Making the First Character for my Game | Devlog

hello and welcome to the game i'm making called legend 64. it's a nintendo 64 style adventure game set inside a sprawling castle where you'll encounter spirits and other strange creatures in this devlog i'll introduce you to the game's first official character the vampire s one of the castle's unnatural denizens whom you'll encounter throughout the course of the game i'll be going over how i created her in just a moment but first i have an announcement [Music] that's right i'm officially switching over to blender i've seen so many cool videos over the past year showing off all the awesome capabilities blender has to offer that i finally decided it was time to try it out for myself i found a nice image of a bass mesh created by aaron friede walker and i use this as reference for the basis of the character [Music] [Music] whenever i create low poly models i actually like to start with a high detailed mesh first and work my way down doing it this way i find it a lot easier to create more organic shapes than i would if i was just using blocky low poly geometry [Music] i really don't consider myself to be a character designer so i made sure to gather as much reference as i could and i also made several mood boards to help me hone in on the look that i was going for to help with the design i had some rules in the back of my mind when i was creating character i knew i wasn't going to achieve every one of these and i'm still not quite happy with the final design but because i'm not working from a concept having some guidelines did actually help with the design of the character the textures for the character were created on a 256x256 texture atlas that means i have 16 64x64 texture slots available to use they can be further divided into four 32 by 32 pixel slots or smaller if needed in my previous videos you may have noticed i was using a much larger atlas for the characters i realized now that this would needlessly over complicate things especially when it comes to character facial animations so instead i've decided to reduce the size and give each character their own dedicated atlas initially i started creating the textures in paint and then taking them into photoshop to add additional details but i actually discovered blender has its own texture painting feature built directly into the software so you don't need to go back and forth between image editors to create textures i actually didn't end up using it that much for this model but i can definitely see it's going to be a huge time saver in the future to start with i try to keep the textures quite simple so i have some different color swatches that i applied to the mesh through uv mapping i'm trying to adhere to the texture limitations of the n64 as much as possible so i've ended up flipping some of the textures to make them appear larger than they actually are i've done this on the chest and i'm also going to apply this same technique to the dress here the dress is going to deform quite a lot when i come to animate the character so it's important that the uv map is actually set up correctly so it doesn't stretch the texture too much this actually took several revisions to get correct for the majority of the textures it really does come down to how they're uv mapped i continued to make revisions to the character until it started to get closer to the design i had in mind i also considered giving the character's outfit a more japanese vibe but to be honest i kind of like the victorian-esque look i had going on so i'm sticking with that for now let me know what you think in the comments the eyes took the longest to create as i was trying to convey a very ambiguous expression with them the expression could be read as a condescending stare or a come hither look when everything was said and done the model ended up being exactly 900 tries which is a lot cheaper than my previous character models albeit still slightly too high for what would be on the n64 perhaps i could get rid of some of the leg geo as it's hidden by the dress but for now i'm going to keep it as is one of the best things about blender are all the awesome built-in plugins you can enable and this might just be my favorite it's called rigofy it took me a while resting but i finally got around to it when i think back to how long this took me to do in 3ds max it actually makes me sick with just a few clicks in blender and some tweaking of the skeleton you can set up a really good rig pretty damn quick having done this before in max and maya i really appreciate how easy it is to flip your bones in blender you don't need to rename them or do anything funky with the coordinates you just add a mirror modifier and you can flip your bones awesome i align my skeleton to the mesh as best as possible and then i added automatic weight paints and this actually did the trick pretty well and i was surprised how accurate the weight paints were applied i still had to do some tweaking but overall i was really impressed with how easy this was if you're unfamiliar with weight painting basically what it is is how much influence a bone has over the vertices of your mesh overall the automatic weight paints actually did the job really well but there were some instances where the vertices just didn't look quite right and i'd have to use something called shape keys to fix this manually i would also use shape keys on the dress as well as this was quite problematic area especially when it came to clipping through the legs the head was super easy to set up as it's a separate part of the model and it can be animated independently from the body it's only influenced by the head bone so it's pretty easy to stop the other bones from interfering with the animation once the task of weight painting is done i can move on to posing the character and creating some animations [Music] here's the walk cycle i've created it's a little janky but it's good enough for now notice how the dress is deforming to the legs as the character moves this was done for using shape keys that i mentioned earlier observe what happens when i turn them off [Music] despite getting the dress to follow the movements of the legs pretty closely there's still instances where the leg is clipping through the dress using the shape keys i can edit the dress to any shape that i want depending on the needs of the animation you can set the shape keys up so that they activate automatically but in this case i chose to do it manually so i'd have more control over how the dress would move as the character walks with the character modelled and the rig ready to go i decided to create a static idle animation before finally bringing her into unreal engine [Music] exporting the model out of blender and bringing it into unreal engine was a bit of a pain but once she was in it was so satisfying to finally see my first character in the game as soon as unreal engine loaded on my slow laptop that is with the finishing touches i created a blink cycle to give the character some more life it's animated for a flipbook node and i can control the speed and the rate of the blink by adjusting a few parameters as i mentioned already i chose to use the smaller texture atlas because i thought this would make animating the characters facial changes a lot easier as you can see here there are several different attributes that i can edit to choose the character's eye expression the facial expression and the blink rate what you can see here is a side-eyed glance which i have swapped out for the standard front stair by inputting a texture coordinate value i can select any face of the atlas that i want i only have two expressions now but i'll add more as the game progresses my plan is to set this up using a blueprint so that the character's facial expression can change depending on certain conditions the mouth is set up in the exact same way as the eyes so i have several slots i can use to change the mouth expression if i need to and that about covers the character setup if you want more information on the tutorials i followed to create the character i'll leave them in the video description below thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed it i'd like to express my gratitude to all of my patrons for their continued support and an extra special thank you to these 64-bit legends lrc napkin grayson mario tavalieri jumbledor [Music] tyler hughes oliver honliken yaya danbus mason stuxbury blake porter and aaron young go check out his youtube [Music] you

Channel: Legend 64

Views: 171,040

Keywords: devlog, vampire, vampiress, character, blender, game

Id: 3KGtT6Z9wdI

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021