Upgrades and Updates! (Patreon)

Hello everyone! 

Some might have noticed a drop in new content release lately - My apologies, but the reason is a good one!

I've been spending all of my time over the past month+ researching, upgrading, and improving almost all parts of my workflow to improve quality as well as improve the speed in which I can create new content (and greatly reducing the amount of tedious work involved).

Some people might already know of some of these upgrades due to Discord (for anyone who wants to join in, you can do so here: https://discord.gg/J9aYZPt)

New Render Engine

The first and most immediately noticeable upgrade is that I upgraded my render engine. As you can see from the sample images, the results are pretty stark, with lighting, textures, shaders, etc all looking much more smooth and crisp.

The above sci-fi image is an example of how some of the much older assets look like in the new render engine (for those of you familiar with the PVGames Sci-Fi pack of years ago).

This new render engine doesn't work only for tiles. It also is a marked improvement for character sprites and character portraits.

The remaining task is to tweak my lighting rig so that it works a bit better more universally across many different kinds of textures and colors. It's a difficult balance because sometimes what works for dark textures will completely wash out light textures, and what works for light textures might turn dark textures completely black and lose all detail. I think I am pretty close to where I want it - the four above figures were all done with the same lighting rig which I think struck a decent balance between being able to see the details of the dark items and not washing out the light bits. I still want to play around with the lighting, create a better rim-light (for back highlights), etc.

New Character Pieces

This upgrade to my workflow is the most exciting to me... and probably only me because everyone else simply always got to enjoy the end product and didn't have to deal with the work to get to there.

Creating character pieces has always been an absolute tedious chore. It involved creating a green-screen type effect where I set up the character and then superimpose the clothing pieces on top of the green character. I would then render all the frames and portraits and whatever else out and then put the sprite sheets and portraits together. Then I had to manually remove all of the green bits. This was the super tedious part, and often left behind some residual green artifacts where the skin and clothing or hair met. 

Some people might recall that this process is one of the main reasons I stopped doing character pieces originally before starting this Patreon, and then revised how I did character pieces. I ended up reducing the number of individual pieces per outfit to whole outfits in order to cut down on the amount of tedious work. But ultimately even that wasn't quite enough.

But after additional research and experimenting, I finally got a process that I can use with the new render engine that allows me to create the character pieces without the need for a greenscreen effect at all, and virtually no manual work except minor cleanup and tweaks that everything needs post-render.

Here is a very crude early look at it (pay no attention to the pose or shape of the character, this was whipped up super fast for demonstrative purposes only):

The new process adds some shadows over transparency already (to properly add shadows where they should be on whatever figure is superimposed beneath), which I still need to tweak and work on because they are not all that great at the moment, but this whole process is super close to being finalized. Once it's done, I can start making new character pieces with much less tedious manual work, and they look better than ever.

I am still trying to strike a balance between number of poses/animations and quality of those poses and animations, as well as the quantity of frames. It is super easy to try and jam every single possible action animation that can be thought of, but the number of frames very quickly balloons out of control.

So I am also revising the list of animations that custom character pieces will have. There will still be walking, running, multiple idles, and other core/staple actions. I am mostly going to reduce the number of niche/mostly unused or underutilized animations.

 I do want to be able to have nice animations for all forms of combat actions, both idles and attacks, and in certain cases multiple variations of them (such as 1-H attacks, for swinging or thrusting). 

This list below is the tentative revised list of animations, which is still missing some potential variant animations that would be tacked on at the end later. The numbers next to the name of the animation indicate the total number of frames for the animation (all animations are in 8 directions, and most animations have 5 frames of animation). As of right now, this is a comparable number of animation frames as to what has been produced so far.

• Walk – 64
• Run – 64
• Dead/Down - 32
• Idle – 40
• Idle – 40
• Idle – 40
• Interact – 40
• Use Item – 40
• Sitting – 40
• Idle 1-H – 40
• Idle Dualwield - 40
• Idle Bow – 40
• Idle Unarmed - 40
• Idle 2-H – 40
• Idle Polearm – 40
• Idle Pistol - 40
• Idle Rifle – 40
• Idle MachineGun - 40
• Idle Xbow – 40
• Attack 1-H Slash – 40
• Attack Dualwield - 40
• Attack Bow – 40
• Attack Unarmed – 40
• Attack 2-H – 40
• Attack Polearm – 40
• Attack Pistol – 40
• Attack Rifle – 40
• Attack MachineGun – 40
• Attack XBow – 40
• Castling Idle – 40
• Casting – 40
• Block Unarmed – 40
• Block Shield – 40
• Evade – 40
• Get Hit – 40
• Critical Idle – 40
• Critical Idle – 40
• Jump – 40
• Climb - 40
• ???

Thankfully, because of the animations I had been creating for the pre-made characters, a number of these animations are already done. Others will still need to be made, but a good portion of the work is finished for many of these animations. It's mostly just a matter of organizing it all and figuring out what, if any, extra animations should be added.

Many New Assets

While I have been upgrading relentlessly for over a month, I have also been gathering tons of new models and resources that I can use to create new assets for you. I've grabbed up about 2 TB of new models, clothing options, hair, tiles, textures, weapons, etc. I still have about 200GB worth to download from my efforts, but this has more than doubled my resource library I can draw from. 

The older render engine I was using could not use any of the types of models I have purchased. The new render engine however can use most (if not all) of the old models that the previous render engine could use. So I can take old items and make them anew (like the sci-fi example up above), and produce tons of new content that hasn't been seen before. 

Templating and the Return of the Other Perspective

Over the past year or so, I have created the 2.5D assets. Many people found them to be good-looking but could be rather frustrating to actually implement in their games. At times, I have seen people express that they would prefer the more isometric perspective of the older assets (pre-2.5D assets) instead of the military projection of the 2.5D assets.

So the new assets that are to be produced with the new render engine will be more akin to the familiar isometric of the older assets (even though they will look a million times nicer). 

One minor drawback is that lego-esque tiles will not be produced at the moment, but instead interiors will be created via templates that I am currently putting together. What this means is that you will have a large number of pre-made but empty rooms that all you need to do is decorate as you wish.

The templates I am currently working on will be for a host of very generic styled rooms, ranging from square and rectangle, to hallways and circular or multi-angled rooms. Each of these will be in diagonal and orthogonal directions, like older assets.

Ultimately, this will make it a lot easier to build interior maps, but it does reduce the potential for certain customization - it's a trade off. But, on the plus side, it is much easier to create interiors that match certain looks and themes, or even just to make them look like they actually belong to a particular exterior building. Another added benefit is that the interiors are vastly more detailed and smooth.

On top of the generic templates, there will be special rooms/templates to go with certain building exteriors as well, especially for rooms that would be otherwise nearly impossible to make with generic templates or even tilesets.

In anticipation of the question "will old assets be useable with these new assets?" - Some will, some won't. With the perspective change back, it's minor, but it means that the 2.5D building items specifically will not work super well with the new assets. Many items such as decorative bits will work. Ground textures and decals will work perfectly fine (I even use them in some of the sample images). So a lot of the older assets WILL work with the new stuff, but not absolutely everything will. Characters and monsters will work just fine as well (though there may or may not be some scale issues, minor adjustments may need to be made).

Closing Words

So, that is what I have been up to for the past month+; I do apologize for not getting more resources out the door for you, but once I delve into a particular task, I have to just dig into it. I think my efforts have born a lot of fruit; fruit which will be passed on to you in the near future. These upgrades are by far the largest ones I have ever made in my entire history of creating assets.

With the new render engine, I am not going to start again immediately at producing Fantasy resources (which is what I have done every time after making upgrades). Instead, I am going to stick to my plan of moving forward with more modern items for a bit and then later loop back around for fantasy. I am looking forward to doing something other than fantasy in the immediate future and hopefully you will enjoy all of those assets as well. But make no mistake, I will produce new fantasy items as well! 

I hope everyone is doing well and I thank you for your patience! I will leave a few last sample images I whipped up quickly: