Oh for sure yeah, and tbh the October "post something every day" challenge has been a big help for that. Lots of days with work calls all day, then gym, crap it's my night to cook, "ok what can I do in like, an hour?"
Looking back through later, it's cool what all compounds from those little bits.
Spent this afternoon writing a preprocessor to recognize and animate certain phrases in the Quest dialogue, without needing to add style info to the dialogue text explicitly.
Also, I joined a studio and now do unity stuff for a living, but I'm still doing this too dw.
I'm slowly getting into the habit of laying out the UV stuff in terms of importance for the model, with faces becoming larger parts over the last few times I've tried this.
Eyes are a total mystery to me and I keep using recolors of the nice eyes that Shannon's commission came with.
Last Melrode kid, Todd, and 8/53 for the number of NPC models up to Solvaring.
Todd's 2 original animations were both pretty energetic, so I wanted to save him for last and learn with the first 3. Adding small root offsets really helped out with these.
3/4 Melrode kids done, just one more for the gang.
I think whoever made the "just make it exist first, you can make it good later" should win some sort of award. It's been fun getting into modeling and knowing that things will look goofy but that it's ok.
Tried the 2nd melrode kid today and had a lot of trouble with his weird head shape and odd expression.
Each of the kids also has their own super exaggerated running animation, which only plays when they turn towards you, so I think they were probably meant to run around town.
Starting the Melrode kids, tried Pete today since he only seemed a little more complicated than a stationary treasure chest.
Fan remake project with no financial incentives, the spiritual successor pivot is reserved if there's ever a cease + desist o7
Started learning how blender's texture painting stuff works. Chest came out alright, but I probably redid the UV stuff like 4+ times.
I am not great with art or getting a clean circular shape into a UI thing, so I tried to use a shader instead. I used a similar one for the chest + spirit interactions to give a slight glow, with the goal of not needing to match their coloring 100%.
So instead of the HUD that quest 64 shipped with, I'm trying to use one from earlier footage where the compass is on the left of the bars.
Started playing with HUD ideas and working on the interaction popups. I'd like to keep as much color and charm as possible, without falling into the "white bars + small text remaster UI" meme, but it's hard to get the quirky shapes and fun fonts to look reasonable in higher res.
Been going through for the last week or so and getting the blocked vertical slice building and ironing out the issues, it's slowly becoming almost playable.
Oh I see, yeah. I'll play around with that.
I haven't done much with the Rock 1/2/3 animations since adding in placeholders awhile back, and the man eater ones atm feel like molasses. I'll probably fiddle with them a bit more then return later after the NPCs teach me more about blender etc.
Animation is pretty new for me (minus very minor edits to accentuate an impact or release), so all the scaling particulars about getting from blender into unity were driving me insane lol.
The little 100x scaling between fbx and blend formats kept weaseling in and turning man eater into a planet.
Trying to do the Man Eater from scratch, minus some bone models and a ground texture. It's turning out alright, and this will hopefully help my confidence when starting the NPCs.
Used some of the "between jobs" time to work on the enemy model silhouettes. The original commissions were very good imo, way better than I could've hoped for after providing low-res emulator screenshots.
Recorded a recap video for the #devtober work today:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw9R...
Oop, missed this.
The Quest 64 discord is probably the quickest route, this is a link from the speedrun page and hopefully still works? discord.gg/0Vr8Ym5bLayc...
Fan remake project! The decomp results are sometimes converted into c# and incorporated into things like cameras and movement.
To give an idea for the maps, I am starting Holy Plains right now actually and the first step is to overlay exported lua data as a sort of guide when blocking things out.
Used some of the day off to finish blocking Dondoran's interiors.
If you've been following this project for a while, this may seem like reverse progress, but I wanted to go back and redo some areas to sure the general feel and muscle memory came through.
The goofy system I've been using to block the dondoran building heights -- moving brian until he's on the roof.
Started blocking out Dondoran yesterday, also fiddling with the door exit animations to use root motion.
It does bring the autowalk doors much closer to the original though.
If you're still reading, then there's a good chance that you followed along through much of this month's posts and I want to say thank you.
It's been a long month in the real world, and I'm looking forward to sitting down and recapping it in something other than tweets.
All the best, gang. o7
Super helpful video that broke down blendshapes into something I could understand. I'd previously commissioned this sort of thing and always felt a little underwhelmed at the results, so this has helped boost my confidence.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WGt...
#devtober day 31 - Shannon blinking
Wanted to finish with something visual, and luckily I found a nice tutorial on how to implement blinking with blendshapes by @evepaints_ -- linked below.
The Shannon model was a commission last year from k_catz on fiverr, briefly shown to the Quest 64 discord.
#devtober day 30 - easier ik look for npcs
There were 2 previous attempts with this with the newer Rigging system, but I learned today that there is just a built-in function for this on the default animator object. Way simpler and just takes a few seconds to set up.
#devtober day 29 - more blocking and camera work
The stairwell areas are blocked with the lua data, and the stencil issue was just a typo somewhere. The last camera issue is handling collision and closeness, and figuring out why the npcs now talk to you while pouting.
#devtober day 28 - blocking and door issues
Adjusted the animation / IK stuff to play nicely with doors and the new 30 fps sim stuff, but the denser layouts are inviting problems with the stencil door trick from last year.
