Post 1–10 of 27
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Firefly4 years ago
Lately I've gotten feedback from both current players as well as outsiders that the 3D character models should look more western instead of oriental/Asian to make them more appealing. Not implying anything wrong with the current look, I am open to suggestions for improvement. So here is the world's first Angeldust 'DEV' forum topic where you can take the wheel! I'm sharing Angeldust's 3D hero character models in a few poses along with their textures. Get them here (2.6 MiB): [LINK HAS BECOME OBSOLETE] A license statement is included in the README.txt file. Please use these files for helping improve Angeldust, and don't make me regret trying to work together with you all :D The included Wavefront OBJ files can be imported into Blender and many other 3D editors. Switch to 'texture only' mode and apply the PNG files as textures (UVs are included). You can then admire the base starting point that's currently in the game. What I'm looking for are updated PNG texture files that (you think) subjectively improve or change the look of the hero faces. Consider the 3D geometry unchangeable. You can share ideas, files and mods in this topic. Maybe the Discord server will also play a role here. Everyone is welcome to contribute. When we have potential replacements I can make new IMY files that you can drop into the game to see the results live. I don't have a deadline—we all need to see how this 'community development' program turns out. If this first step is successful I'll be sharing more and more files and ideas to improve Angeldust in the future.
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Firefly4 years ago
Thanks for spreading the word and facilitating collaboration, Hummm and the Discord crew. As far as it might not have been clear: everyone is free to come up with any new face designs. You can carefully tweak the existing texture by nudging or smearing pixels, or go overboard and design something from scratch. As long as you feel the end result is an improvement over the existing work. Also take note that every hero has three eye states: wide open, squinting and closed. Each pose in the archive file has a different eye state. You don't necessarily have to update everything at once, but eventually we want all eye states to be consistent.
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Firefly4 years ago
Is someone willing to post a brief summary of Discord activity on the faces so far? Should I hop on myself to investigate the state of affairs? News from my side: in an unexpected twist there are some familiar people also taking a look at this. If I receive presentable results I'll dedicate a section of the next livestream to showing and discussing them. Again, there is no deadline, but I feel that iterating on designs early and often will lead to better results.
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4 years ago
The Discord conversation hasn't really yielded anything so far, either people like the heros as they are already or suggest an ingame / website hero face editor like in some other popular games. Noone has tried to play around with the png files so far, at least not that I know of. Myself I think that by just editing the texture we stick on top of the 3D model we can't do much, we can change the eyes, add eyebrows and maybe change the lips, as everything else is pretty much locked in place by the model. For a real change we'd need to edit the 3D model itself to change the face shape and features.
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Hummm4 years ago
I have not posted in Discord about the mods I've made... nor did I even save anything I changed (meaning my changes were not even perceived by me to be better). I will say that I spent significantly more time playing with the model than I did with the textures... this was the first time I had ever used Blender and it has a fairly steep learning curve.
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Firefly4 years ago
Thanks for the update(s), don't worry about (lack of) results or anything. Everyone's free to try out things to make the game better. I can understand it's pretty hard to do 3D texturing/modeling if you've never done it before. As for the limited range of customization: I've seen some alternate texture work that definitely changed the appearance of the character's face. I understand having control over the geometry would give more freedom, but for now I want to stick to updating textures at most. "True masters can work within constraints" or something like that.
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Rabotik4 years ago
After spending my first hour (ever) in Blender, I now believe we can gain a lot from updating the textures. Have a look at what I did so far (left is the original, right has my edited texture). The model remains unchanged. http://heroestospare.com/rabotik/temp/before-after-fighter.png
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Firefly4 years ago
@Rabotik: thanks for posting here! I enjoy the aesthetics so far and this shows that by changing the texture you can achieve a different look to the face. I find your version to be a lot more defined and "readable". And for just one hour of work in Blender, which you never used before, it's a very impressive result! Like Hummm said: you're a true artist. Also, since the cat (or, kitten) is out of the bag: Rabotik and—at a distance—space is green took interest in the hero facelifting challenge. Which I think is amazing. I never dared ask them to take a look since I previously snuck in the 3D visual style that "competes" with their Cartoon visual style. If you want to support Rabotik and space is green, collectively "Heroes to Spare", visit and follow them here: http://heroestospare.com http://rabotik.com http://spaceisgreen.com
Post 1–10 of 27
kross9093
