Look Dev Update 2021 - Iron Brawlers
Much has happened since my latest update: summer break has come and gone, 2020 is in the past, and Flowerboi has some colour!
This post is a quick update on the current state of Iron Brawlers, showing some improvements to the visual style of Flowerboi who will now be called Sol.
We returned to classes this week feeling reinvigorated and ready to finish our game. Since my last post, I have made another pass on Sol’s animation set after seeing how the play out in Unity and in response to feedback.
This was Sol’s old running animation...
And here he is now!
Christa has really captured the essence of Dante's concepts. She did awesome work giving Sol a magnificent lock of...petals and the armour set looks great. Dante has done an amazing job texturing Sol. Texture detail has been kept simple to play nicely with our toon/cell-shader. This scene was captured directly from Maya using a simple 3-point light setup, but he looks even better in Unity with our cell-shader applied.
The changes I’ve made to his animation are subtle but have a big impact on how Sol moves in-game. The main issue with the old run was that his hips were rotated too far to camera. I have been doing this consciously to help our fighting characters read well with a side-on camera, but in this case it created the impression that he was running sideways. In the new animation, his torso and face are rotated to camera, but his feet and legs face the direction he is moving. It's still maybe a bit too slow, but we can always speed that up in Unity.
The other major addition is that Sol now has some expression! I created a series of blend shapes for his face and petals (hair) to accentuate the ferocity of his attacks...and his inevitable failings.
The changes I’ve made to his animation are subtle but have a big impact on how Sol moves in-game. The main issue with the old run was that his hips were rotated too far to camera. I have been doing this consciously to help our fighting characters read well with a side-on camera, but in this case it created the impression that he was running sideways. In the new animation, his torso and face are rotated to camera, but his feet and legs face the direction he is moving. It's still maybe a bit too slow, but we can always speed that up in Unity.
The other major addition is that Sol now has some expression! I created a series of blend shapes for his face and petals (hair) to accentuate the ferocity of his attacks...and his inevitable failings.
I'll go into further detail around Sol's blend shape rig in a later post.
We’ve got work to do so I’ll leave it there for now. Next time I hope to have some graphic design/marketing material to show off, and we might just have a new title for Iron Brawlers.