#it'd be a limited amount of modelling and rigging to do which will be a great project to learn that stuff through

[dkettchen]

My most male trait is the "ye I can do that" attitude abt stuff I have no means of actually knowing whether I can do

[egg-witch]

As usual I am thinking too hard about the biology of fictional characters so. Thoughts I am compelled to share about Boothill below

Canonically he has synthetic, blue blood. This would cause his skin tone to seem quite strange and greyish. Extra so if he's as pale as he is in-game but this would still be apparent with most darker skin tones as well. Man's gonna be looking a bit like a zombie

The intent here is debatable but I also choose to interpret that same line to mean that he does *not* have a synthetic heart - the original's still in there, just running on new juice

Related to this and also the fact he can seemingly have a bullet explode in his mouth without serious repercussions I am going to assume that his skull and whatever else would be left of his skeleton have been enhanced or replaced (having human bone marrow in there making new blood cells would likely mess with things if they replaced that whole system)

This is very funny to me because it seemingly means instead of just putting his brain inside a whole synthetic body the doctor went to the trouble to keep his original face, despite replacing/augmenting his teeth, eyes, tongue and, one can extrapolate, his entire damn skull. He was ready to give up everything except his pretty complexion I guess...

(Unless his face *is* synthetic and intellitrons just have no desire for a realistic human face with the capacity to emote? The rest of boothill's body seems flexible in a way that would suggest a good synthetic equivalent to human skin, so... it's plausible)

Speaking of, I really do not subscribe to the idea that he can't feel anything from the neck down. Do you know how hard it'd be to do anything as a human with a meat brain (or even as a robot for that matter) without any haptic feedback? If they have the technology to make him a whole new body that has equal or better mobility and general function than the old one then they can make it feel things, I promise. Probably not in all the same ways human flesh can feel things, especially if a lot of it is rigid plating, but it'd still be conductive to heat and electricity at least

I know the reason his model is that way is bc it's just a different texture on the same default character model, hence it bending and stretching like a soft body - building, rigging and animating a humanoid body that truly moves like a rigid machine would be an absurd amount of work and also limit the visual design, his canon design straight up would not be able to move or work if all those parts really were rigid no matter how you approached it lol. but it is very hot and looks cool which is what really matters. so I've settled on most of the "plating" being tough but still somewhat flexible, not actually metal but an advanced synthetic material of some sort. and then material more like an artificial skin between joints and in the parts that need extra stretch and flexibility. he's harder (and heavier) than a human but he's not a tin can

Based on screwllum's dialogue that he can and does eat regular food (but the phrasing implies that he could also eat other stuff? And there's that exchange from one of the light cones where ruan mei makes a joke about him having to drink machine oil) and the implication that the doctor who gave boothill his new body was an intellitron, I think boothill must have something similar - he can still eat normal food but also process other things. Idk if the fuel hatch on his back is a redundancy then or what. Could just be that nobody anticipated he'd think gasoline tastes good lmao

(side note while it's kinda implied in game that his weird tastes are a result of an augmented mouth and tongue I like to think he was always like that. He was eating rocks out of the garden as a kid and licking rusty old coins and stuff u can't convince me otherwise)

(also this is getting off track but this guy clearly has some kinda fixation on like. machinery. I think even though he did it for unrelated reasons he thinks his cyborg body is very hot and probably also has a little bit of a thing for intellitrons ngl. which is interesting given his history and the associations one would first assume he'd have with that kind of technology and aesthetic, but. can't fault a guy for knowing what he's into)

Whoops this got super long

Stay tuned for the sequel, "KC analyses boothill's personality way too seriously"

[ajcgames]

Extraction

The process of developing some better assets for the vertical slice began in earnest today. I wanted to turn my attention to the very first thing the player will be doing - setting up extractors to pull up material from the underlying asteroid.

Time to replace the ugly placeholder assets!

My typical workflow for this is to set up a new Blender file with a placeholder tile that represents the footprint of a single grid tile. This helps me keep within a size boundary and helps me to contextualise the height of things a bit easier.

My default Blender file for setting up new objects that will sit on the level grid.

I then set up a new texture file in Photoshop for the object at 1024x1024 pixels in size. Not quite the 4k textures that you might see in AAA studio games - but this is a management / factory game, and super high resolution textures are just wasted at the draw scale of most objects in the game!

An empty texture. I'd best start doing some painting!

It's then time to rough out the geometry into something resembling my idea for an extraction machine. I'm limited somewhat by my (arbitrary) decision to have this object only occupy 1 tile, but it's mainly because I don't want these objects being too large when you have a factory to fill with other more interesting things!

A shot of the front of the new Extractor model.

And from the rear, giving a better look at the vent and back detail.

I then start blocking out rough colours and areas in the texture map, making sure to consider the size / shape of the actual model surfaces they'll be applied to. Then I'll add some small surface details, maybe some decals, and a small amount of scuffs and scratches just to break up the smoothness of it all.

An almost complete texture map!

I keep refreshing this PSD texture in Blender (I don't bother exporting actual image textures at this stage, since PSDs are natively supported in Blender), this keeps the model up to date and also lets me progressively work my way over each part of the model and align up its texture coordinates.

A freshly imported texture. I haven't yet started mapping polygons to areas of the texture map yet.

Some people use UV-unwrapping techniques for laying out and painting textures, which I find great for more organic shapes. But for more angular, man-made objects, I often find it easier to map the texture to the model, rather than the other way around.

After some final texture tweaks and some polygon UV mapping, we have a finished model!

Once I've finished texturing, I export the Blender model as an FBX and import into Unity, making sure not to import the Blender material, animation rigs or any of that other stuff (I prefer to set up most of those things within Unity itself).

A finished model!

I perform a final pass on the texture to create a height map from it (grayscale). This is used to generate a normal map to bring out some of the surface details under certain lighting conditions. Not essential for this game, but in the event I add any situational lighting, it'd be nice to catch some of those details in specular highlights created by the normal map. It's just a nice bonus.

So that's about it for this one. It was a fun lunch break to set this up, and you can see how it looks in the game below.

Thanks for sticking around, and have a great day!