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Weekly Update - MEN

2 years ago735 words

MEN AGAIN. HOW EXCITING. Also shoulder rigging.

Over the last few weeks I've been attempting to tackle some non-game-dev maybe-sorting-my-life-out stuff, and struggling because I feel so out of my element, so I'm paranoid about doing something wrong somewhere, and I feel so terrible about my far-from-impressive life situation - and the difficulty of fixing things - that focusing on it (or more like failing to) hurts. Plus the Fig-Hunter-related trauma I've mentioned many times. Hence the prolonged slump. I need mental health help. I'm still waiting. Should probably try and seek out an alternative.

(UNLESS THE ALIENS ANNOUNCE THEMSELVES IN THE NEXT WEEK AND SAVE US ALL FROM OURSELVES SO WE DON'T HAVE TO!!!)

I feel at my best though when I can just sit down and really focus on doing creative work. That's what I decided to do this week, on this newer thing I still don't have a name for because it doesn't have the same technical/social challenges that the CBC port (which is what I should be focusing on) does.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally altered the single female human model I'd made for the game to create a male variation:



Something about it felt off, though, and I didn't care for it, which put me off doing more work on it for longer than I wish it had. Once I finally pushed through that, I tweaked it a bit, and ended up with something I liked more than I expected to! Here's the male variant of the 'Normie':




And here's the original female one for comparison:



Side by side:



They both have identical heads, and their legs are the same length but the males have a bigger torso, hands, and thicker arms. Originally I just used the female legs unaltered for the male (which is something I did in AFC many years ago), but increasing the size of the feet and thickening the shins really helped give it the chunky, stylised look I was hoping to achieve. Obviously these are leagues below the impressive stuff in other games these days, but I'm fairly proud of them, all things considered. They'll serve their purpose well.

Most of the rest of the week - when I could muster the mental energy to do anything, at least - was spent implementing that model into the game. I also fixed a few other minor, unexciting, but important little things.

And I spent ages trying to sort out the topology of the shoulders to minimise horrendous distortions with extreme arm movements.




Should rigging has been a thorn in my side since I started making and animating 3D models, and there doesn't seem to be some obvious, elegant solution to it for low-poly models. Grumble. Hopefully this'll do, at least; it hardly needs to be perfect, and most players won't notice or care anyway. I noticed shoulder deformations in the original Kingdom Hearts when I replayed that a year or two ago which I didn't see at all when I first played it as a teen!






Anyway, working on this project is a way of productively procrastinating, I suppose. I should be doing other things, but maladaptively avoid them for anxiety-related reasons, and working on this is better than just completely wasting my time away. Maybe it'll even lead somewhere.

I'd still like for the mental health help to lead somewhere though. Maybe next week I'll look into alternatives... though that's the sort of thing I get anxiety about and end up putting off, so I need to get mental health help first before I can do it and... bleh.

(Also I'm writing this on a Friday for a change so I can have the weekend off.)