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[JobLeonard]

> No love for the original birdoids?

More like "that's so long ago it slipped my mind"

> As a tiny update, I now control the properties with visible handles:

Really cool! Although I think the waistline should be renamed "love handle" :p

[RealScaniX]

That's some crazy character designer. Can't say that I have seen a similar thing before. :D
The updates look cool. It's always systems like the dialogue system etc. that feel the most rewarding for coders like us.

[Alain]

It's really cool to see you play around with the blenshapes! I did something similar for an animated short and had handles for mixing different facially expressed emotions. Did you think about having character's faces individualized in such a way?

[Schrompf]

This workflow looks amazing. I need to remember those words for when I ever get to that point in dev

[oahda]

Thanks! No lovely handles I'm afraid, but there are indeed face ones Here are some variations:



Don't think I'll go as extreme as the top-right one but thought it would be better to make the settings go too far than not enough.

Shape keys for the static structure, but textures and bones for animations, set up as in this slightly scary pic:



With bones posed:



Figured this should be enough, with the rosy cheeks as an extra way to express emotion.

[Alain]

That's really cool, thanks for sharing the facial expressions

[oahda]

That's really cool, thanks for sharing the facial expressions

53

Accessories

Enjoy some immensely weird-looking gear!



Don't worry, this is not art for the game, just something to test the workflow with…

Mixing and matching

After getting the base model working okay it was time to put some hair and clothes on. Again the goal was a non-destructive way of doing it with minimal manual work, sticking to the now established "character customiser" and being able to swap and share outfits between characters.

Loose parts

Each accessory is its own model. Clothes are made by duplicating the base mesh, removing the unneeded parts. This way they have the same vertex groups and will change with the position of the driver bones so that clothes can fit any character:



As you can see the clothes also pose with the skeleton. Hair or a hat is just attached to the head bone.

Hidden parts

The drivers in Blender continue to be great since they can control almost any property, such as the "mask" modifier that allows me to hide vertices belonging to a particular group, so I made ones for parts to hide and tied them to bone positions:



This way clipping can be avoided while at the same time removing body geometry that won't ever be seen on a particular character depending on their getup.

[RealScaniX]

That looks great. Are you planning to design some configurations for heads, upper bodies, lower bodies, etc. and then procedurally generate the people? Or are you designing them all by hand? Sorry, if you already answered this. Xd
 
This is also the typical tool that will cost you a lot of time, because you just can't stop playing with it. :D

[JobLeonard]

I'm a bit confused: are these beards or shadows? 

[oahda]

That looks great. Are you planning to design some configurations for heads, upper bodies, lower bodies, etc. and then procedurally generate the people? Or are you designing them all by hand? Sorry, if you already answered this. Xd

Thanks! Hand-crafted for now, some sketches here. There may or may not be more random "extras" in the background, not sure what to do about that yet, but for the time being every character has something to do written into the script and at least some personal details that you can collect so I'm designing them too to make them recognisable

This is also the typical tool that will cost you a lot of time, because you just can't stop playing with it. :D

Possibly!

I'm a bit confused: are these beards or shadows? 

Shadows, no textures yet

[Alain]

Your framework for making your NPC is getting more and more intricate, so cool!

[oldblood]

This is very cool Prinsessa! And a lot more detailed than I was expecting. While I'm still going to miss the capsule-people, this is quite impressive.

[oahda]

Thanks, you two c:

Kept going with the clothes, should've probably waited to make the post till I had something more like this.



Experimenting with an idea I've had forever of faking wind by vertex painting looseness onto cloth and moving the points in shader. It's all a little wonky at the moment but fun to try.

Also noticed I had subdivision and armature modifiers in the wrong order in Blender so I wasn't getting the same results in engine (testing in Unity here) and I'm going to have to redo some of the weight painting and perhaps a bit of the topology as well, wrists bend weirdly now for instance

[baftis]

OK, those NPC sliders are seriously cool. Is this that is only for yourself as the dev or would this functionality be in the actual game??

[JobLeonard]

They look so blissfully happy in that last gif. Can I call them Buddha?

[InfiniteStateMachine]

Looking awesome!

Did you have much trouble with dealing with blender armatures? I had trouble 10+ years ago but it's probably a thing of the past.

[Alain]

Experimenting with an idea I've had forever of faking wind by vertex painting looseness onto cloth and moving the points in shader. It's all a little wonky at the moment but fun to try.

That is awesome! I am using a similar thing (a "looseness" texture) on my plants, where the stems have to move less than the leaves. I recently thought I could use the same code for hair and cloth and seeing this in your devlog makes me want to try it out right away!

[oldblood]

Wow. That looks really good!

[JeremyNunns]

Posting to follow as this looks absolutely amazing.

[Armorman]

I love videogames.