zetheros said: Did you know? we'll have a true WoW-killer on our hands one day. Wahwahweewah!
Maybe you are making it right now ! & i know who & what ip can/might be able to do it, but I'll ever tell. (insert strange sounds here) the issue is wow is pay2play, an with all these ... fluctuations, ... i doubt anyone will go for that anymore.
Thanks @iam717 . Our company, along the lines of Microsoft or Ubisoft will be named "Alwayssoft". There will be an in-game shop, gatcha, NFT, AI slop, paid early access, P2W, lootboxes, team based tactics hero arena battle royale full loot pvp, and if employees don't meet their monthly quota of stealing (or donating) breastmilk and pubcrawling through cubicles I will brand our solo dev quintuple A, science-based WoW-killer "Remnants of Creativity".
I expect an IGN 7/10, controversial (but eventually true) coverage from Jason Schrier, a timeslot in Jeff Kiely's industry advertisement event (with a small award-giving ceremony attached), an all expenses paid lifetime membership card to Epstein Island, and a garage full of really expensive cars that only boomers appreciate.
my weekly tribute to the 🥵🔥 AI slop machine 🔥🥵 Puttin' in dat elbow grease so that uncle Jensen will be proud of me and DLSS5 wont suck 💪😤✨ I'll protect u from those toxic gaemers Jensen 🫶🌈🦄
Temporarily giving the iron automatons the bronze automaton colour palette in order to distinguish sections of detail and to establish regions for player customizable modular materials. Fused cranial plates.
Returning to the default iron automaton colour scheme, more polish work. Definitely getting there, this model will be done soonish. I'm still undecided on whether or not to make a female mesh; iron automatons simply don't have genders unlike the other races.
Thanks @iam717 ! It's actually not been very fast, we're already 4 months into 2026, so it takes me about 3-4 months to make one of these in my off-time. There's still Arboreal vampires M&F, Fungal infested M&F, and a lot of reworking to do in terms of faces, proportions, and anatomy to bring the older races up to speed after my human sculpt training. I suspect we'll be mostly done and ready to delve into animations proper at the end of 2026. Steady, for sure though
Iron automatons don't have gender, rather they are produced en mass by a queen mother factory and will have bodies with a high degree of modularity, so at least I don't have to make two unique models, (however eventually I or someone I end up hiring will have to make a number of modular parts...)
Where did the week go? This update is a bit late because I didn't realize it was Thursday already. More polish, adjusted the front panel hinge so it is not clipping with the belly tubes, and lots of similar minor adjustments. Hopefully next week I'll be making the lowpoly and baking.
No lowpoly yet, but more polish. Replaced the internals with synthetic digestive organs protected by a removable internal panel. Added rivets and hooks. This is a great example of how functionality drives aesthetics. Everything is designed with intention and not because it "just looks cool", and the art is better served because of it. There are two pages of notes in my developer notes about how these function in-game and lore-wise.
Was hoping I'd be 100% complete with the retopo, but there's still a few small bits to complete. Bake coming next week. I haven't made lowpolys of the swamp abyssals yet, so that might come after, or I'll start work on the arboreal vampires. Total tris coming in at 83,353.
there are 45 individual mesh objects, but assembled after baking I hope to bring it down by a bit lol Unwrapping should be pretty easy, it's all fairly straightforward but just a bit tedious
Just an fyi, i thought "devs" agreed to lowercase only naming since you'd have to remember which parts are higher & lower case & that lower case would make life easier.
If you had to say look for parts in a search term or call it for any-other reason in development.
Has this been sorted somehow & no one said anything? ^what i heard, it through the grape/vine.
If i be wrong here is your moment to (gloat oh i mean) tell me
lol I'm actually unsure about naming convention. I'm guessing there are multiple types of naming conventions each suited for different purposes. For editing I try to keep names recognizable so I don't forget what something is, and it's important during the baking process. Most items turn into incomprehensible IDs in the end like '10a5jb' or whatever to save on memory; so like '1' would correspond to 'armour', '0' = 'humanoid', 'a' = style A, '5' = enchanted with demonskin, and so on, but I'm sure I'll learn along the way.
any inconsistencies are human error and I'll fix them as I go. It's a bit cleaner now but IS it acktually???
super busy since Exanima (muh day jerb) released update 0.9.5. I'm posting this update quite late in the day; Did a very quick bake of iron automatons so that they're ready for animations, unpainted as usual. Going back to polish the swamp abyssals and get a lowpoly done of that race as well.
That looks really sweet, love the detail in the scales and the color design. Looks like there might not be much variation in the roughness channel though? The scales seem very uniform in shininess, as if you might be relying on the normal map for all the reflection variation. Or maybe it is there, but just not enough variation to pull it away from looking like fresh plastic. Can you show the various input layers alone?
One thing that would be great with the emissive eyes, is if they actually lit up some of the eye socket around each eye, so it wasn't just the eyes in isolation.
I'm holding off on painting for now (the colour seen here is only rough vertex colour for concepting/sculpting purposes); at the moment every model is missing vital texture maps. I'll batch paint all the models once I've figured out the UV layout; there's a number of gameplay mechanics that could affect how I do the UVs, like character customization, armour and clothing, dismemberment (I probably won't add this but maybe), prostheses (another maybe).
It is something I definitely look forward to doing though. The iron automatons in particular suffer greatly from not having any metallic, specular, and roughness.
i've learned from working on Exanima that it could be an absolute nightmare if character customization, particularly armour layering, isn't properly planned out before making a bunch of assets for. I definitely won't be doing armour layering that's for sure, we'll just replace body parts with different pieces of clothing/armour assets Path of Exile style.
The UVs have a lot of wasted space and I didn't really sculpt the UVs well, since I'm still unsure of the layout. I think eyes and modular assets like antennae should be in their own texture atlas so currently they're in a separate UDIM... 1 texture map = 1 draw call as I understand it, so male/female can reference the same maps saving on calls... but I could be wrong and need to do more research here
Either way, the plan is to make some basic armour and build a fully functional, fully geared character and work backwards to see what kind of UV layout would be best suited for a dynamic, modular mmo player character. I've thrown some curve balls in for me such as wings and tails that will take extra UV space, and the next race will have feathers because I think they're a nightmare to do and I want to learn how lol
And decals, whatever will I do with decals? Do I make a separate UV for the engine to use and apply dirt/blood dynamically, or do I let the engine use the same one? Surely not, because the characters are mirrored and if blood is splattered on the UV above, it'll be mirrored as well. So then do I unwrap everything asymmetrical, or keep characters symmetrical and have an asymmetrical UV for decals, and which method would be more performant? MMOs need to take in account the lowest common denominator of system specs, so it's super important that I keep things tidy and performant even for a toaster. lots to figure out...
And what about facial tattoos, eyebrow styles, and more? that will also affect how I arrange UVs and decals, it's a bit of a mindfuck lol
IIRC lighting, mipmapping, and LODs can affect how UVs are unwrapped too
But yea if I start painting proper maps now I feel like I'll end up wasting a lot of time because I haven't figured out how it'll all come together yet
Replies
Have a great week!
I expect an IGN 7/10, controversial (but eventually true) coverage from Jason Schrier, a timeslot in Jeff Kiely's industry advertisement event (with a small award-giving ceremony attached), an all expenses paid lifetime membership card to Epstein Island, and a garage full of really expensive cars that only boomers appreciate.
Have a great week!
Have a great week!
Temporarily giving the iron automatons the bronze automaton colour palette in order to distinguish sections of detail and to establish regions for player customizable modular materials. Fused cranial plates.
Have a great week!
Have a great week!
Have a great week!
Iron automatons don't have gender, rather they are produced en mass by a queen mother factory and will have bodies with a high degree of modularity, so at least I don't have to make two unique models, (however eventually I or someone I end up hiring will have to make a number of modular parts...)
Have a great week!
Have a great week!
Have a great week!
Edit: Here's a turntable of the highpoly
Have a great week!
Have a great week!
Unwrapping should be pretty easy, it's all fairly straightforward but just a bit tedious
any inconsistencies are human error and I'll fix them as I go. It's a bit cleaner now but IS it acktually???
Have a great week!
Have a great week!
Have a great week!
For example here's a mod using the effect and (mostly) it looks pretty neat
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/110023?tab=posts
It is something I definitely look forward to doing though. The iron automatons in particular suffer greatly from not having any metallic, specular, and roughness.
The UVs have a lot of wasted space and I didn't really sculpt the UVs well, since I'm still unsure of the layout. I think eyes and modular assets like antennae should be in their own texture atlas so currently they're in a separate UDIM... 1 texture map = 1 draw call as I understand it, so male/female can reference the same maps saving on calls... but I could be wrong and need to do more research here
Either way, the plan is to make some basic armour and build a fully functional, fully geared character and work backwards to see what kind of UV layout would be best suited for a dynamic, modular mmo player character. I've thrown some curve balls in for me such as wings and tails that will take extra UV space, and the next race will have feathers because I think they're a nightmare to do and I want to learn how lol
And decals, whatever will I do with decals? Do I make a separate UV for the engine to use and apply dirt/blood dynamically, or do I let the engine use the same one? Surely not, because the characters are mirrored and if blood is splattered on the UV above, it'll be mirrored as well. So then do I unwrap everything asymmetrical, or keep characters symmetrical and have an asymmetrical UV for decals, and which method would be more performant? MMOs need to take in account the lowest common denominator of system specs, so it's super important that I keep things tidy and performant even for a toaster. lots to figure out...
And what about facial tattoos, eyebrow styles, and more? that will also affect how I arrange UVs and decals, it's a bit of a mindfuck lol
IIRC lighting, mipmapping, and LODs can affect how UVs are unwrapped too
But yea if I start painting proper maps now I feel like I'll end up wasting a lot of time because I haven't figured out how it'll all come together yet