I finally managed to get myself out of that “being afraid of something new” at least for a bit and managed to learn a bit about some of the assets I had bought to make my development easier/faster etc. and also some more stuff about rigging my critters.
So current status is, that I learned how to use Terrain Composer 2 well enough that implementing new trees, grass or in general landscape assets, won’t be that big of a hassle anymore. Practically now it’s just about making more assets that I can use to create the Biomes from 🙂 Which also means, that the next step for my assets will be, to figure out how much I want to be interactive like Berry Bushes and such and if I’m gonna completely discard unitys terrain trees and instead just use gameobjects all over the world with own LODs (my own trees i made, didn’t work well with unitys terrain trees option, not to mention that terrain trees don’t allow for scripts or usage of unitys LOD system, sadly)
Here some screenshot of the grasslands meadows with only 4! different grass types 🙂
then another thing that bothered me greatly, was that even though I had gotten “amplify shader editor” for myself, because writing shader code seemed like too much to learn, the shader editor isn’t necessarily that much easier when having very specific needs and not understanding enough about how shaders exactly work XD
So I had attempted it a few times, but never got any results that were even remotely what I wanted…but yesterday I managed to sit down and go through one task at a time, from just making a shader with any texture, then adding transparency through alpha, then adding 2 textures and combine their colors and alphas and then add a field for changing RGB values of each texture.
It took me a while to figure out that “add” and “multiply” just won’t work at all for the effect I wanted, which is to be able to layer multiple textures on top of each other while using alpha channel to as example have a base body color, with a rough fur pattern on top, with a detailed fur pattern on top of that and a face sheet on top of everything, so I can change textures from code and don’t need to make every possible texture combination as own texture XD. Also being able to change the color dynamically is very important for that idea I have about changing colors slightly with each new litter of cubs 🙂
The raw (prototype version) of it, looks like this XD
theoretically I can add as many textures as I want, so even things like eye color 🙂
Then I also continued working on the new Critters model and figured out how to do blendshapes in Blender and how to make IK rigs for easier animating. Ideally I would like to use blendshapes to change between body types, from cub to full grown, big eyes to smaller eyes, changes in body type through adaptations etc. As well as making some facial expressions, which I want to combine with some texture based expressions (I likely will keep their mouths 2D because it allows for more freedom in terms of comic like expressions 🙂 I hope it will go well with the new eyes and I will have to think of some solutions for comic like effect of eyes as well, but I just felt like having eyes with actual volume would just look a lot better.
I also would like to use root motion in unity (movement speed and direction controlled by animation movements) and IK in unity (got an asset for that) so that Critters stop feeling like balloons movement wise and actually start moving like they are interacting with the ground. Currently they are practically bouncy capsule colliders 🙂
Here some picture of the current rig, it’s still quite heavily WIP while I try to figure out how to use limits and such 😮
still lot’s to do…
fartoindie 