I've just ordered my christmas present; a Wacom Intous4 A4. I really miss my old tablet PC, which broke down this year, and my old wacom board is ridiculusly tiny and crappy. I've started sketching a lot in the past few months and I'm also interested in learning more about painting digitally and drawing textures. Unfoutunatly there are not a lot of mid range products available so I had to buy the top of the line, super advanced Intous4, even though its features and prize far exceeds my needs and my budget. But what the heck, it's christmas and after a year of no pay and eating egg sandwiches for lunch I deserve a fancy toy.
This is an idea I've been meaing to try out for quite a while and last night I finally took the time and made a quick test.The idea is to make pixel graphics with dynamic lighting using normal maps, but still keep the hand made, low res pixelart feel. I figured I'd have to use a a small palette for the normalmap as well. So here's a test I did with the character bengt from an old 2d project of mine.
I used a 25 color palette for the normals; it's a bit much but it was the easiest way to do it (5 values for x and 5 for y). As for the results; I'm not really sure what to think about it. It doesn't look quie as bad as I had feared but somehow it feels more like a super pixelated 3d render than a 2d sprite, though maybe it would look a bit better if I made some tiles as well and rendered in his native resolution rather than having him walking around in a 3d world.
Saturday, 4 December 2010
After another week of manic coding and 3d work I think I'm slowly starting to run out of creative energy, and maybe I'll be able to resume some structure in my life; hopefully even get time to go out and buy some food. I haven't really achieved a whole lot this week though, nothing quite as epic as the pants-removal system at least. I have worked on a lot of small stuff though, and some pretty valuable improvements to the engine. I've improved the shadow system; so shadow rendering will be disabled for all the lights off screen and only be rendered once as long as there's only static objects casting shadows. I've finally rewritten the exporter so I don't have to manually convert all the files to xml after they're exported, and added support for scaling joints in the animations and multiple UVsets.
So I'm continuing working on completely random and meaningless stuff and I started thinking about the best way to animate clothing, and then started implementing what might just be the worst way possible. I wanted to make a system where the clothes could have their own rig and their own animation, but could easily be linked to a chacter and follow his movements. Then I got a crazy idea that instead of just linking the rigs, I would skin the clothes dynamicly to a character; that way it would actually be possible to make a character visually undress or get dressed.
So I skinned the clothes to a simple rig, then I created a skinweight map for the character, and used that to find out what joint in the players rig to connect each vertex to based on their current position. Getting this to work on the pants went well enough but it turned out that taking of a shirt is a lot more complicated. Obviously he had to raise his arms before I could animate the shirt, but the shirts animation had to be relative to the bind pose. The problem then was that if I raised the shoulders in the bindpose, somehow the animations got screwed and the shoulders looked slightly off when in their normal position. I tried a lot of different ways to transform betwen the different bindposes, but nothing really worked. In the end I used a very ugly compromise so the shirt uses the matrices based off the normal bindpose whenever it's in it's default position, but as soon as a it starts moving it uses the other bindpose.
I'd probably be able to make it look a bit better if the exporter supported scaling joints or if I make a more advanced rig for the shirt. Anyway heres the result. The clothing items has a simple animation when he takes them off; basicly just moving up or down and squeezing a bit, they are then dynamicly skinned to the character every frame (all in the vertex shader).
While it does look quite horrible and half broken; I still can't help feeling that it looks absolutly awesome somehow. And of course, with a system to animate people taking their clothes off, I'm one step closer to achieving my lifelong dream of creating the ultimate porno game...
Life away from work agrees with me almost a bit too well. I've become completely engrossed in what I'm doing, to the point where I forget to eat and hardly leave the apartment; though I have now replenished my cookie-supply so food won't be a problem anymore.
I kind of feel that I ought to be working on some epic project, or at least a small one that I'll be able to show someday, but instead I keep doing a lot of completly random and useless things. I've been working mostly in maya lately; doing some animation, tried making a simple facial rig and modeled some random stuff. It's nothing that's really worth showing or that will be usefull in any real project, but it's relaxing yet fulfilling, which is exactly what I need right now.
It's been pretty much decided that I'll be returning to work in january now, so we'll have to see if I run out of random ideas before then and start working on something more substantial, or if I'll just relax and eat ice cream.
After a long period of rapidly increasing bitterness I have decided to take a time out from M&D. It feels weird to leave the other guys in the middle of everything but I need to focus on combating my bitterness. I have devised a strict plan comprised of lots of icecream, nougat and coding.
Yesterday I felt a sudden urge to play around with some rendering code again, so I booted up my old shooter project and started tinkering on some water effects. After a lot of experimentation and eventually some googling I think it's starting to look somewhat decent. It has reflections, refractions, waves and some dynamic ripples when you're moving around in it. The code is of course ugly as sin, but what the hell; I'm off from work now.
Now I just need to figure out a game concept with a pool of water (the water ripple system only works on a small, limited area right now).
Ok so the blog has been really dead for I while now and I'm not sure whether I should just let it stay that way or if I should bother trying to revive it. Originally the idea was to post stuff about my coding and game development, but soon after I started the blog, the ball started rolling with Might and Delight and I lost all motivation to keep working on my own projects. So basicly I just posted random stuff for a while.
Then of course I started working full time with Might and Delight, which I can't really talk about all that much. All the official news about M&D can be read on the company blog (which no one updates either), and I don't really want to write about anything related to the company behind the other guys backs. However, as most of my worries and hopes are centered around the company right now I don't really have a lot of other things to share either, so this blog is feeling a bit redundant.
Of course I can always keep posting stuff about Doctor Who and various video games (Kirby's Epic Yarn looks amazing by the way ) Anyway... I'll see if I'll bother to keep up the posting in the future
