No moar tilz!

I've been steadily working on tiles for the current project.

They are kind of meh, but they will do for now. I still need a few more transitions and some cover tiles to give variety. But things are going good overall, which is surprising considering that I usually start to run out of steam when the day job starts.

I got enough tiles right now to at least make a few areas that I have in my mind, and I made a couple of low level enemies to start off with. (still have to animate and print frames)

Drew up a rough draft for what kind of functionality I want in this game, some of the stuff I already did in one incarnation or another, but some will probably take time to learn how to script.

Anyway, Nutaku announced that they will assimilate the previously dying Kimochi and use it as a service similar to steam. Even though I'm still ways off from having anything worth while, it still makes me happy to know that there is a real possibility this could end up being my next job!

A Tale of More Work-Work

So I'm on my final day of vacation and have to go back to grinding one of the most un-fun games of all time..... But in more fun news~

I'm essentially done (I know the pose is not overly intuitive). I still need a lot of polish and some of the finer details need to be worked on, but I can use this for now to make sprites for the PC.

Yesterday was a grind in learning a bunch of neat stuff about NPR rendering in Blender. I learned a fair bit about materials, textures and lighting. I'm pretty happy with the results and I'm getting closer to what I want.

Today I'm going to work on sprites and possibly some enemies.

I was going to give some short review/thoughts on the spring season of anime and a couple of games I played over my break, but I kind of want to get back to work so I'll leave this post short.

Positive News and Not so Positive News.

Hey all, I'm currently on my last week of “vacation” and thought it would be a good time to do an update.

I've been spending my vacation working on 3D art, tutorials and just fucking around. It's not been too bad in terms of productivity.

The last post I came up with a few ideas on what should be my next project to focus on, but I ended up re-evaluating my options and figured that it's probably best to pick a project that I can improve, learn and release updates over time. It's not that I can't do it with the list of other projects, but I felt that their initial design was more focused toward a single release.

So...

Meet my next character. She is a combat/alchemy focused mage. I'm still far from finished with this model, but progress has been steady since I actually have time. There are still a lot of environment props that I need to make and I've been learning many new methods along that way to make them look better and make them faster. I won't give too much detail on the game play side of things, as I'm working out the ideas in my head still. But I think I'm going to go for combat similar to action RPG's with charge gauges. And I want resource farming and crafting too!

In not so good news, Unity announced that it's hiking prices and moving more toward a subscription based model. It appears that those of us that dropped the dime to get a Unity 5 pro licence are going to get screwed..... I'm fairly disappointed with this move and was under the impression that I didn't have to pay anything more until Unity 6 was released. Raising prices is one thing. But now they are changing the rules of how they will distribute their engine.

I'm not sure how this is going to affect me, worse comes to worse I'll just stick with the outdated version of Unity 5 and look for another alternative. Quite a few people are recommending the Cryengine, and I'll probably take a look at it in the near future.

I'll probably make another review post once this anime season wraps up and hopefully I'll make more progress. But that's it for now.

How To Grow Your Own 3D Tree!~

Hi all.  I thought it be time to make an update.

Not too much has happened in terms of actually making progress on any project I have in my head, since last post.  I have been putting together some random models to be used as props, but most of my time has been invested in learning texture painting and UV's.

I put this tree together a while back.  It's kind of fucked it up in terms of poly count and takes a long time to render.  I tried to make something that I could use in a CG scene as well as a sprite but went overboard in modelling all the curves on each leaf and it lags the view port like a 5 ton anchor even with all sub surf mods turned off.

It did serve its purpose as a practice project though.  The leaves are actually texture painted and I did learn some tricks to cut down my render times as well as cutting seams and ways to hide them.

I still have some ways to go, but I feel like I'm making progress.



Anyway it's the end of the winter anime season.  Although I didn't really follow a lot of them due to time constraints, I'll summarize what I thought of the ones I did follow. 

Warning: may contain light spoilers for the winter 2015-16 anime season......



Boku Dake ga Inai Machi:

Fairly good supernatural crime drama.  The art style and characters are really down to earth and set the tone nicely.  The ending felt a little too fulfilling.  But enjoyed it overall.  


Hai to Gensou no Grimgar:

Now this is how you do an anime based on a sandbox MMO!  The story is about a group of people that suddenly find themselves in a middle earth themed MMO world.  They don't remember the original world they came from, other than some some terms and objects they vaguely recall.

This story has to be one of the most hardcore life/death portrayals I've seen to date, even SAO doesn't hold a candle to it.  The battles draw you in with their gruesome “realism” as each monster fights to the end for their very life.

It's a little slow at times, but picks up later.  I kind of like the slower pace as it really makes you feel the social vibe of a sandbox MMORPG.

The water colour backgrounds really help this story feel immersive too.  


Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo:

A comedy about a NEET that dies in a ridiculous way and gets reborn in a world that is structured like a sandbox MMORPG.

I won't go into details, but it's really funny and well worth the watch.  Thankfully a 2nd season has been confirmed sometime in the future.


Musaigen no Phantom World:

A supernatural harem themed anime in a setting where phantoms actually exist.  A group of students fight and seal phantoms as part of their job.

It was alright overall.


Saijaku no Bahamut:

Very similar in mecha design concept to Infinite Stratus.  The prince (main protag) is surrounded by a harem, with a nice selection of arch types.  He is your cookie cutter girly man protag.

Followed this one mainly because of character design and fan service.  Didn't offer much of anything else -_-


And that is it for anime. 

In other news, I have decided to use Blogger again as a mirror blog.  I figured that I've grieved the past issue long enough, and staying with just one blog is cutting off potential posters that may prefer Googles streamlined interface.  Not to mention, there is really very little extra work to keeping another blog going. 


That's all for now.