New Character Pieces! (Patreon)

Whew! So I have finally gotten to the point where I can actually make new character pieces! Honestly, I think they look more organic and a lot nicer than the previous ones. Without having to edit out green screen effects, the lines and edges of the character pieces just look so much better and more crisp, not to mention a lot less monotonous and time-consuming to produce; also, the finer details are far more noticeable within each piece of clothing. Further, the new render engine is a lot better, plus I took some extra time to really finagle the lighting to a lot nicer as well. It can't be overstated how difficult it is to rig lighting to make both light-skinned and dark-skinned characters look decent!

I did not add any stylization to the new character pieces. Instead, if anyone wants to add their own filters to make the characters look more cartoonish, or pixelated, or painterly, or anything else, you can do so. Or you can leave them looking as they are!

These new character pieces now have just short of 2,500 frames of animation (!!!) 

After my previous update about the character pieces, many people sent requests and recommendations for additional types of animations to include, so I ended up spending close to two additional weeks adding the majority of those animations to what I already had. The end result is far, far more animations than ever before.

A few structural changes have been made to how the character pieces are organized. 

The first major change is that you will find all of the sprites on a single, large sprite sheet for each clothing item, each base, each hair, etc. - Before, they were broken into 4 smaller sheets. Similarly, all large portrait images are on a single sheet. I already have spoken with Martin about this and he is going to update his software to accommodate this change. You will ultimately be able to export whatever animations you wish with this software.

The second change is the folder structure. These new pieces go as follows:

Character Pieces > Male/Female > Base/Weapon/Top/Bottom/Hair/Etc > Theme/Pack_# > and then the files for the character piece.

So this small set of character pieces is thus:

Character Pieces > Male > Base (and Top, Bottom, Hair) > Apocalypse_1 > then files.

With future releases, you should be able to just merge the Character Pieces folders together and everything will sort itself into place.

Notes:

You will notice that right now there are no shadows attached to this character. Many requests have come to me asking for versions without the shadows, which makes sense if you want to add your own dynamic lights/shadows. So what I will do in the very near future is make a separate shadow that you can attach to the character spritesheet just like an article of clothing if you want to have a shadow. Otherwise, you can use dynamic lighting and shadows.

There are a LOT of animations and a LOT of animation frames. I am still in the process of documenting all of these, but in the near future I will also be releasing this documentation to everyone. The documentation will include the order of animations, the frame number of the animations, and even will tell you the intended use and play sequence of the animation. I will also see about making a big overlay like I did in the past as well.

There are now 16 large portrait graphics, each one is 2000x2000 pixels. Instead of doing separate paperdoll, bust, and face graphics, I opted to just do single large full-body images that can easily be resized and scaled down to fit your needs. You can also crop them to create busts or just face sets if you wish as well.

*This first release of character pieces is for all Patrons, at all tiers, so that you can see what sort of assets are being made. This release is pretty small, containing just a Base, Top, Bottom, and Hair for a male figure. Future releases will be at the usual tier level and the amount of items may vary. Weapons are forthcoming as well.

Any questions or concerns, please feel to leave them here or reach out to me on Discord! 

Thank you!