This month was also very busy. We're currently working on an outsourced project, and that takes up a lot of our time, but at least we're using Unreal 4 and Substance Painter, so we feel at home. The extra practice doesn't hurt, either.
Unreal 4 got updated again! We've been waiting for volumetric lights and fog, and 4.16 finally delivered them. They will be useful for Lemniscate, since we've used fake godray effects for all the lamps, and this will make it easier and hopefully cost less in terms of hardware. It also looks cool.
In other news, we got our hands on a simple CTC Prusa 3D printer! We're still calibrating it little by little, messing up lots of prints but nailing others. Geril likes the DIY-aspect of it, and the fact that almost all components can be replaced and upgraded, just like a PC. Lussy likes it because once it works reliably, it will be very useful for cosplay.
Putting the printer together wasn't easy (it took about 8 hours), but we've learned a lot about 3D printing. We're still in the process of attaching extra cooling fans, so our prints are imprecise, but here's a bust of one of our characters, Beat!
We've been working on ideas for Lemniscate, and we were reminded of something we've wanted to try doing for a long time: dynamic facial normal maps tied to morph targets. You know: when a character pulls up an eyebrow and wrinkles appear on his forehead, and the like. It took us about a single workday to implement this using UE4 Blueprints (maybe eight hours including creating the normal maps).
We don't want to spoil anything of Lemniscate, so we've applied this technology to one of our characters from OLP, Beat. She hasn't had a singing video yet, so with this, all of the characters have lip-sync videos where they make fools of themselves.
This animation isn't final or fully detailed, the body animation is still in progress so this version is made of recycled, already existing animations. Oh, by the way, we've also made the texture based eyes work.
The quality of this gif isn't great, but you can hopefully see how the normal maps change. We should really make some older characters, this would look perfect on them.
If you're interested, we can probably make a quick tutorial on how to make dynamic normal maps (EDIT: here it is) and texture based eye movement work in UE4 Blueprints.
Just to make it clear, we're progressing with the development of Lemniscate. This is one of the rooms (the staff quarters):
We're screwing around with multiplayer right now. Geril's Beat and I'm Cole. Moving around works, but I'm still learning about client-side and server-side stuff - most of the functions don't work on the client side because of that. So, WIP.
...which is nice.
But because pushing each other with puppets isn't much fun, we're making the fighting system next.
We spent a huge amount of time working on this comic alone (more than half of October). It's not our best comic, and has as much to do with Halloween as a rotting pumpkin in the morning sunlight. Anyways, we tried.
Because no one is going to find the hidden things in the comic (and our previous comics...), I'll just tell you outright: There are hidden things. There are invisible things. Use the view settings to find them.
Working with a deadline (because of the contest) meant that we frequently missed sleep and any other opportunities that came up - no free time, no social life. We planned way too big for such a short time. I can't really say it was worth it, because the comic is rushed. More time could have led to a better quality comic, and better overall mental and health condition for the two of us. Needless to say, we didn't win anything. (if we did, maybe I wouldn't feel like I wasted half a month of my life)
We remade all four of our characters for this, as you could see in the previous post. Eslie really needs to be redone, the mesh has been through a lot of engines and changes, and at this point, it's more of a mess than a mesh. So we're going to redo her as soon as possible.
Blender has been especially cruel to us, causing random errors, not saving morph targets and such. Exporting and uploading to Sketchfab took us maybe 6 hours in total. (midnight - 6AM)
Sorry about the tone, lack of sleep doesn't exactly make me a happy person.
This is our last comic for a while, because the large amount of time we spent on this could have been better used on actually developing the game. We will continue making comics in the future, but for now, we're working on a playable demo.
Cheers, spooks, ghosts, whatever goes today-
And 'Happy' Day of the Dead for those of us not celebrating Halloween (Visiting graves and mourning instead of trick or treating? ...niiiice)
We are properly progressing in the development of Project OLP, FINALLY. This week we got lots of things done, like equipping and picking up weapons, and playing proper animations on slopes (and slowing down and speeding up according to the slope's angle). Also we're working on a new map.
It's been a long time, again. We've been working hard on creating the remaining two player characters. The first one to be completed was the Beatrice, the mouse:
She's not the best fighter, but she's into science and medicine. You've already seen her in a comic, but now she finally has a 3D body, too.
We were experimenting with her hair for quite a while before we got to this point. We mostly used hair meshes until now, so making strands work properly was something new. Unreal 4 helped with that. The other challenge was the tail: it still appears a bit... crooked. It's not broken though! It just needs a lot of bones...
For the skin texture, I tried out Blender's texture paint for the first time, and it made texturing a lot easier. I only did touch-ups in Gimp, when it was almost complete. (By the way, Geril did the 3D model and textures for the clothes, Lussy made the face and body textures, where skin is showing)
(These in-progress pictures were made with Blender's cycles render)
We were working on the two remaining characters simultaneously, so this means you can look forward to seeing the final character really soon! After that, we can hopefully concentrate on game mechanics and level design. I'm especially looking forward to making multiplayer work.
We know it's late, sorry.. Geril got a full-time job, we had a lot to do, and little time. But don't worry, we'll keep up the monthly comics. We really hope we'll be able to finish the next one in time.
