Progress Report 7/7/2023 (Patreon)

Hello again, everyone! Here's what I got done this week:

3D modeling:

• Cleaned up the top of the model's hair so it looks... less bad
• Unwrapped the hair UVs and adjusted them to make the shine effect consistent
• Added a "front fade" effect to the hair shader

Run From Me:

• Made all pop-up menus close when an area outside of the menu is clicked
• Gave the pop-up menus in the customizer a high z index so they're always in front of everything else (namely the stars and grid selection sprites)
• Animated the giantess's feet!
• Created and implemented sprites for the breasts: flat, tiny, small, medium, and large
• Created sprites for the fingernails and toenails: natural, oval, french tips, mountain peak, and stiletto
• Created sprites for shiny and wet

Let's start with the 3D hair shader!

Getting this to work was no easy feat. I had to UV unwrap every single chunk of hair, flatten it out into a uniform rectangle (which was thankfully made very easy and quick with the help of some of Blender's built-in tools), and then move the UV segments up and down to make sure they lined up from the important angles. I even did all of this a second time after fixing the top of the hair; it had some funky stuff going on, namely hair strands twisting at the top and creating ugliness.

And it was all totally worth it!! I mean, come on! That looks incredible! It reacts to lighting and everything!

There was one things I wanted to add to it, however. Something to give it that touch of Miles that it was missing. In a lot of anime drawings, you'll notice that the hair highlight kinda thins out in the front, especially in my own drawings. I wanted to somewhat replicate that here, with the highlight fading away as it approached the camera-facing angles of the hair. I call this "front fading".

The Lightning Boy Studio tutorial I was following didn't cover this. In fact, I was basically on my own, here; it's difficult finding a tutorial on how to make a shader that does *exactly* what you want it to do. Instead, you have to dig around and find pieces of shaders that may add up to what you want.

And after a lot of trial and error...

We have our Miles touch! It's a fairly subtle effect, but it give the hair a bit more dynamicism! It also makes it look less greasy than it did before, oddly enough.

I went ahead and applied the same shader to the tail, although that's a little less effective than the head hair. I may remove the shader from the tail depending on how it looks with movement.

Ugh, I can't wait to animate her! It's gonna be so much fun!

Right, time to switch gears. Let's talk Run From Me! I've been looking forward to this part!

The feet have an animation now!!

It's a bit hard to tell, admittedly, but the feet have three frames of animation to them. I've gotta say, it's really tricky animating things from a top-down perspective! It's not something you can find a lot of references for, and when you do, you realize there's not a lot of movement happening from this angle. @_@

Something that very much helps is the changing size of the feet. That's not part of the animation, per se, but something I programmed in after the fact. It makes it much more clear when the foot is lifted and when it's on the ground, which is very important to communicate here. Eventually we'll have screen shake and probably ground cracks to indicate this even better.

And now, without further ado... Ladies and gentlemen, I finally got to make some sprites for the customizer!

Breasts have been fully implemented, and the nails, wet, and shiny sprites are right around the corner!

It's gonna be a bit of a slow process at first as I get a handle on the workflow of adding sprites. One big thing I've been trying to figure out is whether or not to use sprite sheets. I was initially going to use them for just about everything, but... long story short, updating the dimensions of a sprite sheet to add more to it tends to break things.

That combined with naming conventions, folder locations, file space efficiency, and a bunch of logistical shenanigans are gonna slow me down until I've developed a pattern to follow.

For example, right now I'm trying to figure out how to add the nails into the game. I have five nail colors, so I can't just have all the nails on a single sprite. I could add color-linked nails (like the thumb nails and big toe nails) as one sprite, but that would lead to a LOT of empty space between them; moving them closer together would mean they're not where they're supposed to be on the giantess. The solution I've come up with -- for now, at least -- is to make each nail its own sprite, but mark certain nails (like the thumb nails and big toe nails) in the same group for coloring. That way, there's minimal empty space in the sprites taking up file space AND the nails can be colored properly!

It's... a process.

I'm gonna need some brain food for this. Fortunately, nothing gets my brain going like some good ol' Taco Bell! I'm gonna keep knocking these bullet points out one by one. In the meantime, you stay awesome! I'll see you guys again next week!