Neon Skies – Week 8
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Week 8 started with me updating the visuals on the bow to the white neon while our lead artist worked on animating the mesh. A mesh is an object, specifically an object made out of a lot of smaller objects, we try to build the objects with quadrilaterals (quads) and let the game engines turn the quads into triangles as the computer has the easiest time working with triangles and each game engine turns quads into triangles in different ways for the best performance for their software.
After I had updated the visuals on the bow, I went and updated the texture for the crafting table. Like with the weapons and other stuff we had made before, we needed to make the neon white, but we also needed to add some details to it that we hadn’t added before. We still kept its dark style on the structure, but with some more nuance than before on the textures.
After the crafting station I updated the last of the old weapons to be in white neon, the axe. In itself, this is a very quick process. 3D Coat has a “desaturate” mode and as the neon is on its own layer, I just need to drag the desaturate selection over the entire object with the correct layer selected and then it is turned white.
Once the old weapons had been updated, I was put on the task of making a sword, we already knew what we wanted and we had concepts for it, the concepts had a bend to them however and we wanted it to be very straight as that is the general style of the game. To make it feel less empty we also added a simple interlacing pattern on the handle.
After the last of the weapons that we’ll at least make before GGC was done I worked on some stone ground textures. I tried manually, but I am not that skilled at 2D texturing, however, I realized that I could create a dense plane and create shapes and textures on that. That way I could use tools made more specifically to add a sense of depth and more importantly, mess around with smart materials (smart materials are materials added by the computer based on conditions you make, like “only place this in shadows” or “place less of this on convex areas”).
To fill out some of the areas with more props, I made a canister and a battery pack, they have no real purpose aside from looking nice in the background and supports the sci-fi feel.
Last task for the week was changing the emissive part of the metal ore texture to white so that it could be more easily changed in game like with the other things. The image above is how the metal ore now looks in the game. Overall, this has been a very productive week, if we didn’t upload what we did each week to google drive, I would have forgotten half of it by the end of the week. Especially because after so many weeks, they start to blend and it is hard to remember sometimes if you fixed something this week or the last week.  |
