I have previously posted a sneak peek of the new boss that I have been working on, I have already written a long blog post about her on our devblog which can be seen here, but I thought I would just show some pictures of her character concept here as well.
The initial thought was that the first boss was supposed to be a lower ranked male general in Lord Valac's army but we wanted the prototype to show a greater range of what we had planned for the game and wanted to create a spell caster rather than another sword fighter. We decided that it was supposed to be a necromancer and sometime while drawing character thumbnails we decided to make it a female instead.
I had to rewrite the character story completely, but I think that Nihteana, which means "bird of the night" will be a much more interesting character than what we ad originally planned.
I am still working on her model, nut had to take a break from it as we decided to reprioritize and work together on finishing Tamarrion's updates and Lord Valac's new room. Instead of working on her I have been helping the environment artist out by painting textures and visual effect sprites. I did however find the time to finish her concept art, so here it is!
A few weeks ago we had a motion capture shoot, this was necessary as we are switching to PC controls and needed new animations for Tamarrion to fit the new movement system and to record animations for the new boss that I am working on.
We had some problems setting up and our first attempt failed as something went wrong with the files that did not know where to search for the markerset. For our second attempt we got some help and after some additional problems we did manage to get it up and running.
Last time that we had a shoot we had two male actors, it meant unfortunately that the run animation could not be used and had to be hand made. This time we knew that we needed a female actress and with no one else available to fill the part it had to be me dressing up in the silly suit and doing the acting.
There were some problems with that though, one being that I am not a professional actress or have any real knowledge of how to wield a sword, and, frankly, I am about as agile as a bathtub. But the biggest issue was that I was unable to see myself what we were recording. I am the one responsible for how the animations are supposed to look and the one who will be working with them later and not seeing what the takes looked like made that impossible for me to judge.
Instead I had to rely on my fellow artist, our hired in mocap operator and our designer, who all had opinions. The biggest problem with that was the people who have no experience in working with animations telling me to move my arms more, which meant that when I was working on the animations I had to reduce the arm movement significantly as it looked far too busy.
We did show the entire shoot on my art stream and had quite a few people watching and asking questions. This also means that the entire shoot is now available to be seen on my youtube channel, here is one part of it.
It was a three hour workout and I was quite sore the day after, but we did have a lot of fun. One thing that we could improve on is planning the animations better in advance. I got a tip recently of doing thumbnails for all our animations and I think that might help us knowing better how they should look and work. We did have a general idea of what we wanted but we could probably save us some time by doing this in the future.
Today was an exciting day for my fellow artist and I as we got invited to speak to the 2nd year art students as part of their 3D class. This is actually the first time that we have been on the "other side of the classroom" and actually speaking to others about what we do. Apart from presentations as part of our own courses which is far from the same.
We were asked to speak about what problems we have had while working on Tamarrion and why we decided to make the changes that we are working on right now. It was actually a valuable experience for us as it gave us an opportunity to reflect upon our own work and our process and really think about what we do well and where we can improve.
It felt a bit strange being the ones doing the lecture and we
were a bit unsure of exactly what to say as this was a whole new
situation for us. I do hope that the 2nd years felt like they got
something out of it though, I know that it is hard to learn from other's mistakes but at least it can feel better to know that others have been in their shoes and faced the same struggles.
Here is a picture of the new environment that I have been helping out painting textures for, in our next release you will be able to play in it. Sign up at tamarriongame.com for a chance to play it!
This week I started working on a new and updated version of Tamarrion's texture maps. I had to redo parts of them due to adjusting the model but we felt that we wanted to take the texturing to a new level and decided to redo them completely. What we want to achieve is higher quality textures that has a more hand painted look than I managed to achieve on the old ones. It is a challenge, trying to level up on my texturing skills, but we plan to paint more details and light into the diffuse maps to create the style we are going for.
Basically I want them to look more hand painted and have a higher level of detail and quality. It is still a work in progress but I have completed half and still have the armour to do.
I have been tweaking Tamarrion's rig to get better results when animating the shoulder, as an extension of the work that I have done with the edge flow. I am still unsure about the best way to place the rig, but I am hoping that I am better on the mark this time around. On the left side I have moved the shoulder and arm bones to where the actual bones should be. The reason for them being where they were was a process of trying to find what looked the least bad when animating the shoulder, as we had lots of problems. As mentioned before these problems were the result of a combination of the edge flow and the rig.
I have also started working on the skinning, I had to redo it completely although hoping to be able to copy at least parts but hopefully I have learned something along the way and achieved a better result this time. Again I am not one hundred percent sure of my abilities and the result. I guess we will have to see how it goes with the animations.
I'll end with some pics of the result when trying to copy the old skin layer to the new model, I hoped that at least the legs could be partly intact since they had not been touched, but here is what happened.
