Inner Circle Update for November 18 2017! (Patreon)

Hey guys!

After taking it slow for a couple days after the monthly update, I jumped back in and had a really productive week. I’ve got some goodies to show off, as well as some news about our plans for battle/portrait visuals in v0.06 and beyond. 

Police Overhaul

The big deal this week is that TK and I have pretty much knocked out the entirety of the police enemy overhaul for the new art style. As I mentioned in some of my comments on the monthly update thread, this guy will serve as our test enemy as we make adjustments to battle visuals for the new style.  You can check out the high res versions of the above images here: 

Police Full Body 

Police Close-Up 

This guy posed a few challenges, and may yet require some more work. We had created the original version of him at the end of last year, and at the time I was experimenting with the first iteration of the Genesis body system. I had originally intended to convert him over to Genesis 3, but at this point I’m not sure it’s necessary (I think he looks pretty good :D). That said, if we make the move over to Maya later we will probably need to convert him at that point, but even so it should only take a couple of days. 

The biggest issue we had with him was probably the helmet. It looked okay with our old style, but upon making physically based materials for it I realized how bad the geometry was. TK put probably three days into redoing the geometry topology, as well as improving the UVs and adding bevels for realistic corners. The result is pretty huge improvement! 

Another thing we’ve considered is dirtying him up to add to the realism. I really liked the look of the judges’ armor in the 2012 Dredd movie, so I was using that as a reference when discussing it with TK. He’s made a bunch of dirt and damage textures for the helmet and baton in Substance Designer, but I’ve yet to merge them into the existing textures. Not sure if we want to take the time to add it to the entire outfit, as it’d take us a couple of days. 

Assuming we don’t take on any of the above, the only thing left aside from some rigging issues with his pants is to create his “exposed” version. I should be able to use the new Genesis 3 genitalia I picked up for the Corruptor, so that should go smoothly.

Battle and Portrait Lighting

One of the major things that’s been bugging me recently is how we intend to make the character portraits and enemy sprites look good in battle. We learned when we had to create a new sprite lighting system for map sprites that the new art style demands that things be lit properly else they look completely out of the scene-- obviously not a good thing at all for pre-rendered graphics. Unfortunately, a system like our map sprite lighting system won’t work with portraits or enemy battle sprites; they’re just too detailed and faking it would look bad. 

Well, APL and I spent half a day discussing it and we’ve decided to pull the trigger on an idea of mine. The solution is very low tech, but will look great. Basically, we intend to expand the sprite versioning system we started using back in v0.03 (originally a system for making the map sprites fit with the color of the maps) to enemy battle sprites and character portraits. What this means is that for each different environment, there will be an appropriately lit version of necessary character portraits or enemy battle sprites.  I made a few basic examples just to give an idea of what I’m talking about (expect the actual ones to look uh, more artistic):

Shitty Character Portrait Lighting Examples (not actual in-game environments)

Shitty Enemy Battle Sprite Lighting Example 1

Shitty Enemy Battle Sprite Lighting Example 2

The good news about this method is that It won’t tax system resources in any way over what we already have… oooother than hard drive space, which it will consume a lot of. To counter this, we’ve decided to use a PNG compression plugin that we scoped out awhile back (I think I even showed some results from it).   The visual quality loss is really minimal (only really noticeable on smooth gradients), but the disk space savings are fantastic. Here’s a set of example images: Uncompressed, and Compressed. The compressed version is 70% smaller, and I personally can’t tell the difference without zooming in. Even with this however, I still think MATM will have the largest file size of any H game once it’s completed (potentially up to 15 GB). 

This does lead to some bad news, however at the same time it’s kind of a weight off my chest. We’ve basically been scrounging for resources to poooossibly, maaaybe one day be able to do animated portraits in battle. Given the above, I simply don’t think it’s realistic with a pre-rendered game of this size, so I’ve officially decided we won’t pursue that route. Honestly though, this is as much a production decision as it is a technical decision (we’d simply need more people to even consider pulling that off). Instead, we’ll use those resources to make what we’ve done all along look amazing.

Obviously, all these versions of portraits/sprites will require a lot of rendering. Luckily, that won’t really add a lot of work. Since we don’t have to post-process our renders anymore I can create a relatively simple lighting rig and rendering automation system and let it go to town. The downside (of course there has to be one), is that we really can’t do much post-processing if we need to since we’d have to do it like five or even ten or more times to fit with the various lighting situations. What’s that mean? Well, for one we can’t paint all our juicy liquids by hand, since fluids look way different under different lighting conditions. Therefore, I’ve tasked Ubercharge with developing our 3D liquid simulation system early so that we can use it for v0.06. Based on my previous experiments we decided Houdini is the program to use for that, and so for the past few days he’s been getting up to speed with it, and will hopefully have some good results to show us soon.

Malise Progress Update!

I started out my week investigating female genitalia :o. For Genesis 3 >_>. As it turns out, the best option out there right now is for Genesis 8 (the latest, but widely unsupported, version of Genesis). Luckily, I got in contact with the creator and learned that a conversion for Genesis 3 will be out by the end of the month. I decided to move on to pose conversion, since all of Malise’s old poses need to be converted to the new body. The good news is that I now have a working system for doing so, and have already completed half the steps for all of Malise’s poses. The bad news is the remaining steps require manual edits, but it’s probably for the best since I get to give all the poses a bit of attention and correct any weirdness.  From this example image you can see hair and facial expressions aren’t converted, but I at least was able to fix the issue with positioning shown here.

Last but not least, TK has been continuing his work on suit morphs for various stages of undress. I pulled him away from the final bit of work he has to help with the cop guy, but I’ve got a couple of work-in-progress images for you at least (excuse the graininess :D, I didn't think I'd be showing these off). One thing that’s great about Genesis 3 is that it has breast bones in the skeleton, meaning the clothes will follow breast movement. This allows me to shape the breasts with displacement mapping (shown in the above images), giving a soft-body squishy effect to them. I’ll likely do a set of polished renders for you once we have ‘em all good to go :D.