While I’m posting Dark Souls fan art, I did this piece for a Polycount.com competition, last year. Had a lot of fun with it, though I had to compromise my design due to time slipping away.
Looking at it agian, my Dark Souls 2 character, Rabbit, pretty much has the same look as my Dark Souls 1 character, Mouse. What can I say, love that dingy set.
Here’s a link to the real time 3d model of the final product;
Drew up my character from Dark Souls 2, Rabbit. I just got a hold of Photoshop CC, so I wanted to try out the tools for a bit and ended up with this. As a result, I feel it is over worked considering how simple I was aiming for.
Other nit-picks is the arm holding the sword feels awkward. Also the general weight the stance is lacking.
Regardless, I had fun drawing it and I’m pretty happy with it. Ended up posting it up on Threepanelsoul.com as a temp image since the comic is kind of on hold for the week.
Fifth anniversary! This year’s gift to my wife is our Animal Crossing avatars. AC came out right before our first born’s arrival and it really helped us…
Anonymous asked:
pixosprout answered:
Hi anon,
Hmmm… for someone who’s starting out, a good way to learn low poly modeling is by studying the wireframes of existing 3D models. Some things to take note of while checking them out:
A good source for 3D model reference is the Polycount forums. The low poly thread over here is the best place to start.
Have fun! =)
More tips from other peeps (thanks!):
Also, polycount wiki and tags like “lowpoly” on pinterest are probably some of the best resources, but proper and efficient edgeflow is muscle memory and it comes with practice.
Extended version of this week’s comic. Jo and Tank face off against ‘Totally Not Kalameet’.
A while back, Tevis Thompson wrote an excellent essay on saving the Zelda series from the mess its become. One of the things he cited as hope for it all was Demon’s Souls. And I couldn’t agree more, but after playing Dark Souls 2 I fear that the Souls series is headed toward the same cliff that...
There’s a lot of fair point presented in this crit. The one that really stands out to me is the frequency the designers chose ‘Hard’ over 'Interesting’.
I have been doing a lot of PvP in Dark Souls 2 and it seems to be generating a lot of mail over PSN. Since I don’t have a keyboard for my PS3 I thought I’d answer a few of them here:
"Nice rollin a$$hole"
Thank you. I chose to roll around you because you were carrying a very big sword and I’m...
We’re happy to present a preview of our upcoming update, v0.3.0, aka The Indigo Quarry Update. We hope to have this update available in early April. While we would have liked to deliver it sooner, things like growing Monomi Park as a company, hiring new people, looking for a real office, etc. have slowed us down. But we truly appreciate your patience!
The Indigo Quarry is all that remains of a now defunct mining operation on the Far, Far Range. It earns its name from the deep purples that striate its winding cliffs and caverns.
Rad slimes are in abundance in in the quarry, appreciating the veggies like oca oca that grow in its mineral-rich soils. They’re easy to spot at night.
Experienced ranchers know to always watch their back while exploring the quarry, as unlike the Moss Blanket, its littered with steep cliffs that could send you straight into the slime sea if caught off guard by a boom slime.
And like anywhere on the Far, Far Range, the tarr are an ever-looming menace for the unprepared. Always carry a full tank of water!
Speaking of water, if you find yourself needing to relax, a little dip in the hot springs could be just the thing! You’ll also note that the shy little puddle slimes have received a makeover. Their puddly-ness has increased by at least 152%.
These pink rock largos have asked me to point out that ‘splish-splashin in the water is not just for puddle slimes.’
The hub of the quarry is a kinda-spooky cave. At least this pink slime thinks so.
But the little guy should know there’s always light at the end of the tunnel. Speaking of tunnels, the quarry has an awful lot of them.
That covers some of the new frontier in v0.3.0, so how about some of the new art tech?
What the heck is that? Can it be that all digital displays now have a super-cool led shader that can actually show the pixels as you zoom way in? We must have hired a wizard recently.
The effect is… mesmerizing. What was I talking about again?
Oh right, I was talking about a new game mode!
Thank you all who participated in some of our recent community challenges. Your feedback has lead to one of them has being formalized into a new game mode, the Five Day Rush! You could call this an experiment. This new mode could be expanded upon with additional features if we see that the community enjoys it.
That about covers our preview for v0.3.0, aka The Indigo Quarry Update. As mentioned previously we’re trying to get this into your hands in early April. We’re working really hard on it and hope you all enjoy it very much.
Oh, and before I forget, there’s something else coming with this update, but you’ll have to guess what it is…
Thanks again to everyone who’s playing and supporting Slime Rancher. You’re the best.
-Nick
I’m Ian, and I’ve taken the task of leading the art on Slime Rancher. Today I’d like to share a bit about shaders for you to enjoy. Particularly, the water shaders I’ve built for this game.
Now first, I got to say, shaders can get super complicated. Polygon count is no longer the main bottleneck for computers these days, but instead complicated shaders tend to be the big choke. With that in mind you have to be careful with your shader budget. However, shaders are also super rewarding to work on! A simple change can have dramatic effects on your final result and seeing those happen in real time is very satisfying.
So let’s take a look at the shader for Slime Rancher’s ocean.
Whoa. Like I said, shaders can get super complicated. I use Shader Forge from the Unity asset store to do all my shader work. I can’t recommend it enough!
Slime Rancher is also not a realistically rendered game, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want my materials to seem REAL. I want them to feel like actual substances but still evoke the game’s illustrative/painty style.
The ocean is a very important character in Slime Rancher as it takes up a very large portion of the screen real estate. Thus it gets a pretty large budget! Let’s break it down a bit so you can see what’s going on.
First we need to get the waves flowing right. By blending a few distorted perlin noise maps and panning them in a defined direction, I end up with an undulating grey scale map.
The black parts will be the lowest portions of my waves while the whites will be the highest. I take this map, multiply it by a max wave height value, and also the normal direction of the ocean mesh. The results are that the vertices bob up and down!
(Checkerboard just to illustrate the mesh distortion)
Using this same map, I lerp between a flat surface and some scrolling normal map textures. So the black becomes smooth, and the white/high parts of the wave become rough.
And that’s all we need for the surface detail of the ocean. Let’s move on to the color!
First, to get the color right, we need depth data. This is very important for the look of the water and is the corner stone of almost every further step in the ocean’s final look.
The scene depth is a node that produces a grey-scale image where everything white is really close to the mesh’s surface while everything far away is black. I’ve used a remap node to clamp past a certain distance to black. Anything past this point, is not really a concern to the shader, but adjusting it’s value can produce varying degrees of water clearness.
You should note that the vertex offsetting from earlier is effecting the depth testing. This is good! It’ll help with making the water distort in a pleasing way.
Now before we use this depth information, we need to take a snap shot of what’s behind the mesh.
The scene color node gives us the exact color information of the pixels below the mesh and using that, we can layer it upon itself. By offsetting these layers in cardinal directions we can produce a very fast and cheap blur effect.
By multiplying the offset value for the blur with the depth map information, we can make the pixels near the surface of the water not as blurry as those in the deeper parts. Swank!
Combine the offset further with the normal data we created earlier…
…and we get fake refraction! Now we’re getting some watery-looking water!
At this point, the color data is combined again with the depth data, but instead it’s multiplied with a deep blue.
The deepest parts of the water burn into the abyss as the red values from the color data are removed. The result is a color elimination as we want to simulate the red portion of light to get absorbed by the depths of the water.
We also take the depth data, reverse it, and multiply it by a fresnel ramp to get the color values of the deep portions of the water.
This will be the light from the sky bouncing off the water’s surface.
When you ADD theses last two steps together, you get…
Great! We have our diffuse value!
Let’s take the depth data again and find the edges of the water. This is done by remaping the 0 to 1 data from the depths to a fraction of it’s range. This should leave with only the tippy-top of the depth data.
Multiply our new edge data by the normal noise blue value and we get some nice edge foam. Helps make the transition from the water to ground pleasing. As a note, I’ve posterized the result to get a crisp, cartoon style to the foam.
Almost done!
We need some fake light refraction on the surface of the objects just below the water. A texture is projected on to the objects below using the depth data converted from world transform to local.
The results are a scrolling texture of water ripples. Speaking of ripples, I’ve offseted the UVs of the texture by the normal map again to give it a distortion.
Now we need to combine this with the depth data again. But this time, we’re not looking for the edges, we want the surfaces away from the edge. So we remap to the bottom of the scale.
I, of course, clamped the max depth a bit so that only surfaces near the water’s top have the light refraction. With this, and a reflection probe, we have our emissive map!
Combine it all together with a bit of specular and you have very pleasing, dynamic water!
Now the level designer can just move objects around to their heart’s content all while having very clean results.
Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoyed this look in to a bit of what’s going on behind the scenes of Slime Rancher!
-IAN
While testing an area of the Indigo Quarry today I caught a nice little poolside scene with some slimes beating the heat. Seems chicken was on the menu too.
-Nick
I spent the last few days rebuilding water shaders. Loving the results.
atelierjordan
Hi friends! If you’re into my stuff then it’d be super cool and nice if you could support me via Ko-fi! I’d appreciate it a lot, and it’d be a real big motivation to keep putting more models out there. I don’t really drink much coffee, but I do like hot chocolate and strawberry & cream coolers.
Thank you!~
