Hey everyone!
I (John) am hijacking the blog this week, You can hear more about the marvellous adventures of Phil next week. We have a lot to cover.
As you can see by this week's blog cover photo, We have an update for the character model. I have put a few of the developments next to one another for comparison below, showing how they have evolved as we have gone along.
When Phil dragged me into this project, telling me I was going to be responsible for the artwork, we really didn’t know what that entailed. As I had no idea how blender worked and was making our initial building prototypes in Sketchup, we set the bar as low as we thought would still work for immersion - and intended to make an internally consistent art style which I was going to be able to achieve.
Problem was, I really started to enjoy Blender and the more I learnt about the software, the more I wanted to push myself. So even though we started with a low poly art style in mind, and created the first bunch of assets that way - we soon realised I was going to be able to do more. This brings about a couple of issues such as needing to upscale all of the existing artwork (which has been happening steadily with still a long way to go) and trying to determine where we were going to draw the line in the sand. If we have some art work modelled to a high standard, it will contrast against lower standard pieces and the inconsistency can result in a muddled art style.
We decided one approach to defining this limitation for our artwork, was to model what I thought to be the hardest element first, to a limit we were comfortable with - then bring everything else up to that level. Which is why we focused on the character first as people can be problematic. Hence the nightmare fuel in the progression photos - I have needed to upskill and learn proportion and better representation of human form (though I think the nightmare fuel one would make a good mutant villain ;) ). We have settled on the design we like and I am going to work on retopologizing the high poly sculpt (As seen in the topmost image), and then texturing it, putting it onto a new rig and animating it. Then we will drop it in the game and replace the villagers.
Once that is done - we can work on a pirate model and then start iterating through different models for the pirates and variety for the villagers. Let us know what you think! Among that series of improvements, I shall also be bringing the other art up to this level.
We wanted a strong looking, wise but kind character to begin with and have focused on a strong nose and brow with kindly, aged eyes. We will iterate hairstyles (and hats for professions) to add variety to this villager before I can add further models.
We have also just uploaded the latest patch which includes the long awaited soldier improvements. They will now pursue you if they hear you (running is louder than crouching), and they need to actually see you in order to shoot at you. As a result of them investigating sound, the middle has also become a lot more deadly as we have found out in testing ;).
Until next week!