I’m somehow naturally sticking to a 5-day schedule, oh well

After whatever-happened-in-previous-devlog, I needed to work on visuals to take a break

How it went?

Commits since last entry:

1* 41ab7fb Some small fixes
2* dac1a3c New base model.......
3* 4596fd5 New models (WIP), basic main menu

Not a lot, because things were mostly happening inside of Blender.

I focused on upgrading the inside of the base, because it really stood out from the rest. The reason for that is that the outside is using assets based on real world (rocks, dirt, etc), but I have to do the base myself.

I spent a lot of time fiddling around with lights and shadows, never being satisfied. Even baking lightmaps resulted in some poor quality.

So, I decided to bring out the big guns and bake the lightmaps/textures using Cycles renderer in Blender. This produces much better results and gives me a lot more freedom, but at the cost of longer bake times and much more work.

Setting up shaders and textures in Blender, selecting settings, baking, exporting, loading it up in Godot, seeing if it looks good, going back to Blender and the cycle repeats.

Now that I have the workflow, any future work should be much easier and quicker (unless I decide to switch something up ;] ).

Blender is a powerful piece of software, but my god is it hard to use. Tooltip for Bifurbication will say Bifurbication amount without any mention on what bifurbication is or what does it relate to. And to bake a texture you need to set everything up perfectly and align all the stars, otherwise it will either give terrible output or, worse, breake some other, innocent, texture.

But when it works, it works great!

Right now I’m baking everything into a single texture (per surface), but I think I’ll switch to baking light into a separate texture and combining it in a shader in Godot with some other textures. This will allow me to use tiling textures for better quality, without massive file sizes.

I also made a new desk model, one more fitting for the design. I still don’t know where exactly am I going with this, but surely somewhere.

I’m still new to doing more serious 3D stuff (i.e., not just goofing around), but I feel like I’m making a lot of progress.

I probably shouldn’t have jumped straight into a realistic setting, because it’s overwhelming, but on the other hand I wouldn’t want to do something else, so I kinda didn’t have a choice. Luckily, noise effect and low resolution will hide some of the imperfections.

There are some quality of life features that I want to work on now, but I’ll probably keep on adjusting the visuals throughout.

L8r