Terrors Of Retopology Part Two

New UNLOCKABLE Character: Introducing POLARIS

 Monsters Loot Swag got a new update on Steam, this time featuring a new playable character named Polaris, who is a close range, melee based character with a pechant for saying; "Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru".

 Polaris utilizes the cleaned up auto-repology I created last month, with the character weighing in at around 8K tris, with a lower LOD of 4K - down from the standard 12-16K of the other characters. However that did get my thinking that I could probably make a perfectly decent lower poly base mesh with some decent deformation at the joint from scratch.

Base female mesh created from scratch with 8 face limb edge-loops

This weighed in at a mere 3K triangles and had fully working fingers, something I had not really bothered with in the previous character models. I had started off by deciding to have limbs with edge-loops of 8 faces and built it from there, using the silhouette of my previous base character, which was a chunky 20K tris. After creating this first LOD, I made another from scratch, this time basing the limb edge-loops on 6 faces, which weighed in at ~2K tris, including fingers and some other details which probably be removed for an in-game model.

2K tris LOD with 6 face limb edge-loops

After this I decided to make a base male character model using the same technique, something which I could plan my next game project with.

Next game project base male mesh idea

With that done I wanted to have another attempt at animation using rotoscoping. This would probably work best with multiple cameras, but I could only rustle up one working camera for a side view, so had to ad-lib for a facing angle. Initially it looked a bit wonky due to lack of space and cutting my own feet out of view, but when it eventually stopped raining for 5 minutes, I could go outside and refilm myself acting out some movements.

Rotoscoped Animation

And behold the end result was not too bad. The downside is that without exaggerating some foot movements, it tended to look like the back foot was getting dragged and just blending to position, but then the exaggerated movement looks a bit twichy. Either way, bottom dollar motion capture is perfectly feasible, and I may go looking for a second old camera, so I can get a front-on view as well as the side angle, which would help bone positioning in the other viewport. I don't think it's neccessary to glue ping-pong balls all over myself whilst doing this, but maybe not wear baggy trousers next time - but hey, Gen-X here, we even had a song about them.

The next game project is going to be the hack-and-slash concept I've had for a while, and whilst I would like to do another ridiculously giant project with an RPG, I have decided on a more contracted gameloop idea. I was tempted to make it a side-scrolling arcade style slasher, but have gone back to my original free-cam idea, were the player can rotate the camera view as they please.

In other news I was clearly too optimistic about the weather and whilst the Spring duvet remains, I quickly ditched the Summer pyjamas and went back to the Winter fluffy jimjams. It has been bloody freezing, but hopefully this will change. Fingers crossed for May.

Terrors Of Retopography

4K tris versus 8K tris

 Amongst a slew of bug fixes I have been designing a new unlockable playable character. This has once again led to problems of topology - or more accurately retopology from a not very high poly character to a much lower poly character.

You would think that there would be some automated plugin that could do all of this for you, that it could take a mesh with a lot of triangles and reduce it whilst keeping some semblance of the vertex point weightings. And there is, and it can ... except you have to kiss goodbye to your nicely laid out UV map. Now you try modding this ...

Behold the computer generated horrors beyond your comprehension

It does a really good job of decimation and a really terrible job of UVs, textures and materials in general.

The problem appears to be that my starting mesh is some +20K tris, which is great for an up-close viewing of the character - especially in the viewports of Blender - but not so great when you want it reduced auto-magickally. Especially as I hate manual retopology due to it being the utter epitome of donkey work.

If only you could just remove edge loops in a sensible way - but wait! You can! Blender has it's own decimate modifier, and surely loops can be reduced just as the can be increased? Yes but no.

Just auto-reduce loops bro! Yeah but nah, but really wtf is this?

However this is something that could be cleaned up, and in the end I did, thus using that as a new basic mesh to work from, and it's a much more reasonable 6K tris. And after customizing that to a new character, it can be manually reduced by merging loops to keep the bone weights and UV maps intact.

Try and spot the difference from the actual game camera height

 Once again the real problem seems to be the tunnel vision of working up close in the modeling editor, and I am sure that that 4K mesh could get some more reductions without anyone ever noticing. However it appears to be not just me that goes overkill on character meshes ...

Squint percentage per eye ...

Dragon's Dogma 2 character creator allows for squints by percent per eye ... but in-game, your character is barely a third of the screen in height. Not sure that is going to be all that visible when your character's head is only 64 pixels.

My new playable catgirl cosplayer is called Polaris, and does that 北斗百裂拳, Hokuto Hyakuretsu Ken thing minus the waaa-ATATATATATA battle cry, so you'll have to shout it yourself. The character portrait isn't completed yet and I'm still balancing the stats and attack attributes, so update to Steam should be next week.

It's British Summer Time, at least horology wise, I am removing the winter duvet, so naturally the weather has taken a turn for the worst. Maybe with April here Spring might finally start, as it seems to have done nothing but rain and be generally miserable since October.

 

I also had a thought about the methodology of making a roaming brawler, one where the player could upgrade to the move sets and customize their own controls based on fighting styles and how to code this as combat events. This brought me back to thinking about the melee combat system I coded an example of previously which uses hitboxes, and whether that would be good gameplay system; a (probably side) scrolling roaming hack and slash where you level up your character not just with attributes but also armour and weaponery, restarting each "run at the game" with all the new stuff you earned in previous runs. This way the player would start off very weak and get killed quickly, then spend whatever XP you acquired on better stats or kit and go again, eventually leading to the player becoming massively OP in early levels. It would work a bit like reverse permadeath, with the player's XP being permanant and allowing the unlocking and equipping of better weapons and protections but also melee based move sets that could be customized to control binds.

As Monsters Loot Swag near completion, 1 more level with enemy boss, and 2 more playable characters to add, I am beginning to think more of what the next game will be, and after having created the proof of concept for MLS NINE FUGGING YEARS AGO I think I need to work on a shorter development cycle for my next project.

Leap Into The Future

Monsters Loot Swag Now With HDR And PBR

February has arrived ... and by the time you are reading this, it has also gone. But not before Monsters Loot Swag got a huge update on Steam, and has been ported to a completely new engine build.

This included finally retiring the old engine build and replacing it with the latest game engine build, complete with all of those 21st Century shiny things like an asset system, HDR lighting, Physical Based Rendering of reflections and so much more. The changlog itself ran to some 36 items.

In other game development news, I also ported my old "Aeronauticals" proof of concept demo to the latest engine version. You can download and play that here and watch me do just that below.

 February 2024 is a Leap Year! And soon to be leaping are what is in this pond! 🐸

However since this arrived there has not been much froggy activity due to the weather reverting to being bloody freezing for the last few weeks. Thankfully it looks set to become milder and much croaking was heard earlier.

So that was the month with a strange number of days, and all because two despots mangled the perfectly working 10 month calendar by inserting their egos into new months and totally throwing time out of order every 4 years.