular characters. I don't think it would be much use for me to say anything about it right now, as I end up doing a lot of things over -- still learning as I go.

  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Stuff that happened while I was on vacation. Lots of polish is needed, but it's nice to see things starting to come together.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_5xVg1ZxuE&feature=youtu.be
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr6K2w2DqDY
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Finished the chainmail outfit in 11 hours. I did use a purchased chainmail substance though, so that's a major cheat. Whenever possible, I am avoiding sculpting and baking, and doing the texturing as procedural as possible as this gives me the ability to make lots of variations quickly. For some outfits, typically lighter fabrics that should fold and crease more than thick, heavy layers, I still prefer to start with Marvelous Designer, but for the heavy quilted gamebsons, the chainmail, the leather, I find that I can get fine results with texturing alone. 

    As always, this is work in progress. For now, I just get the rigging to a workable state for demo purposes, but most of this clipping will get cleaned up down the line. 
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Managing about 1 outfit per 2-3 days. This is fast enough I don't have time to mess around too much, but I think in the long run it will be better if I can look at all the outfits together as a whole in engine, and then do all the lookdev, rather than spending a full week per outfit, which may make a clearn result, but chances are I am going to want to make quite a few changes once the mob is complete. This way I can be sure each fills a certain niche, and they kind of work towards a cohesive aesthetic. And once I'm certain I've met the minimum number of outfits, then I can leisurely mess around and try to get the most out of each one.



  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Winter outfit. This one is lambskin, but there will be a wool alternative as well. Fur cards are placeholders for testing right now.

    Side note: combat system is getting a major reworking and the prototype is pretty damn intense even with only part of the systems in place. Very tactical turn-based game play. I'm not really into the genre, and yet it's hard to put down once I start playing. Looking forward to sharing some gameplay videos here in a few months.
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Animations aren't mine of course, but some custom work is being done with the timing to give a good feeling of control for the player. 

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XEWr4t-BkY&feature=youtu.be
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    leather lamellar outfit. Everything is designed for maximum flexibility. Once the target number of outfits is finished, I'll be able to come back to the substnace painter projects and quickly generate alternate colors, levels of grunge, etc. The final aesthetic will likely call for much filthier outfits than this, however since we will have repeating uniforms across the battlefield, I want to offer variations of grunge patterns even if only slightly different so that, say, two uniforms with the same colors can still look different with their unique grunge patterns. 


  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    The theme of the game is centered on peasants -- filthy, foul, boorish peasants wollerin' in the stinkin mud just like the swine they is -- so I am trying to find ways to get that across with the low-tier outfits. As much as I want to stick with totally non-destructive texturing workflows, in this case I found that a bit of carefully placed alpha's to suggest torn fabric around the seams really helped. However, all the mud, stains, and some subtle noise layers remain so that I can randomize their placement for variations.

    I also have a tendency to really avoid exaggeration in favor of subtlety, however in the screenshots below, this is actually quite a bit closer than the game camera will typically be. So a lot of times, my smaller details get lost, and thus I am learning to overdo some things so that they can actually do their job in selling the outfit's appearance. 

    Some final tweaks to do with this and then rigging. Then... another one.

  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    A lighter-weight chainmail outfit. One more to go to finish the minimum amount of outfits we need, then I am going to change gears for a bit and make all of the faces.

    I've been working to trim the polycount down quite a bit. I wasn't paying attention to is much before, but this latest model is about 50% lighter than my first models, which had a ton of unnecessary density. I think this weighs in around 10k, which is about right to not show jaggy edges at our typical camera distances. I know people say tri-count doesn't matter much anymore, but when you multiplying each of these characters 10-30 times on top of a scene that might already have a million tri's (all the lighting and whatnot figured in), and you are trying to keep this running well on lower-end platforms, it at least pays to not be wasteful.
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Alright. This makes 3 outfits per 3 tiers, a total of nine. I'd like to do a few more for each tier, specifically the lowest tier (a few more variations of ragged, pathetic looking peasant clothes), but for now it's time to make a lot more faces. 

    My plan is to work from the three base body ztools, sculpt a new face (leaving below the neck untouched), baking the new face, and then bringing that new head into the existing Substance Painter projects so that I don't have to make the base skin textures each time, but can just change details and tonal values to give each face a couple skin tones and unique details.

    The three basic character archetypes will also guide the face sculpts. Legendary characters will be big, powerful faces. Hardened characters will be lean, mean, and strong looking. And peasant characters will be lean, ugly, and dopey.

  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Mustering the mob. 

    I've got about 3 more months until were going to publish the early access game. Right now the character models are finished, and I started to make a handful of texture variations for each and will probably continue with this until I finish as it's kind of an assembly line thing with a lot of organization I got to keep in my head so I don't make mistakes -- maybe a week and half to two weeks. 

    If anybody is following along and has some suggestions/critiques, now is a great time to share them as I am picking at each model and not in such a rush anymore. I'd really appreciate some feedback, no matter how big or small. I probably won't be able to make any major overhauls, but that doesn't mean I can't learn from the advice for future work.

    One thing I am considering is making one or two scabbard models that can work with all models. We don't have the means to have custom scabbards per weapon, but just like one or two that can just paste to the waist for anybody with a sword equipped might add a lot of visual interest to the outfits without a big time investment. 

    Beyond that, some  outfits will get tweaked a little for better silhouettes and optimized for performance. Overall, I feel like assembling the mob in the muddy field here for look dev while I make the texture variations is really helping me bring them together into a more cohesive aesthetic. The plan is for each outfit and each hat to have 3-5 color variations, and 2 levels of dirtiness. 


    Beyond the art, the combat game play is getting more fully fleshed out, and I have to say, with only a quarter of the final content involved in the current test scenarios, it's surprisingly deep and challenging game play. There is much balancing work to do, but I easily spent five hours the other day playing it over and over, and I'm really happy with how challenging but consistent and fair it seems. Of course the key here is that the programmer is highly  competent -- which means once we figure out a concept, it's not much time before we are able to test it and refine it.


    I think the "old rusted" helmet doesn't look right. I'll probably revisit that one later. Perhaps adding some tiny imperfection to the silhouette, along with some large dents in the normal map will help? And tone down the vibrancy of the rust? Or just less rust overall?

  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Last few days have been pretty frustrating. In finalizing the rigging for all the meshes, I had to redo some of them more times than I have patience for. I wonder if I am not using a Maya friendly workflow, what with so many meshes in a single scene all rigged to the same skeleton. Problems with the mesh history causing bizarre issues, non-deformer history utterly destroying things, some meshes getting duplicated inexplicably.... a total nightmare. 

    Anyway, such is life. Take a break, play a game for twenty minutes, and the motivation returns. It can be frustrating to move past a problem, however, not fully knowing what caused it in the first place. 

    Got another outfit and helmet done with texture variations. More trouble there with shader issues, and I had to learn more about how lighting inside Unity works. After getting the lighting squared away, and using a reflection probe (which was a mystical magic orb to me until now), I'm starting to feel pretty good about the quality I'm able to achieve in this test scene. Of course, the lighting in the final game isn't up to me, but it's still good to know your engine. 

  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    I had been unhappy with the chainmail outfits silhouette and general look. It looked very doughboy-ish. I thought it might even be worth scrapping and redoing, but I found a few ways to salvage it and I think it looks about right now. 

    1. I simply tweaked the vertices defining the silhouette very slightly on the game model. I tucked in a little bit until the pecs, bulged out slightly above the belt, just small stuff like this went a long way into dramatically changing the appearance of the outfit. 

    2. Using the curvature map (extremely useful, always bake one!) as a mask on a fill layer with height information, I can accentuate the existing curves. Add a blur filter on top to even things out, and you can easily make folds look more intense, less intense, sharper, duller, etc. 

    3. Run it through animations. All of the animations we are using never put the model in anything like an A-pose. It's really helpful to continually review the model in action, throughout all of the animations. Initially many of my models had pretty thin shoulders, as I wanted them to look somewhat emaciated, but I found that when animating, this often led to some pretty bad looking arms and shoulders while swinging weapons. So increasing the volume of the shoulders more than I thought necessary actually gives a better look for the final, in-game and animated model.
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Alrighty, that's all the outfits finished for now. 

    Originally, the lead developer was pretty against having "bright" colors as the theme of the game is to be grim, but all the reference of clothing from the period (11th century europe) that I could find was pretty colorful. I decided then to stay pretty true to the ref I was looking at because I thought if all outfits were drab colors, they'd all just blend together into a general mush. I did compromise somewhat and tended towards simple colors like green, blue, black, white, and red. I felt that pushing a grim aesthetic could come more from aging the outfits, dirtying them up, and also using lots of natural effects, like fog, rain, and chilly looking atmosphere.

    All in all, I think I am pretty pleased with the general feel of the mob. Will be nice to add some more outfits in if I have the time. I'd like to see more tattered peasant outfits, more leather, and some more interesting silhouettes in general.

    Some outfits I like more than others. I don't feel the leather lamellar fits -- it's too Byzantine -- but whatever, some people may like it and it's probably better to have too much than too little. 

    Next task -- about 20 or more face variations. The goal is for fearsome, revolting, horrifically ugly mugs that will make you glad you were born in this century. But of course, I don't have a week to spend sculpting wrinkles into each face, so the challenge then is to think of the most essential features that can easily be discerned from a distance, and also work in a way that allows me to come back and easily make changes in the future. This ought to be fun.

  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    ***gameplay videos coming next week!!!***

    When starting the heads, I realized just how much I might improve the original peasant model. I've learned alot from this project so far-- especially how to make smarter use of UV's -- and so I couldn't stand to not redo some of my earlier work.

    The first new head, then , is a rehash of the original peasant model, but I spent a day to make a new sculpt for the body as well, and also totally redid the UV's. Then I used a full day to get a Substance Painter project set up with an easily modifiable layer stack so that, moving forward, once I sculpt a new head, I can get the textures done quickly. I hope to get a couple unique heads done per day for the next couple of weeks.

    As with the outfits, each character will get a dirty and a filthy version (though I think I really overdid the mud on this guys filthy version), but each character will also get two skin tone variations as well. 

    Original peasant model in the center, which I spent much more time on. Hopefully I can continue making big improvements like this, but I think I'll show the most improvement when I can sit down and spend two weeks to a month just on a single character -- getting everything just perfect. I'm having fun with this project, but I am getting antsy to put all my new skills to use like that.


  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Some new faces and skin tone variations. I had trouble hiding the seam on the first models, but have gotten better so I'll have to go back and fix those later. The head and body are separate materials, that way I can reduce the head material -- which will be used for every character all the time -- to 1k and not lose as much detail as I would if I kept it with the body. 

    I've set up a few smart materials in substance painter so once I sculpt a new head, I can generate some new textures with minimal time. Since this saves me some time, I am playing around with small ways to add some custom detail. A few of my experiments so far are wiping off some of the grime with the eraser tools and a fingers alpha, and using the particle rain emitter to do something similar, although its a bit too straight and uniform to look very realistic. However, it still looks more interesting than without. It may be better to make a custom brush and do that by hand, so I could mimic sweat running down the body in a more natural fashion. Substance Painters thing works pretty good, but it cannot account for the normal map details, which would effect dripping sweat IRL.




    7-24-18        A few more faces. Don't want to spam the forum everyday, hence the edit rather than a new post, but I feel I'm dialed in the skin textures a lot today and felt pretty pleased with it.


    7-25-18   I did a couple extra peasants because some of the programmers friends wanted to become starving, desperate peasants. This was great "likeness" sculpting practice, though I didn't have enough time to nail them precisely, I think they are pleased with the results. Tomorrow I'll start the "hardened" characters, and the first one will be myself. What, you thought I'd make myself a peasant?!


  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Before I start new heads for the "hardened" man archetype, I wanted to go over his anatomy as I kind of made a rush job of it 3 months ago when I first made the model. 

    I've not strayed too far from my reference, which is a body scan of a stocky, tough looking over-the-hill man, as I haven't made any serious anatomy studies as of yet, and wanted to treat this more like a learning exercise and less of an experiment. Using the ecorche really helped with making sense out of the twisting forearm muscles, and cleared up some misconceptions I had about where some muscles insert, roll over other muscles, and so on.

    However, once I blocked in the basic forms, I changed some things up in subtle ways to fit this body a little more to our characters narrative. If I had more time, I might totally overhaul him -- I'd like to see a much thinner man, but with very sinewy arms, back, and shoulders, but still retaining the withered torso. 



    Later that day....

    Didn't get quite as much high frequency detail in the roughness map, which gives kind of a uniform glossiness I don't like. But it's quitting time, will fix later.






    7-27
    Tried to make myself.... somewhat succeeded, but I can't change the skull and jaw structure too much as it will make conformity with my hats/hoods/helmets a problem, so the face features are there but it's not the total package. I found that I look too soft and modern, anyway, and had to add a bit of fiction to make my character look more like a tough, manly man. 

    About half-way there now. Grinding out these faces and textures is pretty simple and fun. There's only one big thing left that I'm kind of dreading, and that's making all the hat and outfit variations achieve conformity -- meaning when the player switches whichever hat with whichever outfit with whichever head, they have to all fit right and not have any clipping (or at least nothing eye-jarringly bad.) That's going to be a big, very boring and very tedious job. But somebody's got to do it...

  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Was supposed to create a gameplay video this week, but importing and setting up all the new characters brought a number of bugs to be squashed. I'm headed out of town  this week, should be *fingers crossed* a gameplay video with some commentary the following week. 

    Maybe it's loving parent syndrome, but I can play this game for hours easily. I think it really strikes a balance between slow paced, hardcore tactical thinking, but still retaining a realtime, no-down-time feeling. Much of the gameplay is centered around the same kind of tactics I learned while in the airborne infantry scouts -- so for anybody interested in a tough, authentic, ambush-or-be-ambushed type of gameplay, you'll want to check this out in the coming months.

    Hopefully we can find the right people to enjoy this game and get enough eyes on it. If anybody has some experience with that side of things, please drop me a line! Me and the developer aren't social media savvy, and are kind of shooting in the dark when it comes to marketing.

    Another month most likely to full finish out the characters, and after that, for the final month or two before launch, I'll be making some touch ups to the environment to give a more realistic and more thematic feeling.
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Last few heads. Some blonde ruskie types. One's uglier than the other.

    The third character archetype is getting pushed back. Bigger priorities and the game can live without him for early access. 

    Next step is beards and hairstyles. Will start tomorrow and take a week or two to make as many as I can, then the rest of my work for this project will be clean up and other boring stuff. Not much more production.

  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Working out an efficient way to create lots of hairstyles that look at least somewhat decent from a distance. Kind of got a production pipeline worked out that will allow a few styles per day. Textures will need more work -- right now this is just flat albedo and transparency, no roughness or anything else. Marmoset Toolbag is coming in handy for look development thanks to the auto-reupload.


    Updated textures and new styles. Reduced total number of cards to just 4 basic ones so I could get more resolution per. Will try to do all hairstyles with just these. 



    I'm having way too much fun with this. Everybody is making beautiful, idealized sex icons. I've got greasy creeps. Haha. I don't think I could ever work on a cartoon. This is supposed to be a serious game but making these hairstyles -- I can't stop laughing. Really slowing down production.



    Colors



  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Happy Leif Erikkson Day


  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Got all the characters into the main build, here's some random generation portraits. 

    Just a little bit of polish next week to finish these off -- fix some textures, fix some rigging, improve portrait studios lighting -- then I'll do a little bit of work with the games environment, and basically be done producing stuff for this project. 

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQu3xmAc0YY&feature=youtu.be
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Used the SpeedTree modeler to create new trees and bushes from scratch. Super fun program to use. Materials are default speedtree stuff, but for the bushes, I clipped some fronds from a bush in the backyard and made textures from that. Just albedo and AO, I don't see a need for anything more than that for our purposes.

    Grass is from Unity Asset Store : DAgrass. 

    Now I'll have to devise some mask to feed into the procedural generator system so that I can, hopefully, spawn these new assets in a realistic way.




  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    A handmade prototype terrain with three biomes. Before we implement my content into the procedural system, we got to get things running decent enough for older machines to handle it. 

    Here is a muskeg type of area. 



    Old growth forest:


    Small spruce forest:


    Not a ton of logic in placement at the moment, this is just about finding issues and tuning the assets further, but with some basic rules fed into the procedural generator I should be able to accomplish some interesting and varied biomes.
  • Olingova
    Offline / Send Message
    Olingova interpolator
    Getting along well!!! Definitely , i think it's suepr interesting to have these "creeps" as u said instead of the standardized handsome actors face :D That gives a really cool "dirty medieval" feeling to it.

    If i may, i think the skin shader isn't great yet, feels too plastic right now.. Could use a slight subsurface color or something like that. I look forward to see more anyway!
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Hey, thanks for the comment. 

    I agree about the skin completely -- and well, to be honest there are many things that can be done a lot better -- but unfortunately the scope of this project hasn't let me get too deep into any details. I am really just trying to get a mountain of work done to a satisfactory level before it's time to publish. So there is a lot of areas where I see some need for improvement, but I got to just accept that there are larger priorities that I have to take care of first. 

    I got a few weeks to try and improve the environment a bit, then I'll have another pass with the characters, but it will be more about fixing rigging and technical, organizational details more than anything. Nonetheless, I appreciate the feedback because afterwards I can use  that critique towards new characters I make -- and also it may be fun to take some of these characters and try to make them more like AAA hero characters, which would give a chance to work on that skin shading a little deeper.

    Ultimately, I had a lot of fun and learned a lot making the characters, but looking back from this point I think they could have used a lot less detail. You just never see them up close in the game really. But it does look nicer in the inventory screens anyway.


  • Olingova
    Offline / Send Message
    Olingova interpolator
    Yeah i totally understand, working on short deadline projects can be frustrating... But the amount of work already done is impressive.

    Maybe a solution to avoid wasting too much time would be simply to take a look on the free pre existing shaders out there? Anyway jsut a suggestion; i ll leave that here in case :) 

    https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/asset-packs/the-blacksmith-characters-39941 
    (of course it's only the shader that's interesting)

    https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fast-fake-skin-42535

    A fast way to improve their eyes look is also to just fake some Ambient occlusion in the eye texture:

    Far from AAA standard but can save you some time if you don't have too complex eyes animations and not too much time, and in my project surprisingly increased the overall "human feeling" of my characters. Keep it up!

  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    I'll definitely look into those -- that is a big difference with the eyes and should be easy to implement, so I'll definitely do that. I mean, wow, its a big difference, haha.

    The skin shader I will explore just for curiosity if nothing else. The thing is, ours is just a two man project, and the main guy is already mega swamped, so I don't want to really ask him to integrate anything new at this point. We are using a custom shader that he built -- basically just the unity standard shader but supports packed textures. It wouldnt seem like a big deal to switch shaders, but the whole project is a pretty convoluted tangle of interconnected pieces as almost everything is procedurally generated. 

    However, if the game makes some money and justifies continued support, I would absolutely love to start taking these characters up a notch in terms of quality. Right now, we dont have any eye or facial animations planned. Just not enough time, or money. 


    edit : just noticed that the blacksmith package has a hair shader.... that may be really handy as the hair in engine right now looks like dog shit... not near as nice as it does in toolbag with the dithering. Because all the hair is just one material, I think it could totally be doable to integrate that better shader.

    Thanks a lot for these links. If I can get these implemented in time (again, it's a big if as it's more about whether or not it makes too much work for the programmer), I think they'll make a major difference.
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    I'm gonna test both of those shaders out as soon as I get back to the characters. I don't know if they'll make it into the early access build, but I am definitely intrigued about some free assets that will make better looking characters in Unity. So far, I've felt kind of limited by the standard shader but just didn't have the time to realyl dig into it. 

    Thanks a lot @Olingova !

  • Olingova
    Offline / Send Message
    Olingova interpolator
    I am really glad if that can help!! Good luck!
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    @Olingova

    I checked both the shaders out. The skin is a major improvement, however I would need to reexport all of my character textures... and it's a lot. Haha. I doubt I'll get that done before it's time to publish, but hopefully I'll be able to implement it in the future. 

    The hair shader is a bit more involved... I'll have to spend some more dedicated time with that in the future -- but certainly the demo hair looks a lot better than what I got going on right now.

    Thanks again. I never would have thought about looking for stuff like this.
  • Olingova
    Offline / Send Message
    Olingova interpolator
    That's already good that you could pick some useful stuff there! Don't hesitate to post some screenshots of these improvements :D
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    I will, but it will be a little while. I'll need to make some new textures as everything I have right now is packed in a different way. But even if I don't get the new shaders into the final build, I'll make a few "beauty" shots anyway.
  • Alex_J
    Offline / Send Message
    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter
    Ok, got the environment assets dialed in to a level so that, for lower quality settings, we won't have to use billboards so aggressively. I also changed the looks a bit. I think autumn will be a nice fit with our theme. Both pleasing to the eye but also a foggy, damp, and somewhat gloomy connotation. 

    Just going to do two enviro types for now as well. An open muskeg type of area, and boreal forest.

    Now I've just got to find a way to use the map magic system to generate some environments that both look good but also play good. I am going to see if there is a way I can always generate dense forest surrounding a mostly clear play area, so that the player can feel like they are in a realistic setting but also not have issues with the camera getting blocked too much. 




    Personal side note -- I wish I had gotten into environment art primarily. I like it way more than making characters.
Sign In or Register to comment.