The final dev update of the year! What a crazy year it's been when it comes to Project Vault. Taken so many steps to building it up to a more playable version that I can really get in folks hands! Wanted to spend the last month splurging a bit just for me, so I spent the majority of it doing a lot of cleanup on Bod's model! This includes a full texture rework to be more in line with the hand painted PS2 era vibe I'm going for in the game! Overall been super stoked with the current efforts on it :D!
Now time for the updates!
Bod Model: First and foremost came a lot of cleanup on Bod's model! I gave the whole model a full mesh cleanup to help reduce the overall face count while also giving some areas a bit more detail. Likewise I got Bod's tail actually added to the backside so that it looks more natural!
Bod Textures: The texture rework was a significant effort this month! Originally when I had done the last round of placeholder textures, I had been working with 2k and 4k sizes for Bod. After a lot of heavy research and a lot of fine tuning, I was able to resize all of Bod's textures into sub 512 resolutions to better fit the PS2 era graphics I'm looking for! This has been such a treat to work through, I'm starting to really love getting to play with lower res textures :D!
Glow Effects: one of the other major updates Bod's textures got was a glow effect! I've been planning for ages to get this working with Bod's suit, so all the texture updates were a great chance to finally spend some time on this! My current method of adding glow to the seams on the suit works by doing a selective transition between a lit area and the original textures via an alpha lerp on the textures. It's got enough freedom that I can do color shifts, speed changes for the flicker, and more :3! I've already gotten some aspects of it working with things like Bod's ledge hang!
Rigging updates: Got a few big tweaks in for Bod's overall rig. First and foremost were some supporting bones on the hips and shoulder blades to help with mesh deformations! These were surprisingly easy to add on and made a significant difference on how Bod looks through a lot movements!
Harness Progress: With the overall mesh in a place that I think works for the games overall look, it means I can finally start working on some of the other parts of Bod's kit! First and foremost being Bod's harness! Over the course of the game, Bod will be getting harness and armor upgrades to layer upon the suit. Been blocking in and cleaning up a handful of them before weight painting them to move with Bod. Got a handful that are done, but there is more than enough for me to keep working on! So expect more updates on this over time!
Morph target Updates: With all of the mesh and rigging updates, I needed to cleanup and redo some of the shape keys/morph targets on Bod's mesh. This includes the hip changes that come with the inventory, in addition to the extra thicc and belly versions haha. All of those are now in the game and ready to go :3!!
With that we can close out the year! Going to be moving on to some other updates this next month, starting with some actual damage reactions from Bod! Going to get his shields working and get some of the enemy AI working with some attacks so that they can be an actual threat to Bod X3!