https://youtu.be/cpUawoSEtaY
This week, Tommi has been creating stranger wolf behaviors. Andrei has been setting up wolf customization. Susan has been researching secondary missions, and our new developer Zach has been working on multiplayer. And I’ve been a bit obsessed with rocks.
One reason for our trip to Yellowstone was to see rocks up close and personal since, strangely, those are not common subjects of photography in Yellowstone. (Hmm, what else could people be taking pictures of?) The cliffs of Amethyst are made of conglomerate rock (formed from mudflows mixed with gravel stream deposits), along with some sandstone and siltstone. To create these cliffs, our rock artist Omar has created a number of repurposable cliff models. I then experimented with several shaders (which determines how light reflects off objects in a 3D environment) to find the best way to create the cliffs for the game. Today’s video shows that process.
One reason to put this effort into the cliffs (besides being a good challenge) is because these cliffs are the domain of the bighorn sheep, which was the top vote-getter in our February blog poll for a new animal to add to the game. We’ve partnered with Games-in-Motion, a 3D art firm in Slovakia, for many of our new game animals, and they just delivered the bighorn model, which is just as handsome as the elk and mule deer which they made for us last year. We will share more about the bighorn when we get the whole family animated.