Long time no see!
Thought I'd just give an update for how things are going - for those people who aren't in the discord server or who don't follow my Twitter. I'm making this article public as I'd like to make this a devlog on Gamejolt, but would rather wait until more progress is made before doing so - to avoid those people sighing at the fact I'm remaking part of the game again.
The visuals of the game are being overhauled in Blender - switching from Source Filmmaker (abandonware running on an engine from 2007) to this instead. Blender, for those who don't know is gradually becoming an industry-standard animation, modelling, etc software. Its been used on things like Next Gen and probably a billion other things.
Cons to switching to Blender:
- having to re-animate and re-render everything
- having to make far more props and textures, etc
- slower render times
Benefits to switching to Blender:
- significantly easier to work with
- crashes much less
- easier to send files around for animators or modellers to assist
- can support much higher-quality models, textures, effects, etc
- supports fully-raytraced reflections, shadows, lighting, etc (path-tracing)
- no need to rely on people porting models to SFM for me
I have a handful of screenshots to show of progress so far, and currently I'm very close to finishing the props and lighting for the office and show stage (cams 1, 2 and 3). All props in these screenshots (aside from lockers, the fan, and the curtains) are made by yours-truely, which I'm quite proud of despite knowing very little about modelling. I also have a friend of mine: Gild-A who will be helping out with rendering and animation, since he has an RTX 3000 card and I have a mere 1060.
I also have another friend, NB65 (concept artist) who will be helping out with story and writing scripts, as its been a major mental roadblock for me.