Swamp area wips (Patreon)

Quick reminder: payments are set to resume the beginning of December.

And it's been close to 30 days that the build has been out which means 1.14.8 open to all patrons!  

Worked a bit on the swamp town block out.  Pretty much everything is still placeholder but I'm trying a few new things here.  The biggest is splitting the trees into multiple meshes.  The trunks are completely separate from the canopy meshes in this shot.  That way I have a lot more control over things like the angle, scale, or rotation of the tree trunks without the canopy being at a funky angle.  It also allows me to plan for where the canopy shadows will fall so I can highlight specific areas of the scene and play a bit more with composition stuff.   

Started roughing out the anatomy for the frog dudes.  He's still pretty rough but I think the general shapes are all there.  Threw a quick skeleton in him to test the neck rig.  I was worried that he'd look silly during animations without a neck but the results have been promising.  The only major issue so far has been if he tucks his chin in and tries to look down.  When that happens his entire chin just sort of disappears into him.  I'll keep messing with it and see if I can figure something out.  But does he really need to be able to look down at his toes?

Lastly I was chipping away at the conversion stuff with UE5.  The bad news first, it broke all of the door objects and I'll need to redo those, and the save system is going to be even more broken for a bit after this transition.  The good news is that the updates are making it a bunch easier to work on the landscape and it looks like in UE 5.1 they've made it so that foliage and landscape meshes are supported by the new Nanite system.  This should mean better overall lighting and more geometry and meshes in the scenes.