NeoFur!

Hi! It's Geril.

Because Lussy is 120% preparing for her finals, Lemniscate's development is going slower than usual. But in the meantime, I've had time to try out a new technology that I've wanted to try for a long time. It's called NeoFur by Neoglyphic. Because all of OLP's player characters have fur and fluff, this plugin is perfect for us.

For now, only Cole the bobcat has a presentable coat of fur applied. It would be a lot better with a fur pattern map, but Lussy is busy so it'll have to wait.

As you can see on the comparison screenshots, the fluff and the beard improves the character's appearance greatly. We can control the fur's length, density, and how much gravity, wind and force fields affect it. It's fun to tinker with and makes things really interesting visually. For example, we can even make Cole's beard grow during the game.

so majestic

According to our experience with NeoFur, it really is the best when used as a fur effect (because, of course, we've tried to use it on other things, too, like hair). However, it also looks decent for things like fluffy carpets or grass.

The fur effect is very costly graphically, especially when using more shells (70<), but using proper LODs helps solve this problem.

We couldn't make animations work with NeoFur yet, but we're working on it. We can watch the animated meshes with fur in the editor frame by frame though. We're looking forward to solving this issue, because the preview looks promising.

We can only recommend the NeoFur plugin for anyone making fur-coated beings in Unreal 4. It's really worth it (it's only $20!).

Apart from this, there are lots of things going on, for example, we may begin to publish posts on other sites, too. Nothing is decided yet, but it feels like our work up to this point is finally going to pay off.

After Lussy's finals, we'll get back to working on Lemniscate again!

Mini-update: Multiplayer!

Hey!

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.

Happy Halloween!

You can view our Halloween 3D comic here:

No Rest for the Wicked by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

Can you find all the hidden secrets?

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)

3D comic #2!

Hey!

Here is the second 3D comic we made:

Being Superior by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

I think for now we'll stick with these (as they are more convenient to make and we are low on team members), but you can expect more traditional comic strips somewhere in the future.

This comic gives you more information about Cole's character. We were experimenting with sound effects (written, of course), 3D text, camera angles and facial expressions. There are some other things, too - I wonder if you'll be able to find them!

About the project; we're moving forward, slow but steady. I (Lussy) am working on textures, which means the two playable characters that only existed in drawings will soon be ready for animating and then importing into Unreal 4. Geril's doing the comics and other models while I'm messing around with the textures. Alex is still knee-deep in the engine itself (IKs! Yaaaaaaaaay).

Until next time!

3D comics!

Hi!

We spent a lot of time doing a new type of comic on Sketchfab. You have to click through the annotations to read it properly. Like this, in the lower-right corner:

We recommend full screen to see it better.

On non-widescreen (4:3) monitors, you may not be able to see all of the text, because we optimized the comic for widescreen monitors. You can move the camera with the right mouse button to see all the bubbles.

Enjoy!

Stargazing by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

Sketchfab!

Spring already!

We spent the Easter holidays (and the rest of the time, too) working. All of the 4 characters are slowly becoming functional, and we’re discovering more and more possibilities in Unreal 4 (though it already killed one of our laptops…).

Alex is working on a pickup system that is going to be very important in the game, as the players will be switching weapons frequently. We have two functional characters so we can also begin to test the local multiplayer elements soon. (And there will be a video of it.)

About the comic… It’s really late, we know. It’s going slowly because the 4th character’s design is still being worked on. But we joined Sketchfab, so in the meantime you can look at our 3D models in all their glory!

Cole_v25 by carpaintergeril on Sketchfab

Other ones will be uploaded to: https://sketchfab.com/carpaintergeril

Unreal 4!

Hi!

This month is a little crowded.

We are happy to say that we managed to get hold of Unreal Engine 4 for a while (thank you, GitHub!!). So these days we are trying out the engine, discovering the differences, etc. There are lots of built-in stuff in UE4 that we would have needed in the UDK. So we're looking at the pros and cons, and considering migrating our project. We're not sure yet though. I have yet to check out the blueprint system in-depth. (By the way, scripting is so much quicker with the graphical interface and in-engine compiler. No more restarting while adjusting a variable. Yay!)

Here are some pictures for comparison! Every texture and mesh is the same as they were used in the UDK. Only minor changes at most.

Left side - UDK, right side - UE4

---

Super detailed bump maps! Yay!

Geril created this "building" in about 15 minutes.

Real-time reflections make everyone look like T-1000s in liquid metal form

If we do decide to migrate the project, we'll make some tutorials.

I'm sorry to say that there may not be a comic this month at all. Geril is hard at work at his full-time job, and in UE4 too, and I (Lussy) am traveling in South Korea at the moment. I hope you can understand.

Comic No. 2!

Hi!

Here's the second comic:

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.