S̸̗͊h̶͉͋e̴̾ͅ ̷͇͋ḧ̵̻a̶̡̋s̸̙̀ ̸̧̋n̷̙̆o̸̞̒t̴͖̕i̶̗̍c̵̏ͅè̶̜d̵̹̾ ̴̥͗y̸̰̋o̷̰͝ȕ̵͚.̶̯̀
sketch and doodle
It’s essentially done! I might fiddle with it a bit more, and I’m not sure I’m entirely happy with the face, but it is ready for animation testing now, and I managed to squeeze 100% out of my 400 triangle budget(!).
Speaking of the face: The second gif shows something really interesting, which I learned from reading an article by one of the Crash Bandicoot devs. I have made the pupils two small triangles, and because they are separate polygons, the rendering will always prioritize them (at any resolution). This means that even if you view the character from far away, at a really low resolution, the pupils will still be represented by a couple of pixels. Had they been drawn onto a texture, the character would have big empty eyes if viewed at a distance. It’s a subtle thing, but it really helps a lot! (Here, however, the eyeball polygons are so close to the face that the engine doesn’t quite know which to render at a distance, causing flickering. I’ll have to work on balancing that out.)
It also means that I can animate them any way I want, of course. The eyebrows are also just a triangle each, which should allow for some nice emoting. The eyeballs are textures slapped onto two separate faces, so that they too can be squeezed and moved about. One final touch is that the eyeballs are placed against the face polygons at a slight angle, which means that I can rotate them by tiny fractions to change the angle of the cutoff at the bottom. This will allow for ex. sad, angry and skeptical expressions when used together with the eyebrows.
If I were to extend my triangle budget slightly, it would be to add a bottom part of the beak, to be able to animate talking. Then again, who doesn’t love a silent protagonist?
Update: Got a lot of feedback from people who doesn’t like the face :(
Uptdate 2: Tried vertex painting this fellow.
Update 3: Fixed the head and facial features.
Update 4: Made a flying pose. It took a while without bones, so vertex-animating this is going to be quite a challenge… (but still easier than 2D animation!)
I was intending to wait with posting more until I had some in-game footage to show you, but although we have stuff moving around in the Unity engine now it still looks pretty horrid.
Soon, though - SOON
Here are some of the animations I’ve done today, stringed together to better see how they blend into one another. Some of them ended up a little silly:
marmaladedoodles