#spectrumreturns

[zakadeja]

Spectrum Dev Blog #2 - 2/8/21

Hi! It’s been a while since I’ve last posted about my project, but here are a few model updates. 

• I made the model use 3-4 textures instead of... so... so many. The head, body, tail, ears, claws, teeth, tongue and eyelash use the same 4k texture. I ended up making it 4k, or it pixellated the head - because I kind of suck at unwrapping things.

• Found some bad weight painting, fixed and resolved it. The base skeleton in the model should be perfect in combination with all of the new shapekeys.

• Made a handful of new shapekeys for testing purposes. Some may be scrapped, or improved upon as time goes on.

• Big change, stopped using NoesisGUI and went for Michsky’s Modern UI Pack instead because I couldn’t be asked to learn .wpf and I just wanted to get a preview ready for the public within my lifetime. Michsky provides amazing, personal support for all owners of his product. I really enjoy this asset!

• I’ve been doing tons of secret story/lore updates in the background in-between working in the game and art. It’s not polished enough for me to go public with it - the Wiki will probably be released alongside some bits of lore and characters.

• Updated the character Shader Graph to be less horrible, and made the base for all objects a ‘toon’ shader. 

• The current implementation of a character creator is rough at best, but it works. A drag-and-drop layer system needs to be the final design.

• Worlds will now be generated with the help of Gaia Pro (AMAZING), and some new environment assets (not naming until finished) have added a crude, but charming basis for the game world’s environments.

• Water is controlled by CREST Ocean System URP, the sky and weather by Funly Sky Studio. Might end up writing my own in the future.

Current to-do’s:

☐ Script the shapes, manes, tufts and markings ‘manager.’

☐ Make more animations, such as social interactions and lipsync poses.

☐ Rig tufts for jiggle bone use. ( maybe during in-game test? )

☐ Either mesh eyes and animate their pupils using a shapekey, or texture eyes and figure out some parallax stuff.

☐ Randomize button

☐ Undo/redo history

☐ Biograpahy/details actually saves to a file

☐ Really simple ‘voice pack’ assets so that you don’t have to sound the same as everybody else.

☐ Titlescreen, login, options panel etc. will be made after I’ve gotten nearer to the end of the Character Creator’s design process.

Thanks for checking out this post! I’ll try to put out updates more often.

[zakadeja]

WIP wolf player model for Spectrum Returns.

[zakadeja]

WIP dragon model.

#dragon #3d #blender3d #blender 3d #stylized #animal #fantasy #art #bluemarten #bluemartendev #spectrum #spectrumreturns #mmo #animal mmo #creature #western dragon

[zakadeja]

Spectrum Dev Blog #1 - 9/30/20

Been working on so many different things for Spectrum lately that are all code related, so I don’t have much to show here.

I’ve been:

• Trying to decide on toony plane fur, or buying Xfur 2.0 (I have 1.0) has been rough, and I think I might transition to Xfur instead. Hopefully, the URP hair shader I already have will look good for manes and tufts. 

Because all of the transparency of the planes are on different materials, it’s quite a lot of materials for Unity to keep track of. Making a render in Blender might be nice with these, but making a MMORPG that has characters with 12+ materials isn’t something I want to do for any project of mine.

So by the end of today, I’ll probably have bought Xfur and started working on learning its new tools since they look really awesome.

• Slowly learning NoesisGUI, a cross platform WPF based UI engine. Note that it looks wrong in the screenshots (most likely using the wrong style). Today I’ll be working on data binding & event stuffs so that when you click, there are sounds, and some sort of event-forwarding-to-unity thing - though I believe Noesis already handles this.

I’ve only used WPF once for an application I don’t even have anymore, and I’ve been doing my best to make sure my project is organized well.

• I’ve started over and over on Wild Midnight so many times that I did the same for Spectrum. It uses none of my sloppy Baby’s First™ code from WM, but that means that it isn’t currently at the same place WM was. 

• I made a bunch of extremely basic animations for prototyping. I’ve been trying to learn and comprehend Unity’s animation controllers, blend trees and state machines. Hopefully the game will have a dynamic animation system in the future that can be easily extended for all of the different species. I’ve considered using the Malber’s Animations Animal Controller that I got free a while ago, but for now I need to learn how to do this myself before I start buying more and more assets.

• The shadergraphs have to be completely redone. I have decided on a Sims-3-pets-esque editing system for markings and decals. You will be able to drag and drop layers, move them up, merge them down, apply gradients to them, etc. in the future. Making the character designer fun and easy to use should help people enjoy the game a whole lot more - since I plan to release it before everything else.

• I’ve learned how to make all kinds of textures in Substance Designer, so next is to learn Substance painter. I’ll have to put this off for a while until I’m ready to do more environment design.

• Gaea is a free to use terrain generator. Really good stuff.

Thank you for your time, reader. Spectrum may not be ready for another year or so, but it helps for me to make dev posts like this.