I was trying to tweak lighting and lightmap resolution today in a bulk action operation I accidentally removed all the collision bounds i set up so i basically spent the morning redoing it for all the WFC tile set. Not super fun but since i’ve been doing so much back and forth with those meshes I’ve gotten to be a lot faster.
After lunch I was looking to how to orientate the player character so that when she is spawn she will be looking at a wall. I had an idea of using boolean of the wang tile set to create surfaces that would then be able to isolate the directions that are not attached to the wall. After a few trial and error I managed to map normal directions as I wanted.
Only until later when i re-instantiate the HDA, do i realise the blueprint does not respect that normal information. I am not quite sure if it’s something I did wrong on my end or is this not supported by the HDA engine yet to translate blueprint rotation from normal.
Anyways so I took a little break from it, and after a walk around my neighbourhood I decided to make some npc to put into the scene. I knew I wanted to make a few of aliens and fun abstractly shaped aliens who are pompously looking at art. I didn’t want to make it labourious process to make them so I can focus on dressing them up.
So i did what I usually do when i’m lazy, I made a standard dummy fbx to rig in mixamo. Bring the skeleton back and auto weight a bunch of differently shaped characters onto it. I figured out a few small quick hack. this time I wanted to make the characters more gradient based so even if the actual character design is mostly a mash up of basic shapes they still look interesting. So I created a few strips of gradient texture and try to map the UVs to it that looks visually pleasing.
I also figured out a fast new way to morph the eyes to the shape of the head since I wanted the character design to have a strong silhouette with different body shapes. I previously mostly used the shrinkwrap deformer but this time I just made a fast simple deform to speed things up and change the proportion of the eyes until it looked good.
so basically on the art side it’s all about being lazy.
Tomorrow I think i will make another 3 characters then try to put them into the engine