Progress Update #55 (Patreon)

Finally, the bear fight is finished! Oh my god, that took way too long...

I don't remember if I mentioned in the previous update, but the second part of the scene takes place at night, and I had to make some extra assets and adjust all the materials on the scene. That's the big disadvantage of using this PSX plugin, the light support is very basic, like for example, I can't change the color or the intensity of the main light source. That means my only two options are either deleting the light and having a flat, dark and boring scene or manually adjusting all the materials on the scene to have a dark blueish hue, which is what I did. At least I can create multiple point lights and change their color, but unfortunately these lights can't cast shadows, and I have to turn their intensity way up, because I lowered the brightness of all the materials in the environment, and some of the characters ended up getting super overexposed when they are close to the light source. Celestia is so white, she basically turns into a light bulb.

By the way, this is the whole vibe of the scene. Luna getting her ass kicked while Celestia is just chilling in the back and cheering them on. And speaking of Luna, here's the "Battle Damage" version:

When I finished this model, I thought: "maybe that's a little bit too much blood", but it ended up working really well on the scene. The fact that the environment is dark, the camera is not always close and the resolution is super low, it just helps to exaggerate the details on the model to make the visuals more clear.
I was also worried about modifying the mesh of the model, because I didn't want to re-skin everything again. But I was able to achieve this look by just editing the textures, which was a big time saver! Or so I thought... Turns out the PSX plugin doesn't play very well with transparency. The alpha map of the coat casts this "invisible polygon shield", that is only active at certain angles of the camera and only affects some of the objects. So I have to switch to Unity's legacy diffuse shader to display the transparency correctly, but the lighting behaves differently on this material, it's not double sided and I lose the warping effect of the PSX plugin. So I have to switch back between the two shaders depending on what is happening in the shot:

The whole thing is a mess! But it worked out in the end, and now that the bear fight is done, this is what's left:

I talked about it before, It's a very basic scene, it's already animated in maya, I just gotta finish some stuff in the environment and record it in Unity. I'll update you guys as soon as that's done.