Early base pawn redesign with walk animation
Hey hey.
Let’s talk customization, and how we reached the above. To set expectations, visually the game was never aiming to be realistic. We’re already limiting face count to allow so many pawns to be active at once, and at the proposed sizes later (see weight table drawing above), that count will only increase.
And while bodily proportions will be… as close to realistic as they can be, any textures applied to the body mesh, buildings, and the environment will be vector-illustrated in style. As the mesh expands, we want methods to deal with artifacts/ stretched pixels appearing before they’re too apparent, and a vector art style diminshes this effect; this informed how the eyes were designed.
Let’s go over some features I’ve implemented, and others proposed for the future. Right now this version of the pawn exists in a separate project for organization, but I’m hoping to transfer them to the main project soon.
Eyes track a point of interest we can set in the environment. This includes their destination when working, other pawns, or you.
When it comes to importing your own custom character meshes and textures at its earliest stage, it’ll likely be a case of substitution; renaming your files to match mine. In the case of eyes, you’ll need a base texture for the eye, a texture for the iris and its pupil, and a mask. Readmes will be available explaining everything. In a more developed state, everything will be doable inside the game itself.
blend trees, so cool
It’s emphasised here to be obvious, but one thing I wanted to address was minimising clipping. That’s usually when an animation has parts of the body overlap and the arms pass through the thighs while walking for example. In the above clip, I can set a value to raise the pawn’s arms as they gain. I’m not sure if it’ll be necessary yet, as I only have this first stage keyed, but the hip bones are gradually widening at a lesser rate too.
The aim when transitioning to each stage will be to make it as seamless as possible. When it comes to texturing, I’m anticipating a single high quality image across all meshes should suffice. As I key, I’m ensuring all parts of the mesh remain relatively in the position where you’d expect them to be, to avoid any potential misalignments should a custom texture be used.
There’s the potential for other features, including;
- male deformation mesh (very likely, once this one is complete)
- extraneous bones (for things like hair/ accessories/ …other bones)
- the head actually turns instead of just the eyes (crazy insane)
My first attempt to implement jiggle physics was through the VRM tool in blender, and it came with a suite of emote sliders I’d like to reimplement later to make pawns more expressive.
I wanted to continue more on the mesh but I’ve missed working on the game itself. I created a recipe database and will be continuing implementing a cooking system for both foods and mats. Something I’ve never mentioned before is I’m designing with VR in mind, and while I’m yet to own an Index (heck m*ta/ fb), these cooking systems will heavily involve interactions possible both from a desktop and VR perspective. So long as I keep optimisation in mind, it should be achievable.
Actual development next time. Thanks for reading o/