Hamar Hills Teaser Trailer

   
    Short teaser trailer for my new game "Hamar Hills" - Coming Soon. More updates to follow later on. Enjoy! Vvrroooooooom!!!!!

Making progress....

Today I started working on the first level for the next game. This time around, I really want to focus on texture and graphic quality as well as level design.

Dev screens bam!

Oh baby! Those textures!

Look at the lighting son! nice!

Snowconesolid Productions!!!

Character design changes:

Also, from the above screenshots, you might have noticed something different about my 

"Ponytail character" Hmmm what could it be what could it be....

Thats right! he now has a super cool hat!

I thought something was missing from the original model so I went back, modeled this hat and re-did his texture. I decided that he will be some kind of mail man character.

This hat though! It really perfected my character! Look at all these hats! Looooook!

I loved the new hat I created for the character however, I was dissatisfied with the new color scheme I came up for him. Soooo... I decided to go back to his original pink texture that I created. I felt this pink texture made him more unique and comedic and cartoony. I adjusted the new hat to match his clothes and boom!

He is now a very cool looking character model. Especially with the hat that has my "Snowconesolid Productions" mascot on it. A 3d character wearing snowconesolid merch yo!

Back to level design:

I really want to structure the levels properly this time and am focusing on a more modular level design workflow. 

Here is the first "non-development" screenshot from the first level, which is essentially just a quick short tutorial/getting started/intro to the game before the actual game starts.

This first level is like a little easter egg cave essentially. I really like how it turned out and can't wait to make more progress so I can eventually show more progress. 

More updates soon! 

Cookin Games Episode 3 is out

Here is that new video update I promised. :)

Making of "PonyTail"

Here is a quick breakdown of how I created the Ponytail character that you see above.

First, I started out with a quick character concept sketch that I drew on paper. As you can see, the character I originally had in mind was more of this older cartoony vampire type character. The end results was a completely different character. 

I started off by poly modeling the entire character from a cube. Everything from the head to nose was poly modeled by hand. I did not do any dynamic sculpting (dynamic topology) or retopolgy at all for this character model. However, I did use sculpting tools such as the grab, smooth and inflate brushes to adjust the vertices I already had on this model. 

After modeling the main body, I then modeled the features that give the character a unique look. Small detail stuff like hairstyle and type of eyebrows, adjusting certain aspects like how wide is the character and so on. Originally, I tried to go for a bald top - crazy hair coming out of the sides hair style, very similar to my concept sketch. I did not like the way it looked. It was messy so I scrapped it. I then decided to just model a simple ponytail type hairstyle as you can see in the next two images. After giving him a ponytail hairstyle, I decided to just name the character "Ponytail"

The modeling was done at this point.

I laid down some simple base colors for the character. Not final color scheme. Just preparing early for texturing later on.

For the eyes, I was originally planning on just texture painting them onto the mesh. However, I later decided to actually model in the eyes and make it part of the mesh's geometry. This was a much better result. 

Next came the texturing process. I started marking seams on the model and unwrapping the parts. I then organized them on a 2048x2048 texture map.

Still on the texturing process. I baked out an AO map and a diffuse map and used those to create one texture map for the character model. I then hand painted extra details such as the eyes, added fabric detail to the clothing pieces, fixed the messy parts of the texture map (such as artifacts from the ao bake or seam lines that showed) and played around with the color schemes a bit. 

Next came the rigging which is actually a very quick and easy task to do if you are using Blender3d as your 3d modeling program. Using Blender's rigify add-on, I quickly rigged my humanoid character model. While the rigify add-on does save a lot of time on the rigging process, it is not perfect. So I had to go back, adjust some weight paints and clean up a little bit so that the mesh properly deforms and is animation ready. 

At this point the 3d creation and rigging side of things from Blender3d is complete. Finally I exported the model as a .fbx and the .png texture map to the Unity game engine. I created a small working prototype demo and set up a third person controller so that the character can actually move and be in action. 

And that is the whole character creation process for "Ponytail".  I would say this character model probably took around 4-5 hours to create from start to finish. There is still a lot more work to be done in the unity engine. This is just one of the many things that goes into game creation. It's a very time consuming process and takes a lot of patience and work. But it sure is a lot of fun and seeing the end results of your hard work is a great feeling.