Video Dev Log #2: A Journey Within

Our Kickstarter has been updated with an in game video showing the latest dungeon.
You can pledge at the link below:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/druidgameworks/freelance-artists-for-witanlore-dreamtime

Kickstarter update

Our Kickstarter has been going on for a few days and it's been doing well. There have bee a bunch of updates about various subjects in game development which I think might itnerest a lot of people.

Head over to our kickstarter page and read on!

Unearthly Challenge Finished!

The challenge was.. chalenging.. but fun and above all it taught me a lot in generating normal maps (I didn't get it as perfect as I wanted to), texture creation and general workflow.

Here's my final entry for the challenge:

The Time Device

Today I did some texturing of a game prop. I made the high poly model and from that produced a low poly model. A normal map was then made from the high poly model.

I will detail how I did the normal mapping in another post, but I've found Blender to require a little bit of hacking to get going, but once you get the idea its pretty simple and relatively fast.

Anyway here's some screenshots.

Scientist character

My friend and I are working on a game. There's not much I can say right now but I've been working some things for the past few weeks.

Today I'm showing you progress on the main scientist character.

I haven't done much humanoid character modelling. I haven't done much normal map generation. 

So that's what I've been doing lately!

To start with I made a high resolution mesh. I dont usually go with a specific modelling style but in this case, after seeing this lovely tutorial by CGtuts, I decided that subdivision modelling was pretty useful!

By starting with a low poly mesh and applying a subdivision modifier you can produce high poly meshes with the peace of mind that when it comes to producing the low poly mesh, all the vertices will stick closely to the underlying high resolution mesh, allowing you to focus on simply removing edge loops rather than trying to mess around with traditional retopologising methods.

Of course when it comes to animation, you will need to make sure you have adequate geometry for deformation, but that's not too complicated once you have a low poly mesh which you know is a good proxy for the high resolution one.

The benefit of the subdivision process is that you can use the edge loop selection and delete features to effectively reduce the geometry to something a game engine can handle, while the overall volume matches the original mesh closely. The down side is it may take a while to reduce the geometry back from one or two levels of subdivisions however the benefits are great.

The final reduced mesh can then be modified to improve deformation etc.

Final polygon count is around 12k triangles.

The next stage involves rigging as I want to make sure the geometry will deform and take on the normal map correctly.

Using the riggify tool in Blender made it very easy rig this thing. The only annoyance is the weight painting itself where it can sometimes be quite hard to get the correct deformation in all poses.

This is the result after the rigging process!

For those interested, here are some wires:

I hope to show some texturing soon.

Until next time.