Sophie’s Screenshot Saturday #2

Posted: August 20, 2021 | Author: Sophie | Filed under: Patreon |Leave a comment »

Hey so it’s been another week of work on my RPG project! The first big news is I grabbed a subscription for the Substance Suite, thanks to a few new patrons I was able to justify this pretty easily, and so making detailed and interesting materials is SO much easier now! I think even in this week’s screenshots you can already see how much of a quality bump things like this can give!

Being able to make quality stuff like this *quickly* is going to make a HUGE difference especially with a project that could become so big and require a lot of assets! I think this is a perfect example of how much your support helps me so THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! <3

There are a few other tools/systems/packs etc that I have my eye on and may grab in the coming weeks/months but we’ll see! I’m not going to go on a spending spree getting cool stuff I only *think* I might need and then find out I can’t get the stuff I *do* need.

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Anyway, this week has mostly been about working on my blender-to-unity pipeline and all the key stuff there is DONE! I can render a scene in blender, import it to unity, I have a script to set up the cameras to match, shaders to draw everything, I know the settings for rendering reflection probes in blender and having them match in unity… it’s all there!

Well, I say *all* there, I still have to work out some tech (eg; reflections) but that is the kind of thing I can work on once things are actually underway.

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As part of making 3D renders with fancy materials this week, I did a good amount of FREAKING THE HELL OUT.

Seeing high quality details and such was really intimidating – can I make good-enough realtime models that don’t look out of place? Can I make HUNDREDS of them for all the NPCs and monsters???? It’s terrifying to think about!

But as the week went on I started to chill a bit, if things become a problem, I can solve them. Otherwise I’m just gonna have confidence in myself because I am awesome 💪 (I hope)

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Anyway here is the note-dump from the week, (as an FYI I’ve started moving my notes to a workflowy list here. This way they are more organised, and collected in one place rather than a series of posts);

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A legendary fisher character!

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Learn new input system!

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Learn new animation system!

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Start thinking about what challenge/conflict can bring a party together, develop relationships, and be cool as fuck to fight

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What if reincarnation is real in some form,  it it’s understanding is suppressed, and exploited by the powerful for their own benefit?

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What if there are lots of hidden underground caves/temples that are like other worlds?

What if these are gateways to other worlds? What if a character was taken from one and is looking for the right gateway to get back home?

I like the idea that each world has some great power that can be bestowed upon a character, party members can each claim one of these powers?

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Tools/tech to look into:

• substance suite
• Uv pack master
• TexTools blender
• Decal machine
• Extreme PBR for blender
• Retopoflow? (2.8 remedying good enough maybe?)
• Speed sculpt?
• Edge flow
• Box cutter
• Mesh machine

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A cat person with a catapult!

Wait, isn’t that a dark cloud character?

Yup 100% it is. Tbh tho that’s just proof it’s a good idea.

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Figure out a way to refract through a pre-rendered foreground element like a magnifying glass?

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For battle scenes, maybe just… bake all the channels? I dunno maybe full PBR stuff is easier and better looking but single unlit texture materials will load WAY faster and be kinder on mobile? But maybe it will be negligible compared to pre-rendered textures anyway…

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Experiment with blender compositor! It could be cool to get an NPR effect but even if sticking with realistic BGs, colour adjustments and such are important! (If making look-up tables, those should be able to be used in unity, right?)

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Keep this link handy! https://rsci.app.link/IntBAke0L3?_p=c71d29c59b1c66f2eb038cf4

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“Bellows” could be a cool name for someone?

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If I did paintovers of renders, it could really fix the “rigid” realistic look and make something more stylistic characters could exist in, but it more than doubles the environment work for each shot…

Perhaps with the right shaders and compositing I can achieve the same goal?

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Think about using detail contrast in shots – limiting areas with lots of texture detail to make them stand out in a composition rather than having high detail textures everywhere making for busy images

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Maybe just ditch the principled shader and try others for more stylistic effects?

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Accessibility:

• make sure all dialogue and menu selections are output to text files that can be read
• Full UI scaling
• Be able to skip/auto-win battles
• Mode where all interactive things & entrances/exits at a location are listed, described, and selectable through a menu – the character can then run to each and interact as needed
  • Don’t forget descriptions of scenes and key events!
  • These can appear in the stage manager system but are passed over when the mode is disabled
• Make a Sinput-style wrapper for the new input system if necessary. Rebinding is a MUST.

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Making monsters, things to incorporate/experiment with:

• insects!
• Mix animals
• Classic cryptic but DON’T USE THEM IN CLASSIC WAYS/APPEARANCES
• Eachies!
• Tizzy-whizzies!
• Think about locations
• Evolution
• What kind of fear/dread or other feelings it should evoke

Locations:

• think about what locations inspired by forms of random things might look like? A city with architecture like a keyboard? Like a hairbrush? Like a ladder?
• Think about all the places there could be
  • Underwater
  • Seaside
  • Built into a cliff
  • In mountains
  • Underground
  • In the sky
  • On a bridge
  • In space
  • In unreal places like dreams, memories, ideas
• Think about age
  • Ancient (ruined? Preserved? Updated constantly over the ages?)
  • Decrepid
  • New
  • Under construction
  • Abandoned
• Think about how a place gets used, what for, by who, why, where is it relative to other places? Does it hold a value in culture.
• Time of day
• Weather

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New input system is gonna need some WORK, I might have to make Sinput2 whilst putting this game together?

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Reflection probe setup:

• camera, facing -y in blender
• Panoramic, equirectangular
• Cube texture shape, lat-long (cylinder) mapping in unity

Transparent occluded setup:

• project UVs from camera
• PrerenderedBGtransparent shader, transparent queue

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RESIDENT EVIL HD USED PRE-RENDERED DEPTH MASKS!!?!!

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Could divide screen into tiles, each one being a depth mask. By having tiles offset in the scene and of varying depth, could get around the bit-depth depth mask issue and pre-render a whole shot’s depth some? Would still have granularity issues *within* tiles covering large depth changes tho…

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Party member who turns out to be a (not obvious) bad guy, they become a serious opponent, genuinely believing that they are making the right choices and doing good but eventually reach a point where they *are* aware they are wrong but can’t admit it. They could become a serious endgame threat, fuelled by anger at their wrongness and utter denial of it, they lose all ability to see sense.

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Evading a global manhunt?

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Super duper gay boys rescuing each other

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That’s it for now! For the next week I’m probably going to do most of my work lying down listening to music because for one, my back is fuuuuuucked up rn, for two, I need to just brainstorm a whole bunch more story stuff, but also how I’ll approach the next few systems. Pre-rendered third person stuff is easy enough because I know how it’s going to be for this game, other systems though I don’t have a CLUE yet, and I can’t make them until I know what they want to be.

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