Over the last couple weeks I have been improving one of my creatures that I created. Both textures and animations. I would like to take a bit of time to look at how this creature evolved from its initial concept:

Initially we had a pretty simplistic chubby ghoul like thing... It was very rough around the edges, but the idea was there. The thoughts were: you know, chubby works but emaciated would be creepier and fur is in the concept so lets try that! The result:

We were getting closer to the concept but it still didn't look very scary or anywhere near real enough for what we were going for. So the decision was made to get rid of all the hair and revamp the texture maps one more time. We also decided to get rid of the mummy head look. In the meantime I had been studying how things were done from asset packs found on the Unity asset store and had learned some more tricks. I had also gotten a better handle on the style we were going for which was closer to realistic than I had initially thought. The result:

Now this guy has a lot of detail compared to the original maps. He looks grungier and there is a lot of wrinkle and vein action going on. Everyone agreed this would be our creature at this time. I did experiment with sculpting some to try and bring out some more subtle details but that did not go so well this time around. There was already a lot of detail there, and more just got lost amid all the other details.

The animations underwent similar changes. Gradually refining to what we were looking for. Through the evolution of this character I definitely learned a lot and improved many skills along the way. Unfortunately most of my time was devoted to one project here, but hopefully I can scrounge some for the other one very soon. See you next time, and hope you liked the creature talk post!

The new year so far

Alrighty, lots of stuff been getting done despite the holidays, though it is mostly filler items to make the scenes look less empty in the game. Stuff like beds, tvs, playground equipment. You kind of don't realize how many little things are around until you move in an environment that just doesn't have them. Here is a progress screenshot of those items:

Still a lot left, but it is a good start. We also have some help from the asset packs we purchased as well. Progress on the game itself is going pretty well, stuff coming together and the world slowly coming to life.

Switched over to my other project, it seems things have slowed down a lot over the holidays. People just up an vanishing for awhile hah. Still, I look forward to seeing more things get implemented there as well. After all the work last year both projects have a lot of the groundwork for a game already in place. My modelling skills have advanced to the point I am thinking about my own game again as well a bit. Just got to hit that coding wall at some point and just start doing things. In the meantime here is a sheep:

I look forward to doing another creature model this coming week along with some more filler.