Hello Neyyah adventurers! Hope you've all had a wonderful weekend :) Beautiful hot weather here in England currently (I adore the heat! Bit too much for some). I have been able to work productively over the last little while since coming out of the darker side of covid.
My main focus has been work on backdrops for the characters which will be appearing in the game. These are coming along very nicely, and although I don't want to share all of them, I will reveal a snippet from one of the new backdrop environments:
As well as the backdrops, a lot of work has been going on outside of environment design in the engine itself: implementing the water animations. And there's a lot of them! Here's a link to my most recent dev log which delves into various aspects of the process behind extracting the mask from the prerendered image, using Sqirlz Water Reflections to get the right amount of rippling animation (depending on the player's perspective of the scene), and how I then bring these animations into Visionaire Studio 5 as a series of frames, overlaying the scene.
Adding water animations to the still scenes enables them to come alive, and along with sound FX (which is something I have already delved into and sits within the current build) really adds a new dimension to the game world.
Here is an example of one of the water masks for a scene set up at a very high perspective, looking out across the ocean:
Here is the original rendered scene, which this mask was extracted from ...
Even the smallest little details have to be extracted for the mask - such as part of the railing scene at the bottom of the scene. Otherwise, it ends up swirling and rippling all over the place, becoming entwined with the ocean. Sometimes, with grassy areas, this can be unavoidable, but works for an almost underwater foliage effect!
Here is a more intricate water mask, with a lot more going on in the scene ...
Extracting elements such as grass is a lot harder, and is usually achieved in clumps. While I could create black and white masks within Blender, it would require opening all node files and applying the same proceedure, which takes time in its self (probably more time than just quickly running over the scenes with the quick selection tool within Photoshop). Fortunately, other scenes have been set up with cameras in a much easier way, which will enable me to skip the Photoshop mask extraction and go straight into Sqirlz.
Here is the original scene:
YY
I have put together a couple of gifs which show Neyyah's water in action!
Water can be enabled and disabled within the game too via options!
I put this in place, as a throw back to Riven, but also to enable the game to run faster on less powerful machines! Most of Neyyah's scenes will have water animations, as there's A LOT of ocean in Neyyah!
YY
Sqirlz Water Reflections is a cute piece of software, enabling me to get some cool water effects for Neyyah. Here is an example of the software in action with a scene I'm currently working on for water animations ...
Sqirlz requires settings to be altered in relation to the player's view and perspective!
YY
Once Sqirlz has generated the animated sequence, I can bring this into Visionaire Studio 5 as an overlay. Here is an example of one of the ocean sequences applied to a scene within VS 5!
Within Visionaire, I can also adjust the fps of the animation, and whether it should play backwards or forwards, or loop infinitely!
YY
I really enjoy the process of adding water animations to the game world. While it can be very time consuming, it's very rewarding seeing the results come to life. Again, later sets have been set up in a much less counter productive way, and will have water animations generated a lot faster!
Thanks for stepping within this dev portal! Safe travels back, and stay tuned for the next dev log! Looking at exploring my recent adventures in Cornwall - collecting sound effects, textures, environmental art references, and much more!
Here's a teaser ...
- Aaron Gwynaire / Defy Reality Entertainment