Developer Log

DL28. I love blocking in levels with basic tilesets. Environment Art pre-production is over, and I'm going into full real-time development with Unity 3d. I have a fairly decent grasp on Blender as a 3d generalist, which has been a challenge after decades with 3dsmax and Maya. From hard-surface modeling, to characters, to lighting and FX, Blender has a decent toolset. I've been getting some light scripting experience in Unity 3d and I believe I have the art pipeline down. . I'm keeping level size reasonable. Unity lightmap baking times for test levels is killing my old i7-7700K. There are five citadels in Eterna, each with three levels. This one will feature commoner architecture.

DL24. Add-Ons. A recent Asset Store purchase, I can highly recommend a little gem called Assets Library Builder. Effective asset management is key if you are running a small project (or hell, a big one). Grab it here: https://blendermarket.com/products/assets-library-builder

DL21. The Azhem are a species of metallic guardians. They are ancient beings often kept as familiars by the Aegis Mages. They can be found in the wild, but often guard Aegis residences along the coasts. Fiercely loyal and extremely tough, they have made meals of many an intruder.

DL17. Interior rendered in dimetric projection, including color tweaks and cleanup. All that is left for this environment is re-rendering and breaking it up for sorting layers. Post that, I'll drop it into Unity for QA. Next up? Four sets of generic furniture for the commoners. After that we start looking at modeling an interior for the next group on our list. Each group will have it's own culture and architecture. Homes will also vary a bit in different biomes.

DL7. Character animation testing begins with a COM archer (shortbow), and yeah, I am pretty rusty at rigging and animation. I've never done any real bipedal animation in Blender, and I am a long way from 3dsmax and Maya. Still, mad shout-out to Artell, the dev of the Blender Add-On (can we all please just say plugin?) Auto-Rig Pro.

DL6. Character sculpting. Getting back into character sculpting is well...going to take some time. This is my first attempt at a Mudbox character sculpt in over 10 years. I'm keeping game-size sculpts to under 5M polygons in Mudbox, as the included image is larger than the characters will appear. There is no point doing a 25M polygon sculpt when the characters are so small. It's better to focus on large-shape details. The first of a ton of characters, so hopefully my sculpt quality will improve.

DL6: Giving Blender Cycles renderer an emission spin. Emissive materials have always been visually striking but have almost become as ubiquitous as the ancient lens flare effect. I’ve thrown a bit of it around this environment but am not sold on the results. Still chewing.