This will be a short update because I haven't done much this week (it's the holidays!). However, I've been working on and off on Cliffs icons/portraits and character model.
After a lot of trial and error, I've finally figured out my proper modeling pipeline (up to this point, at least). He's still a little funny looking, but with clothes, hair, and some lovingly painted details, I think he'll be very presentable. He wont be able to open his mouth or blink, which is a shame but saves time on animations and puts more focus on the icon/portraits for expressions, letting the model just be blank-faced. Hopefully, I can reuse this base model on other characters like Lang and Naomi.
Finally, expressions! You may notice theres two almost identical sets of eyes here, and thats because I still can't decide which looks better. The innocent, wider top eyes or the narrower, sharper bottom eyes. Perhaps they can both be of use to mark a subtle difference in feeling. The final portraits are comprised of a backing image, which is just an expressionless Cliff, then a rectangle-shaped Mouth sprite and Eye sprite, so that these can be switched out and replaced at will. That way, Cliffs mouth can chatter away while reading dilaogue without the whole image having to be alternated. It also means sets of eyes and mouths can be mixed and matched, meaning less original drawings have to be made for there to be lots of expression possibilities. The shading style, I admit, is over-complicated and tedious to replicate over and over, but I think it needs to be that way to render the characters "aliveness". (The red lines behind him are just the sketch layer showing through, but I kindof like it... it gives him a cool glow...) Ingame, the background behind him will be transparent, and the sprite may peek a bit over the top edge of the dialogue box to make the UI a little more dynamic than just straight boxes.
Thats all for today! My goals for the next coming week are to finish Cliffs model (with or without texturing) and map out the environment for the Hospital scene, perhaps even starting to properly assemble the set. Auf Wiedersehen!~
- Monkeydog
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