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BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG
Our Secret Visible Enchancment
Hey of us!
Welcome to the primary BattleJuice Alchemist devlog of 2024, the place we spill some beans on how we spiced up our headless lorekeeper, Dullahan. This one’s for the tech nerds, however I promise it is cool even in the event you’re not into the nitty-gritty stuff.
So, Dullahan is that this mysterious outdated, headless girl who lives amongst her scrolls and ravens within the supernatural realm surrounding us, the Crossroads. Our artist, Patrick, had this concept to take it up a notch technically. Dullahan ought to have a flowing cape and candles on her again.
Normally, we use solely a single texture, which determines the colours for a personality. In trendy video games, a 3D asset often has a number of textures: There’s something known as PBR (Bodily Based mostly Rendering), the place you add textures offering the data on how bumpy or reflective a floor is. We do not use PBR as a result of our recreation is all about that hyper-stylization. However Patrick got here to me with this plan – add a second texture file that shops completely different data.
The brand new file tells the engine how wind ought to mess with Dullahan’s cape and the way a lot the candle’s flames ought to glow.
Wind Results (Blue Channel): Dullahan’s cape is swaying within the wind, regardless that our animations are so simple as it will get and the cape shouldn’t be animated. It simply strikes, the place we paint blue into the brand new texture. That is the magic of the feel’s blue channel proper there.
Glow (Pink Channel): Dullahan’s candles now glow. There isn’t any particle system, only a easy aircraft for the flame as a part of the 3D mannequin. It strikes, due to the blue channel and because of the pink channel, we will crank up the glow depth in particular spots. With our post-processing utilized, Dullahan appears to be like like this:
We will even broaden on the system by making use of the at present empty inexperienced channel and the alpha channel of our new texture afterward.
“Why secondary movement?” it’s possible you’ll ask. Our animations are intentionally easy, however throwing in some secondary movement is like including a sprinkle of magic. It is the explanation puppets like these in Sesame Avenue usually have fur – further movement that makes the character extra energetic and doesn’t have to be animated manually.
Patrick’s thought turned out to be nice, and I’m glad he nagged me to implement it. Try Dullahan inside the sport:
As we preserve pushing what we will do with such a small group, these tech tweaks assist us preserve issues trendy but immersive. We’re stoked about how Dullahan turned out, and we hope you agree.
Stick round for extra behind-the-scenes shenanigans and thanks for studying!
Alain
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