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[Kal-Drey]

Those animations look fantastic. I am VERY much looking forward to this!

[Christian]

I probably already asked this here, but it's been a while. Do you have any plans for Kickstarter/crowdfunding? Would definitely back this

[Olsen]

Hey guys,

apologies for the lack of updates.  I'm on a monster asset crunching drive all of last month and just started on a new project at work.  The stuff I'm doing is pretty dull as it's just days and days of rigging, skinning, modelling of secondary characters - about 8 in total.  I have no concept artist right now so it also means I waste a lot of time pissing around with character design in 3D but i'm on the home stretch as far as that aspect is concerned.

Good news is the schedule for on October milestone has been set, Pax tickets booked.  Going to wrap up character creation this month and aim to have an alpha of the prologue from start to finish by the end of July.

Implemented ladder grabbing, climbing etc and shall post tonight with some visual updates.

Regarding Kickstarter.  I do plan on looking for funding after the reaction of the prologue release and trailer for the first episode.  I want to put out something tangible before I go looking for coin.  But I definitely cannot do the whole thing alone in the time frame intended and freelance talent isn't cheap.

Cheers

Chris

[Olsen]

LADDERS ARE ANNOYING

From a few weeks back.  Super annoying to implement accurately and I'm not really happy with it.  Need to split up the climb anim into one step at a time, it seems. Everything I did was trying to find a way to avoid this.  Serves me right for being lazy.

Long weekend in Sydney, looking forward to posting asset work.  Cheers monarchy.

[Olsen]

INFERTILE DRONE

Finalising (it's never final) the drone design.  Poor guy still can't shoot.

[Cakeprediction]

This is true beauty <3

[Olsen]

cheers Mr Cake!

[Olsen]

NEW CHARACTER WORK(CHEAT)FLOW

I desperately needed to get out 7 fully rigged characters and a few extras by the end of this month to be able to slot them into Unity with placeholder anim for next months milestone of the start to finish prologue run through (mouthful).  I've always intended Somerville to be bursting at the seams with unique asset animation and because of this I've always been on the look out for short cuts to getting base meshes for humanoids that are skinned.

Thank god I discovered this little gem at http://www.makehuman.org/.  Just this weekend I was able to push through all the secondary characters you will be interacting with in the prologue.  For those who've never used it - It's essentially an opensource human generator with sliders up the wazzoo that is actually good.  It spits out up to 3 different levels of mesh density skinned to joint structures that are supported in many packages.  The edge flow is decent (which I ruin later on) and the skinning is perfect for what I need it for.  You can even download the Nightly beta builds which give you a sneak preview of their upcoming functionality, I even spotted some Unity joint presets.

After spitting out the fbx from the software the main issues were downressing the geo and editing clothing.  I'm making a point of being able to see the hard edges in our characters when we get in close just to help sell the flat shaded look.  Not being a modeller I had to learn all the tools in a day but it soon came round.

Rigging was a doddle as I've been working with Maya's HIK system and all the skin weights could be copied over to the edited mesh.  Then it was just a case of posing it in there with the player character and seeing if they fit.

The models are still too soft for my liking and need a good hit with the warped proportion stick but I almost like how John's gaunt, angular, withdrawn frame pops a little bit amongst these squishy folk.  Bare in mind these are also minor characters, bar the Female by John's side.  For the remaining two characters I have due by the end of the month I'll be spending a lot more time on them. But I'm really happy to have discovered a means to fast track the process.

[Olsen]

Oh and some dire thumbnail I did for Etna.  The second biggest character after John that I'll be modelling next.  She's bit of a bull terrier and myself, being a fight nerd, she's loosely based on Scottish MMA fighter Joanne "Jo-Jo" Calderwood.

 

[Olsen]

ETNA WIP

More modelling progress.  Been nice to spend a bit more time on the significant support characters till they really fit alongside John.  Profile of her helmet prop also.  Just needs a few more tweaks, a rifle and she'll be good to roll out.  Looking forward to animating the semi solid suit forming around her as well implementing a physics ponytail when she recoils the helmet.

[Olsen]

ETNA RIG FINALIZATION

Quick pose work this morning to see if I could break the rig.  All modelling done on her now.  Time to move onto the enemy, final humanoid and ship work.  Then some speedy shader work inside of Unity to flat shade those bad boys.  Managed to score a 24 hour deal on the asset store for some premade glow-shaders and they seem very light and intuitive.  So happy I don't have to do any intricate texturing or deal with more than one perspective.  It's going to be a busy month.

[jovan.vesic]

very nice and stylish!

[vividhelix]

Ah, that roll and shoot - Flashback flashback, with a hint of KRZ. Following this, the animations are stunning. Looking forward to seeing some more enemies!

[Olsen]

Cheers guys!

@Vividhelix First proper enemy this weekend.

Also got my friend helping out on some background animals for the forest, cute bunnies and foxes to scuttle.

[Ark]

SOMERVILLE looks amazing! Love games like that. You're probably tired to hear people mentioning Flashback, Another World and Kentucky along the way... but yeah, I want another Flashback and this might be even better (killing myself to say it ). Good luck!

[Olsen]

ALIEN GRUNT RIG AND MODEL FINALIZED

A fine saturday of productivity.  Skin weighting and all that is pretty junk but I'll take some time to clean that up in the future for now I'm glad this fella didn't hold me up.  Going to try two methods with the tail in Unity.  One will be click and hope Unity can take the joint count and manual animations on the tail.  The other will be breaking it off and treating it as it's own asset, hinge jointed to his butt with a physics setup coupled with animation.

@Ark - Nah, doesn't get tired, I love those games.  Cheers mate.

[Christian]

Getting an ancient Egyptian/Horus god vibe from that alien, was that an inspiration?

[Olsen]

@Christian - Hmmm, not too much.  But I can totally see it.  The crux of the brief I gave the concept artist was that they're somewhat a nomadic civilisation formed of tribal communities. They have long life spans and may exist at different stages of evolution.  Any more info would dip into spoiler/don't know areas.

[dougvfx]

Watching the development of this game is so freaking inspiring. I love the camera movements. They feel really great and frame the shots so well. The animations have so much character in them. I cant say enough great things about the animations! Great job all around and I can't wait to see the playable in October.

[Olsen]

Cheers doug!  The positive feedback is such a driving force for this project.  The amount of times I've got my productivity turbo charged off the back of good responses have been many.

Mainframe's art direction is suuuuuper purrdy.  Will be keeping an eye on it also.

Will post tonight or tomorrow morning the final humanoid to join the fray.  Then straight onto hard body work.  My biggest fear is without a full-time concept artist or art director I'm just winging all these designs and that they'll look disconnected when they're dropped into a scene.  I'm hoping the desaturated, simplistic shading method coupled with silhouette and neon will bridge the gaps.