Update: Island, Scissoring Animation

Hey everyone,

hope you had a nice week!

Today some more technical stuff about the Island and one commission animation I am working on.

• I increased the size 4x! It is now roughly 3500x3500m = 12,25 square kilometers. That is pretty massive 😁 And it runs great so far on my laptop!

• I did a lot of research about nondestructive Terrain generation and figured out a way how to do mountains and still be able to paint/tweak the Terrain. You can see the splines on the screenshot. When I move them, the mountains are adjusted. And the base shape, the mountains, shore tweaks etc. are all on separate layers so I have maximum flexibility. So this is still in a blocking stage and might change, but probably not a lot. I do want 2 Mountain peaks, just the terrain around them might be tweaked a bit to adapt to the gameplay. But for now it´s good.

• There are 2 Mountain peaks and the highest peak is 1430m high! That´s one intense hike if you want to go up there! I really like the volumetric clouds and that the also cast shadows. Back in the days with Unity that was something I always wanted to have. Because on large Terrains, things quickly look repetitive. And with additional Shadows from the Clouds this is broken up and looks a lot better. Small things that make me smile, especially when I think back.

• The look from below is also pretty fantastic I think. Having mountains (and of course also enough flat spaces) definitely adds to the variety and appeal to the big picture. And it adds a lot of gameplay variety as well

• I also added a temporary fish particle system. The ocean felt too dead 😋

I have been working on a commission animation that I really like. The good thing now about me not stressing myself so much anymore I can enjoy the process a lot more again. Doing research, finding nice timing, adding extra nuances. I will finish it next week and then make a nice scene in Unreal and render it. And of course, it will be added to the next PoseViewer update as well 😊 

And as you can see in Maya it looks really ugly. Shading is bad, no lighting, etc. And then, with a lot of extra steps, the end-result looks nice. But it´s good that you also see how it looks while I am still animating it before it goes to the next steps.

That's another look with all the main controllers, not even the secondary ones. Controllers move the bones, the bones move the body-parts/skin.

The next couple of steps will be:

• Block out the layout of the Village with simple Boxes
• Creating some houses/shops/buildings for the Village once blocking is done
• Adding some roads and paths
• Creating a Terrain Material with rock, soil, gras, etc. so it's not just sand

Alright, that´s it for this update!

Have a great weekend 🥰

Best,
PM & Team