2023!

We got through probably the hardest year of our lives so far.

Many things happened that made our lives difficult; we're moving soon and we're working on a different project now.

We're also dipping our toes into motion capture – full body, not just facial capture. So working on personal projects became somewhat hard, we rarely have time do it (again – or rather, still).

What Geril is messing around with nowadays is the iPhone app RealityScan, that creates photogrammetry in semi-real time. You basically have to take several photos of your target from all angles, and as you're taking the pictures, you can see the app building the 3D asset in AR. It can use up to 200 pictures – that you have to take inside the app –, and it uploads those to its cloud server. Making a preview can take some time, and you can only export the result into Sketchfab.

We used to upload some of our projects to Sketchfab, so we're familiar with the platform (for whatever reason, we have 4.7k followers). After the Sketchfab export, it's fairly easy to download the mesh and the two textures.

I shot a few (hundred) photos at our family Christmas, so I can share my grandmother's Christmas cookies with everybody. There's also a wooden hawk and a wall that is in a very bad shape.

We hope that we can show you something interesting this year, that we can be more active. Also, we hope that you all had happy holidays and will have a happy New Year!

Unreal Game Jam!

Hi! It's Lussy.

This month was... hectic, to say the least.

We're still getting settled into our new home, but we did have some time for our personal projects. So we decided to enter the Unreal spring game jam.

At first, we started making a turn-based RPG for the theme 'Transformation'. It featured a bug of some sort that could take the defeated bugs' and insects' limbs and use them as its own. We got quite far with the development, the combat system was mostly finished, it had a basic interface, experience points, 15 levels with new abilities unlocked at various levels. The whole thing was inspired by observing a dead mosquito in our bathtub that fell apart with all of its legs detached. (Why does that happen, by the way?)

...Aaand then we realized that we couldn't finish it in time, so we abandoned it and started developing a much simpler game. We managed to make it in just about one day. It featured a sphere shape that could transform into a variety of other shapes at the press of a button, and the player had to control this shape and guide it through a series of holes in walls that were coming towards it.
We called it 'Andy and the Wallhole'.

Just as we were about to upload the finished project (which was very much not finished, we wanted to include a lot more features and even a soundtrack, but oh well, game jams), we noticed that it was half hour past the deadline. I made a mistake in converting the deadline from New York's time zone to our own. Sooooo... that was that. We uploaded the project to itch.io nonetheless, but it was not accepted. I'm including the link, so if you want to try out this earsore of a project, go ahead.

The whole thing left a very bitter taste, but we do plan on going ahead with the shapes project and making it our own rhythm game. We've been trying to come up with some gameplay mechanic to put into our rhythm game framework ever since we recreated Taiko. So at least this is a plus! I also feel like I gained some experience in working really fast with blueprints. So it wasn't all in vain. That's what we keep telling ourselves, anyways.

So, until next month!

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!

Project Blind story details!

Hi! It's Geril.

We're on Steam Concepts! (And soon Greenlight) Check it out!

***

We haven't really talked about the story of Project Blind, because obviously, we don't want to ruin anything. But I'll try my best to give you an overview.

The game is set on a transport spaceship that carries supplies from and to a city-sized science base. In the game, there are also four people being transported on it, one of them being the player, an ex-engineer who had a severe accident and lost his vision, and therefore his job. He is in a coma after the surgery that replaced his eyes with a machine.

The other three people are a newly retired doctor, a scammer lawyer and an insane designer. All three of them leave messages in their portable devices, which the player can check to find out more about them.

The spaceship has a crew of five people who keep the ship in check, while the ship carries them through space on a predefined path.

Among the cargo, there is a military experiment hidden, the result of an ongoing gene-modifying project. This creature wakes up from cryogenic sleep for unknown reasons, and breaks free.

The player wakes up after this happens. Most of his fellow passengers are dead, and he can only find out what happened by discovering clues and reading writings on the wall. The only other survivor has locked himself in the surveillance room, watching the player through the cameras, and he is the one leaving the messages.

The loose monster isn't the only thing standing in the way of exploring and fixing the ship. About eight minutes after the player wakes up, the ship enters an anomaly that resets time and the player wakes up again. Time goes back by about one and a half days, but the player always wakes up in the last minutes. By that time, the other survivor has changed what he could in the ship based on his own experience and the player's actions, to help the player progress, and locked himself in. For example, if the player rearranges a room to get to a valve to turn off the heating in the room, then the next day, the other survivor will have already exposed the valve for him. Of course, he won't repeat everything the player does, but he tries his best to help. This is why he writes the notes on the wall, although those can be misleading sometimes.

Ultimately, it is up to the player how many times the day repeats, and what the ship's fate will be.

Tutorial: Baking normal (and other) maps in Blender

It's Geril. Hi, all!

As I looked back on our previous posts, I realized I promised to make more tutorials about UDK and game development in general. The reason why we didn't make any is because it's hard to teach what we are still learning. But I'd like to share something that I think not many people know.

Blender3D can bake many kinds of textures, so we don't need ZBrush, 3D Coat or Blacksmith to create materials (even tileable ones). But as Blender is a free software, we have to work twice as hard.

I'm trying to make this tutorial as in-depth and easy to understand as possible, because I tend to omit important parts. If I'm wrong about something, please tell me in the comments, you know that I'm still learning, too.

So, in this tutorial, we're going to show you how we create tileable materials; in this case, a cobblestone surface. This is the result, rendered in Unreal 4:

This tutorial is only for the normal, displacement and ambient occlusion maps. In theory, anything can be a color map, we're using one that is a general stone texture we use for many other things.

---

First, launch Blender (we're using 2.76 right now) and delete the starting box. Then add a Plane mesh using the Add menu [SHIFT + A] - this is going to be the surface to which we are projecting our texture. We're using the upper right area of the editor as a UV/Image editor, of course you can use any other area, too.

Press [TAB] to go into the plane's mesh edit mode that has all of the vertexes selected by default. Press [U] and select Unwrap from the menu - you just created a UV map for the plane. You can see it in the UV/Image editor area. This is where your texture will appear after baking.

In that area, create a new image in the image menu. Choose the right resolution for your texture, based on how important it is going to be in the game. We use 2048x2048. The color and name parameters are not important.

Exit the plane's edit mode [TAB], and add [SHIFT + A] an ico sphere (this will be the first stone). Push [G] and then [Z] to move it along the Z axis above the plane. Push [S] to re-size the sphere, shrink it to the size of the stone you want, relative to the texture's size (the plane).

Using the [NUM 7] key, you can switch to a top-down view, and using [NUM 5], you can change the perspective to orthographic (this is very important if you want to be precise!). Go into the sphere's edit mode [TAB], make sure all the vertexes are selected (if not, use [CTRL + L]).You can randomize the sphere by clicking randomize on the left toolbar. You can adjust it further in that menu, but I find it easier to just repeatedly push the randomize button until I am happy with it.

Open the specials menu with [W]. You'll find a "Smooth" option, with that, you can smooth your randomized sphere so it looks more like a rock. Once again, you can adjust it in the left-side menu, or just keep smoothing it over and over. With this method, you can randomize rock easily. (I add the other rock this way, too) Move your rock to one of the corners, I moved mine to the lower right. To move the mesh on the grid, hold down the [CTRL] key, that way you can align it perfectly with the corner.

Duplicate the rock with [SHIFT + D], and put a duplicate in each of the corners using the grid. Create some new ico spheres, and make new rocks from them using the previous method. Select some rock with area selection [C] (if you didn't select all the vertexes of a mesh with [C], push [CTRL+L] to select the remaining vertexes on them as well), and arrange them as a group, re-size them [S], rotate them ([R] to rotate on the current view's axis, [R] again if you want to rotate them on all the axes).

Duplicate them, and to make it more random, set the pivot point to Individual Origins, so that when you rotate or re-size them, they will all rotate and re-size individually (not as a group). Just make it seem as random as possible, customize them, but it's important that, except for the rocks in the corners, no other rock should touch the plane's edges.

Pick a group of rocks, preferably one that is roughly as wide as it is long. Place it to one edge of the plane, so that it touches the rock in the corner and goes off the edge a bit. After that, duplicate it and place the duplicate on the opposite edge, using the grid. The easiest way is, say you want to move them from the left side edge to the right side one. You'd use grab [G], and to move them on the X axis, push [X] after [G]. Then just type in "-2". This moves the group two units on the X axis - right onto the other edge of the plane. For the top and bottom edges, of course you'd use [Y] instead of [X], for the Y axis. Do this for every edge, the point is that you should fill all the opposing edges with the same models, so that in the end it becomes tileable. It's a little tricky and tedious, and requires a lot of patience, but if I could do it, you can, too.

After our rocky surface is done, and there are no holes remaining, exit edit mode [TAB] and move it to about one unit above the plane. Then duplicate it, and move the duplicate a little closer to the plane (it still shouldn't touch it!). You should also rotate the duplicate 90 degrees ([R], [Z], 90 - this shortcut rotates it on the Z axis 90 degrees) Another important thing is to set the rocks' flat shading to smooth on the left side toolbar.

Select the two rock objects and the plane, in this order; the plane should be the last one [SHIFT + Right Mouse Button] for multiple selection). In the Properties section on the right side, choose the photo icon - that is the Render tab. There you can find the Bake sub window, where you can adjust the bake settings. First, check "Selected to Active" and "Clear". Margin can be left on 16, but I've had bad experiences with margins and tiling, so I recommend setting it to about 4. Set Bake mode to Normals. Now let's bake!

Well now, if the rendered image doesn't look healthily blue, but rather greenish or orange, our Plane's surface points in the wrong direction. In this case, go to the plane's edit mode, select all of the vertexes, and look for a "Flip Direction" button on the right-side toolbar. That should flip the plane's direction. Select the rocks and the plane in the right order, and try again. It should look normal now (pun intended). If you're happy with it, you can save it in the UV/Image editor window with Save as Image, I recommend saving as either PNG or TGA. When you've saved it, let's go back to baking - select Displacement in the Bake menu, and Bake again.

You shouldn't have trouble with the plane's direction again if the normal map came out good. Just bake it and save it next to the normal map you created. After that, repeat the process for Ambient Occlusion as well. You can do a little touch-up in Photoshop or GIMP, like filling in holes between rocks, but be careful, and always keep the original file. You can set the contrast higher on the Displacement map though, it makes the material look deeper. (Don't mind the Hungarian stuff on the pic)

Let's import the pictures into Unreal 4. Select one of the imported pics, and make a material based on it. Put the remaining pictures in that material as well. Use something appropriate as a color texture. Using the color texture as a DetailNormal map is also a good idea. 

This is the last step, messing around with the material settings. It's a little hard to explain this in text, I hope that the picture is understandable. I'll try to write the instructions down as best as I can, though, because I'm not that lazy.

Connect the Displacement's red output to a BumpOffset node [B], then duplicate it and repeat. Create a TexCoord Node [U], and set it to U:2 and V:2. Connect this to the second BumpOffset Coords node's input. Connect the first BumpOffset node's output to the inputs of the textures we created. The second BumpOffset node (with the TexCoord) should be connected to the color texture, and its detailnormal map.

Multiply [M] the Displacement map with the rock texture. Connect this to Basic Color. If it's too dark, leave out the multiply node, but I think it improves the visuals quite a bit. Our normal map would be boring on its own, so you should also add the color map's detailnormal to it (multiplying its texture coord so it becomes more dense).

Create a BlendAngleCorrectedNormal node (that's a fancy way of saying MAKE A MORE DETAILED NORMAL) (okay.. there is a reason why it's called that, but.. let's just continue, okay?) Put this node next to the normal maps. Connect our baked Normal map to Base Normal, and the DetailNormal's to AdditionNormal. Connect this fancy node to the Normal input. And finally, connect the Ambient Occlusion's output to...... the Ambient Occlusion input. Yes, there is an easy step in this.

All that is left is to save the material and try it out. You should adjust the BumpOffset, Roughness and Specular, but I can't help you there, it all depends on what looks good with the color map and environment you are using.

---

This wraps up the tutorial. If you have any questions or requests, leave them in the comments below! I'll be happy to create a tutorial on anything, as long as I know what I'm doing.

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.

September update!

Hi!

In this update, there actually is a lot to say.
Last week I (Lussy) started learning and making blueprints. As we are finished with all characters, Geril is progressing decently with the environment, so with though it would be best if I did Blueprints next to modeling. As a result, our game is finally starting to look/play more like a game - even more so than it did in Unreal 3.

Here is a video in which we demonstrate what we achieved up to now:



I still have a lot to learn about Blueprints, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. If I get more comfortable, we may try to make some tutorials. But for now, here are some of the features I added:

Sliding

Falling from a height

Walljumping

Stopping after sprinting

Some gifs of the test maps:

The sandstorm

 Inside the "house"

 
 Sal cloth test:

Also, we were interviewed by Sketchfab! You can check the article out here.

That's all for today! Look forward to more updates, more game mechanics, and more comics!

***BONUS***

 WTF moments:

After the video...

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!

March update

Hi! I'm Lussy.

...It's been a while..
I got home from Korea a little while ago, so I'm still jetlagged and grumpy. But being there helped my mental health a lot, so now I'm ready to dive into work again. ...I mean, I would be but I have a few months of school left, so until I graduate, I don't think I'll have much time for anything... Finals. Sigh.

So while I was away and wasn't paying attention, Geril found a REAL programmer for our project. An actual programmer who can actually program AND actually DOES program. Not procrastinate. So yeah! As I still have very little grasp on what's going on, I'll just let our new programmer tell you how the project's doing. If everything works out though, I'll be able to switch back to the role of a designer and texture(/3dmodel/background/everything else related) artist soon. And I'm really looking forward to that.

***

Hi! I'm Alex,

I'm the new programmer for this project. I can also help out with German and Italian translations if we decide to include them in the game.

I hope you'll like the videos we make about the game, its features and maybe some of its funny glitches. I joined this project because I liked the story behind it and I want to be a part of this 'game-dev-gamers' team.

What I'm working on right now is some basic movement, and functions for blueprints. I'm still trying to get used to Unreal's hierarchy.

Hopefully with me on the team the rest of us don't have to get involved in the blueprint madness too much, so we can speed up the project a little bit.

What I aim to work on soon, but still don't know how exactly, are some grab functions and fluid character movement to make the gameplay look awesome.
I hope you will enjoy my videos and updates on the project.

***

PS: March's comic may be a little late, but it's already in process,
PPS: It looks like we'll be migrating to Unreal 4.