[Nephilim]

I've been crushed by work lately, so I haven't been working much on Sacraments 3D, but I did manage to get a chance to do some modeling and rigging tonight. I decided to make one of the monsters for the game, and this is what I made:



The idea is to have fairly naturalistic monsters, based on real-world animals, instead of the more fantastical monsters you see in many RPG's nowadays. Seems like many RPG's make monsters weird for the sake of being weird - I'd like to go the opposite direction, and make them seem as natural as possible (while still making them interesting, of course). The challenge here, of course, is that natural monsters will look dumb if not modelled well, whereas fantastical monsters have no precedent to compare it against, so you can get away with more. But I'm going to try it.

This particular critter is basically a big bird, somewhere between a horse and a large dog. This would be the sort of monster you encounter in the typical wilderness environment. The more "monster-like" monsters would be reserved for special magical places, and look like mutated/perverted versions of real-world animals. (In this game world, magic is an organic part of the environment, like water, plants, and air, so it can stagnate, fester, and rot. When this happens, and animals get caught in it, it creates monsters by changing the animals in unpleasant ways. Hence, all monster-like encounters will basically be a lot like real-world animals.)

I was experimenting with some texturing techniques and more animation rigging with this model, and I'm pretty happy with it. I actually have its idle animation about 90% animated - just a few tweaks left here and there - and it works pretty well.

My next technical experiment is piling animations onto these characters so I can trigger different "emotes". My goal is to get to the point where I can make a combat demo between the Luthien model and this bird critter. To do this, I'd need at least some basic animations for each combatant : idle, attack, hurt, and die. I'd also like to include special attack, weak, and "really hurt" for more variety, but I'm wary of biting off too much animation work. We'll see how it turns out.
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[Nodtveidt]

Not bad, not bad at all. :) You can still afford some eccentricism even if you're trying to stay "realistic" though, since only a bonehead nitpicking player is gonna care about how "true to life" your animals are...
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If you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear demonic voices. The scary part is that if you play it forwards it installs Windows. - wallace

[BadMrBox]

As long as they dont go as far as some of the Final Fantasy X enemies (with hoovering rings and crap) I'm happy. Liking the bird. I guess it dont have the flu? :P
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[Nephilim]

Heh.

Yeah, I will take more liberties with the "monstrous" animals than just making them larger. I just want there to be an obvious shift between "normal animals" and the "polluted animals."

Anyway, I just uploaded an animation test of the bird above that you can view. It shows the "idle" animation for the bird, when it's not attacking, getting wounded, or whatever. I was going for the spastic, jerky motion of birds, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

I had the animation pretty much ready to go last night, but for some reason, the character rigging at the very end of the tailfeathers wasn't working, so I had to rebuild the rig from scratch. It appears to work now, though. Next, I'm going to try building the other animations.
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[Nodtveidt]

Killer. :)
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If you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear demonic voices. The scary part is that if you play it forwards it installs Windows. - wallace

[BadMrBox]

You have catched the perfect birdy feeling with that one Neph. Liking it's movement - almost hearing it ...whatever the sound doves makes is called.
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[Nephilim]

Thanks. I'm pretty happy with how the animation is looking.

Tonight, I added some more animations: a "moving to attack" animation, an "attacking" animation, and a "getting hurt" animation. I cobbled them together into a little interactive demo that shows how the different animations work together by having a bunch of the quailtards duke it out.


_________________
Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[Jocke The Beast]

Perfect. Now I wanna kill some birds :)
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Jocke The Beast

[BadMrBox]

[Nephilim]

Haven't had much opportunity-slash-energy to work on my 3D stuff lately, but I did manage to sit down today and start working on an indoor tileset: a series of caverns. Here's a screenie if you're interested:

(In the final game, the light won't be so bright in there - I just bumped it up for the purposes of this screenshot.)
_________________
Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[BadMrBox]

Have I told you how much I enjoy the cartoon feeling of this project? Yes I have, but I say it again.
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[Nephilim]

[js71]

I dunno if it's just my monitor, but I really can't see what's going on in that first picture. Waaaay too dark. I can see some blue, some red, and a little white bit, can't make anything else out.

[Nephilim]

[js71]

Ahh yes, that's much better. Looks great, too. :) I love the cel shaded/cartoony feel, the cave looks especially great with it.
And yeah, brightness settings would definately be good... Almost mandatory for some games, I mean, I can't imagine the Thief series not having that. :p