Completed Models and Resource Optimization
As a feature of Substance Painter 2's export tools, there is an interesting feature that is included that will save on user VRAM and likely on other GPU resources. In the world of game development, there are various texture maps that are used in creating complex materials. Some of these maps, such as metallic maps, height maps, and ambient occlusion maps are maps that are generated in grayscale. This means that a pixel found on that map, of say a roughness map, with a value of white will be interperated as having a value of 1, or full roughness. Black, or 0, would make the surface smooth.
What Substance Painter 2 does with this, to turn three different 4MB files into one 4MB file, is it converts these maps into RGB tones. For example, red would be 1, and black would be 0. By doing this, we can overlay each of the maps on top of one another (and make a really ugly picture) to save on memory. This image can be taken apart and interperated by UE4 during runtime to create the maps that are desired.
Let's say that in our RGB map, red is roughness, green is ambient occlusion, and blue is our metallic map. When being taken apart and iterperated by UE4, if a specific pixel is purple, that means that that area of the texture map has values of roughness = 1, ambient occlusion = 0, and metallic = 1, because the colors red and blue are present, but not green. Gray would imply that all values are equal to 0.5.
On a side note, we've also fixed the shaders in Substance Painter 2 so that they are more representative of the shaders in Unreal Engine 4.
Sergal Model
Looking into the history with the Patreon that is running for the development of this game, and I was wondering why I didn’t have a whole bunch of support that was on par with the good comments that I’ve been getting from people I’d talk to. A lot of people agree the game is a good idea and that that like what I’m doing so far, but I thought something was missing…
I recently came to the conclusion that people would probably be more willing to financially support a game about sergals, and myself, if they actually saw sergals in the game! So, I started making a final (and hopefully it is the final) sergal model to put in my game.
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| This is a .gif that was used to highlight improvements to the arms of the model, but can also be used to show the overall progress as of 10/10/2016. |
What you’re looking at here is a “blank and smooth” male model. He is still missing a lot and needs a bunch of refinement work done on him, but he is some pretty good progress that I’ve got done over the past week, which includes forming the entire base model and various improvements as suggested by the Project Freelance Games community. (Thank you everyone who provided your feedback on the model!)
The way I see it, although he almost looks done, he is only around 1/5 of the way complete.
Texturing and unwrapping is exactly what it sounds like.
After texturing, I’d like to add fur to our model before working on anything else. That is a whole set of complex problems in of itself. Hopefully, it won’t take too long to rig up.
For skeletal rigging, I want to have the base skeletal structure to use for animations, but I also want more intricate facial rigging for expressions, blinking, and talking or shouting. I also want spring joints, also known as jiggle bones, to simulate dynamic movement of different parts of the character, such as ears and tail. In the engine, I am also going to set up inverse kinematics, so that the character’s feet will dynamically update to what they’re standing on.
After that, it’s on to animations. I plan to use a lot of blended animations to get as dynamic a character as possible. This means that the character can decide, from a list of approved animations, what they’d like to do. For example, if we have a character who is walking, we’ll have then run a walking animation. There isn’t really much else we can do with that half of the body; if we’re walking, we’re walking. The top half of the body though, that can have different animations such as regular walking, carrying a weapon in two hands, carrying a weapon in one hand, of the character can even decide if they want to scratch their head or their arm. These animations can be mixed together to make completely new animations at run time and can make a character look more life like.
Looking forward to having a completed model!
Unreal Engine Update / NeoFur Update
We have moved from Unreal Engine version 4.11.2 to 4.13.1
Notable improvements from the previous engine version that would be able to be implemented into Vilous: Soldier of the North include planar reflections, grass and foliage scalability, twist corrective animation nodes, as well as some updates to the stock AI pathfinding, among other impressive things. Unreal Engine 4.13 release notes can be found here. We also updated our NeoFur version from (1.0) 4.11 to (2.0) 4.13 for support within the new engine.
NeoFur 2.0 (4.13) boasts many new features over the older 1.0 (4.11) version. We still have all of the same features such as our dynamic fur simulation, self shading and advanced PBR material support, but in 2.0, artists have access to much more powerful features. Version 2.0 of NeoFur is much more strand-driven, as appose to only using shells for rendering like in version 1.0. This means that density maps can be used, height maps can be used to dictate strand length, undercoats of fur and overcoats of fur can be rendered, each with their own PBR settings, and many other impressive features that will be noted in the next update on this blog when we are finishing our sergal base character.
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| A screenshot taken from a user of NeoFur who posted this on Twitter. An amazing example of the realistic capabilities of NeoFur. |
Team Update / Story Update
We've added a new member to our team! You may know Siskmarek from interactions with her on Twitter, the #Justice4Sisk campaign, or from the sergal game she was making a while back; Dissertation. Unfortunately, due to severe complications on her end regarding the directions things have been turning out for her, she is unable to work on her own game.
However, she has offered to help me in creating V:SotN! Due to her situation, she is unable to access a computer and is flying with some clipped wings, but she is still passionate about the project. Drawing concept art up and helping in writing the story, we're making great progress in creating this game!
Once things are fleshed out a little more in the story aspect of the game, I'll discuss the direction the game is headed apposed to where it was headed. All of these changes are made with user experience in mind, so they're for the better!
Patreon Update
A special thanks goes out to everyone who is supporting this project on Patreon. We broke our $40 goal, so that means that we're going to start hosting live streams for game development on beam.pro. We're plan to try and host a live stream every Thursday. Due to the complexity of my current schedule, this may not be able to happen every week, but I'm going to try! Above are screenshots from the last live stream, done on 10/13/2016.
