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

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

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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.

Some plans

Hi!

A lot of you (..the few people who sometimes read this blog) don't understand what the game is going to be like. So we'd like to make this clear: we're making a sidescrolling cooperative game in which you explore huge dungeons in groups of 4 or less, fight monsters and enemies and do quests. We'll leave the rest for later. For now, here are some of our most recent plans and ideas:

(don't tell anyone! ;) )

Shapekey Test

We've been planning to post info about the gameplay for a long time now, but we'd rather not discuss it just yet. Instead, we're going to show some interesting stuff.

One of the playable characters in the game is going to be Eslie. I'm going to write about her technical properties today but her story and personality will be covered in another post.

Her lip-syncing is kind of difficult to create and adjust with her being part wolf. Morph targets - or shape keys - deform her base mesh into a given position (for example, her mouth making different sounds). It can be adjusted, how much (a gaping mouth-morph target can be adjusted to become a slightly-open-mouth morph target by changing the values) and when (they are made into keyframes) the mesh deforms. With some effort, these morph targets can be adjusted so Eslie can (almost) perfectly lipsync any given speech.

A demonstration of this:



I (Geril) used a free software called Papagayo that creates lip-sync using sound and text. It's not very accurate, and it doesn't adjust the jaw movement unfortunately, so there's still a lot of adjustments to make after it finishes. It's better than creating it all from scratch, though.

The importing didn't go very well, but I managed to put it all together in Blender ver. 2.63. I also added some very basic facial mimicry to see how it would look.

And the character can now sing. Not in perfect sync, of course, and without any animation on her body... in T-pose. But it's working. (Makes a great imitation of the decapitated robot in the first Alien movie.)