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[Alain]

After making my last post I noticed how huge the steps on the stairs were compared to the character. Turns out even when trying to use real-world units and placing blocky people next to the models, I just can't tell until I get things into the actual game.

That is interesting and I made the same experience: concerning size the real world is a sh*t reference for games referencing the real world ;)

[oahda]

I actually keep getting surprised at just how huge some buildings and monuments are in reality, but it just didn't feel quite right here.

The town hall is going to be quite large nonetheless but a lot of it will be a grand open space with banners and plants hanging from the ceiling (and more waterfalls or fountains indoors probably!), not least because I want it to be visible from almost anywhere in town.

[oahda]

37

More café, less FOV

Playing some more with colours and model of café to the extent that's possible with the fountain texture. Going to make the plants nicer and more varied later. This is all I had time for today. c:



Also decreased the field of view even more because houses stretched so much when they were on the sides of the screen rather than the middle. Pulled the camera back to keep the character more or less the same size; basically a dolly zoom.



Blender's wireframe modifier is real handy for making a quick and dirty fence in no time by turning simple edges into solid bars:

[vdapps]

Yeah, you also mentioned drawback of very wide FOV (distorted geometries on edges, fish-eye look). On the other hand, too narrow FOV can easier lead to nausea (due to "zoomed" screen). I think you're hitting the balance in your last screenshots.

Ahh, Blender, never tried it, but I guess I will install it finally and start learning a bit.

[oahda]

Yep, the FOV feels good to me in motion now too. I like Blender a lot, hope you'll enjoy it too!

Realised I haven't posted any in-game screenshots with snow in a while, so here's one of those:



Without the snow, for comparison:



It's a bit flat and empty with the snow right now, but I'm not going to have it cover the ground completely later (this is a busy spot with lots of people walking!), and eventually I can probably complement the "automatic" snow shader with some hand-modelled piles of snow to add some variation in height.

EDIT:

I guess a GIF for the FOV is in place too!



Excuse the framerate, working on it, and recording doesn't help~

[vdapps]

GIF looks very nice! No problem with frame rate.

What are you using? Currently I'm using OBS Studio for screen grabbing and for animated images I use Ffmpeg to convert grabbed MP4 to animated WEBP. It's much better than GIF.

I also make GIF versions (also with Ffmpeg) only for itch.io, which doesn't accept other format for animated images (plus they have crappy limit 3MB, so I use gifsicle tool to optimize it further, many times leading to super crappy GIF-s).

[oahda]

I usually use LICEcap (dedicated GIF recorder) but for this one I used QuickTime to do a screen recording and then converted it to GIF using ezgif.com where I usually also edit/optimise. c: I like WEBP but it doesn't show on my phone so I tend to stick to GIF.

[vdapps]

Let me guess, you have iPhone? Android should not have problem. I think starting from iOS 14 / OS X Big Sur, there should be support for WEBP on Apple eco-system as well.

[oahda]

Yeah, it's a slightly older one. Feels safest to use GIF for now. c:

[oahda]

38

Festive façade

A now fairly fancy front of the café complete with snow in time for Christmas.



Closer up from ground level:



I don't feel quite finished but I think it's time to move on to something else. Perhaps the interior of this house, or the exterior of the flower shop. These are the first two houses you'll have access to in the game, so that's why I'm focussing on them early. c:



Got some piles of snow now like I said. They look a little angular at the moment, but it was a quick and easy solution: just make a mess of polygons, place it just below the ground, and then apply the snow shader so that the pile will poke out of the ground as it grows over time!



It's not only the ground that lacks the regular snow shader now, but parts of the café where I don't want it as well, such as the floor of the platform, on top of the tables, and on things that are under something.

[gustavolsson]

Looking really good! I love the, clouds, the artsy style and the purple hues. Do you perform any post-processing effect on the scene to get this effect or is it a result of the colors and shadows?

As for GIFs, I stumbled upon this excellent library the other day: https://github.com/notnullnotvoid/msf_gif. Integrate this and you can record high quality GIFs right out of the engine!

[oahda]

Thank you so much!

I got too bothered with the length of the shadows making things look messy, so I fixed that, and also made the purple on the banners match the shadows more (bluer), so I've replaced all the pictures in the previous post, hope it's better now.

I have actually been interested in doing that, so thanks for recommending the library! I think I'll check it out, but it might take a while.

EDIT:

Sorry, I forgot to respond to the question! It’s mostly directly from the colours and the lighting. Gimme a sec and I’ll grab some updated screens of the render steps! c:

EDIT 2:

These are the pure colours with no lighting:



Lighting and sky get done in one step based on the depth buffer, normal buffer and so on in one deferred step where the shadows and the ambient colour are separate to get the effect I want:



Then the watercolour effect is applied on the result, mostly a 2D effect, but also using the depth buffer and some masks:

[ChrisLSound]

Absolutely love this. Those shots of the café with falling snow are so good -- probably some of my favorite shots so far

[oahda]

Thank you!

[oahda]

39

Flowers and fixes

Hey! Felt I was getting too spammy so this time I wanted to do something a bit more substantial before posting again.

Flower shop

Here's a first draft decorated to about the same point as the café, again only on the front:



Facing sideways

This one was a bit tricky because if I just made it face the café head-on, its façade would be completely in the shade which didn't look very good, with all the shapes and details getting flattened, so I decided to turn it 45 degrees and have it be diagonal. We'll see how I can solve that with regards to the other buildings around it later, but it does make it more interesting!



Normal normals

The lighting had been a little broken for a while but I didn't fix it until now. When parts of a mesh were rotated in Blender, the facing direction of the triangles wasn't getting imported correctly into the game, making them respond incorrectly to light.

Normals before and after:



Render before and after (mostly visible on the gold disk on the bridge and in the alcoves on the towers):



Point lights on point

Back to harder point lights but with an artsier twist that fits better: same watercoloury gradient as the directional lights, and some wobble to make them not so perfectly round.

Through the steps to the final result on the right:



Shadows fixed

Shadows from trees actually show the rendered shape of the leaves now and not the underlying triangles.

Before and after:



This also goes for the ivy on the flower shop wall, which uses the same shader as the tree crowns, and shadows can now also be turned off entirely per object.

[vdapps]

Nice! From the last batch of screenshots, my most favorite is the first one, this lanterns are giving it so cozy feel.

[Alain]

I like the café and the updates on the lights!

[JobLeonard]

> Back to harder point lights but with an artsier twist that fits better: same watercoloury gradient as the directional lights, and some wobble to make them not so perfectly round.

If that wobble is animated it could actually look like the flickering of a candle!

[oahda]

Thanks, and happy new year!

I do indeed want to animate the wobble!

EDIT:

Enjoyed my time off for the holidays by taking a break also from this, but I got back to work yesterday, and also the game. Spent some of my lunch break time today fixing up some bugs and I think I'll keep ticking some long-standing issues off of my list there, so as that won't make for visually interesting updates, I'll just leave yesterday's work here for the time being.



In reality you generally get snow trodden down in the gaps between cobblestones even if people's feet are keeping the top of them clean, so I fixed that for the game. c:

[oahda]

40

Edge frame?

Been playing around with a small border around the sides of the window as if the picture was not fully painted to fill out the paper.



Maybe this is too intense, and posting this I'm noticing you can see repetition along the bottom, but I'll play around with it!

It's achieved using the same bleeding watercolour effect that I'm using for the lighting, which means this could be use to create some interesting transitions and effects:



I've been using Zelda-style black letterboxing when listening in on a conversation, but that doesn't quite suit this art style, so maybe I could do it like so now:



Of course conversations don't necessarily have to be visually differentiated from regular gameplay, but maybe this can work.

As a bonus, currently having some inspiring weather: