Don't Byte the Hand That Modeled Ya

Last week I listed off a lot of stuff that needed to be done in order to finish the combat code. How much of it did I get done? Not much. What I did get done is probably only impressive to me, because I know what a hang up I have had in the past with this. For years I have worked jobs that closely resemble that of a graphics artist with very little art skill. Growing up I was always told I had a lot of potential, but I never practiced my art into a reality. I have been in game competitions before and artwork is always a big point looser for me. In fact, this is the one area that has intimidated me about this project from the word go, and I knew if anything was going to bring it to its knees begging for me not to pull the plug it was going to be the character artwork. This week that fear had a big byte :-) taken out of it.

While no one is going to be asking me to paint their chapel ceiling anytime soon I have personally been impressed with what a few months of practice and determination can produce. I have read books, done tutorials, practiced free drawing, and looked at numerous gallery's online. What made things start to click was the realization of tendencies, and some anatomy lessons, mostly bone and muscle structures. I was blown away at how much this helped even for drawing cartoon-ish characters. The more I practiced, the more I began to see perspectives and dimensions.

This week became the week to jump. I got out the calculator and took inventory of just how many frames of animation I was going to have to draw for this project per character. The results were horrifying. For a main character, it was going to take 270+ frames of animation to do it like I wanted. While a pro artist may be laughing at me right now, that's a lot for me, and beyond the scope of my time table. It was time for a plan B, and I just happened to have it installed (on 5 different operating systems no less ).

Blender, the 3d tool for those who can't afford a 3d tool. First off, I have had some modeling experience with blender. I have basically used it a poor mans CAD for quite a while. My most recent project was designing my kids a tree house. Second off, don't let its price tag fool you, Blender is plenty powerful. There are more tools in this application than I will ever use, and many more that I thought I would never use until this week.

Now armed with a plan B, I knew I had a lot learn. I started with what I knew to do. I drew out some 2d figures for the characters, loaded the textures, and modeled it up. Now I have done this time and time again, and always threw away the result. This time it was different. Practice had taught me to see the dimensions, and very quickly the character took shape. Luckily, I only need a 128 x 128 rendering, so detail is vague.

Next I took off on a tutorial hunt and came up with enough to get me going on animation. I started out with envelopes and made a lot of the animations. While it worked, the deforms were sloppy, and 128 x 128 even showed it. So I took off on another tutorial hunt which landed me on weight painting. The results were much better, and I was able to see places in my current animations that needed clean up. Blender is truly an exceptional tool, and was well worth the time to learn. Hopefully by next week I will have some fully rendered NPC's to show off. This week I just threw up a quick animation from my character template model.

Other than that not much else was done. I cleaned up the combat system and balanced melee out a bit. There is still more to do with melee combat, but I really need these animations I am working on right now to polish it up. I could try and work around it some more, but that usually causes more work in the long run. I can already see where I am going to have to go back and change some animation code, but that's just how it goes.