Salut à tous (haha, en français cette fois les gars !)

This one will be full FR, because why not =)

Donc, petite mise à jour de la progression de la démo.

Pour commencer, je suis heureux de vous présenter la "version SWR" du chasseur Naboo N-1, pour les besoins de la démo je n'ai pas fait tous les détails du cockpit ce qui simplifie pas mal de choses à commencer par le rendu (pas de transparence=pas besoin d'animer/modéliser le reste).
Vous pourrez l'admirer sous toutes les coutures dans un nouveau hangar du Venator ;)

Je n'exclus pas de faire le cockpit plus tard, notamment pour la version marketplace du modèle car c'est un peu un must-have quand on veut filmer du dogfight un minimum sérieux.

Ce vaisseau a probablement le design le plus léché de la saga, et a donc été un des plus compliqués à cerner. Il y a énormément de lignes de force, de courbes, et de simplicité qu'on peut difficilement le rater, ça demande toutefois pas mal d'observation et c'est une autre paire de manches que de foncer tête baissée dans la création d'un décor.

Voilà un apperçu de ce que ça donnait en jeu il y a un bon mois avant ce post (ça a un peu évolué depuis ;)). Notez que le mode combat spatial, qui n'est dispo qu'en bonus, a été codé par mes soins ^^ C'était un énorme point manquant depuis la création du jeu, et je n'aurais jamais penser m'y coller ni atteindre quelque chose d'aussi amusant à jouer (ça reste trèèèès simple et imparfait, mais c'est déjà chouette d'avoir tout ça !)

Ensuite, viennent les Commandants Clones ARC Troopers Phase 2. J'en ai créé un par armée intégrée à la démo. On a donc ceux de Kamino (les "blancs", pas vraiment de gros marquage sur l'armure, ils sortent quasiment de l'usine)

Puis ceux de Coruscant, les "Shock troopers". Ce seront aussi eux qui vous embêteront dans Lumberia. Parce-que le rouge se détache bien du vert avant tout ! Cohérence graphique oblige, on adapte le scénario après (ça va pour le coup rien de compliqué : on est post Ordre66 et les Jedis sont traqués. L'armée Clone est démantelée et ne subsistent un temps que ceux vraiment proches du pouvoir, des postes clés ou des missions importante, donc en toute logique on croiserait soit des Shock troopers, soit des Kamino troopers, avant de passer à du Stormtrooper =) Que je ne suis pas prêt de faire, j'aime pas des masses ces armures retro, vous savez mon amour pour la prélogie et ses designs ;))

Ensuite on a la 414ème (ceux de Mevenn, notez que je n'ai pas fait Maxonn/Axe'L/Crusher et RedJaws. Je me réserve la liberté scénaristique de les faire évoluer plus tard. RedJaws notamment, passera outre l'ordre 66 et son histoire se poursuivra sur un arc relativement indépendamment des rebelles/empire)

Et enfin la 501ème (qu'on verra bien évidemment dans les Archives). Je vous avoue que la tentation de faire un des clones bien connus de la série était très, très grande. Mais ça collait pas, j'essaie d'être raccord autant que possible avec ce qui se passe dans l'univers canon, et l'une des grandes astuces est de tout simplement mettre en place l'histoire dans de nouveaux décors (comme par exemple Lumberia). En revanche dès qu'on plonge dans des lieux connus il faut faire gaffe (et je suis presque sûr que malgré toutes les précautions que j'ai prises il y aura des incohérences...bref). Le tout c'est de pas passer 15 ans à vérifier trop dans le détail mais tenter plutôt de capturer l'essence du lieu, l'ambiance, qu'on s'y sente un peu comme dans les films et les séries, rapidement (et puis bon, je vous rapelle que je suis seul à faire tout ça haha, j'ai pas le temps de niaiser comme on dit !)

Ces clones ont pour but de servir d'ennemis + coriaces, mais également d'habiller certains décors. Il s'agissait aussi de compléter la base de chaque armée, il manque encore pas mal de spécialisations comme les pilotes, mais ils sont moins importants pour le gamedesign.

Ils sont à la fois une mise à niveau côté modélisation (+ d'équipement) mais j'ai également revu l'ensemble pour créer les peintures de guerre, histoire de conserver un maximum de cohérence. L'ARC Trooper de la 414ème a un peu + de détails que les autres, je voulais faire un mix entre l'armure de Mevenn et celle des Clones Troopers réguliers de la 414ème, en accentuant les clins d'œils jeux de formes qu'on lit sur l'armure Phoenix et en ajoutant + de couleurs (Mevenn garde le violet sombre pour elle, histoire de la garder démarquée)


Ces ARC troopers sont modulaires, comme les Jedis. On peut donc créer plusieurs variantes facilement =)

Viennent ensuite de l'amélioration de niveaux (enfin...disons que j'ai pété des murs pour voir + grand =D)

Geonosis

Probablement le niveau le + barbant (bah oui, y a pas un pèt de véget, c'est tout plein de sable, ça manque de vie...) bref, fallait améliorer ça !
Et comme l'été dernier j'avais posé vite fait un potit bout de concept pour une sorte de gouffre avec des tuyaux et tout et tout, je me suis mis à plancher là-dessus...quasiment depuis le mois d'août 2021. Je sais. Un an, c'est long. Mais je ne suis pas resté bloqué sur le syndrome de la page blanche, non, je l'ai habillement laissé de côté pendant des mois (haha, astuce du chef !), le temps que ça infuse dans ma tête, que je trouve quelque chose de cohérent, un angle d'attaque. Et ça s'est résolu en deux trois soirées (le + long a été de s'y mettre, j'ai enlevé des morceaux que je pensais vitaux, de bonnes idées mais impossibles à faire pour le moment faute de temps...et c'est rentré nickel !) L'extension n'est pas géante mais elle offre un petit supplément plutôt sympa à explorer, ça reste une "petite" map ^^



Le plus gros morceau étant...le Temple de Lumberia. Enfin !

Pour la petite histoire, je fais des recherches graphiques sur ce temple depuis 2018, je suis même passé par une construction à base de Kappla haha ^^" Mais assez tôt, je voyais un Temple dans Lumberia, un peu comme dans un Indiana Jones ou un Tomb Raider/Uncharted. Mais dans l'univers Star Wars. C'était dès le départ un casse-tête sur le plan technique. Comment j'allais pouvoir texturer un décor aussi gros ? Sans qu'on ne distingue la répétition des textures ou de gros pixels ? Faire des décors de cette taille pour un jeu demande de la patience, et beaucoup de recherche. Si je ne l'ai pas fait à l'époque, c'est que je manquais de connaissances sur la façon dont créer des décors pour du jeu-vidéo. Alors oui, j'en avais fait pour divers projets, et ça tournait très bien, mais jamais je n'avais envisagé de faire un bloc aussi colossal, et pendant longtemps eh bien, j'ai laissé ça de côté. J'avais le temple au loin, enfin, une ébauche, un test. Mais je ne savais pas par où commencer. Et au final, ça a été le déclic juste après avec tombé la salle des serveurs dans les archives. Pas besoin de faire des tonnes de textures, juste viser les couleurs qui fonctionnent bien, rester subtil aussi. Car de loin il ne fallait pas que ce soit un pâté de pixels. J'ai aussi eu une idée qui m'a motivé l'an dernier ; des piliers "fleurs". Même si quelque part on est pas tout-à-fait dans ce que j'avais en tête, ce point m'a permis de donner une âme à ces lieux et je pense que c'était ce qui manquait pour savoir comment dérouler le reste du temple.
Autre point important : l'architecture. Je voulais que ça fasse cathédrale, mais sans connotation catholique ou autre, juste cathédrale avec de longs piliers et une voute impressionnants. Et quitte à faire, de partir sur un mix avec une pyramide triangulaire. J'aime bien, parce qu'un triangle est une forme élémentaire et quand on s'y promène, chaotique. C'est moins évident qu'avec une base carrée ou rectangulaire, et ce chaos apporte du mystère au décor. Pourquoi les Lumbériens ont-ils fait ça ? Comment s'y repérer ? Quel était leur culture dans ce coin reculé de la galaxie ? Qui a allumé tous ces cierges ? (haha. Bon, c'est moi. Je trouvais déjà ça étrange dans Diablo, mais ça reste excellent pour l'ambiance !)

(Excusez le framerate pas dingue, j'ai toujours un souci avec le setup d'OBS et c'est balo, parce-que mon PC est loin d'être à genoux ^^") 

Lumberia a été un terrain de jeu fantastique pour créer des coins féériques, et je pense que je pourrais pousser le délire beaucoup plus loin si jamais je bossais à nouveau dessus plus tard. C'est un peu une planète magique où on peut se permettre des écarts temporels assez profonds, et où la nature omniprésente est empreinte de magie, de rêve. Et puis y a des champignons qui sautillent ^^


En parallèle de ça, Thomas a créé de nouvelles animations pour Mevenn. C'est une feature sympa qu'on retrouve dans beaucoup de jeux, parfois très vieux même (comme Rayman 2), Mevenn peut désormais jouer des animations après un certain temps. C'était l'occasion pour Thomas et moi de faire autre chose que des idles simples, et si j'ai lancé beaucoup d'idées et fait les premières versions de nombre d'entre elles, heureusement pour vous, les anims finales ont été soigneusement faites par Thomas. Et il est bon, le bougre

En voici un bref aperçu :

Autre point très, très, mais alors très important : la gestion des projectiles.

Avant, c'étaient de vrais passe-murailles et les ennemis pouvaient se tuer entre eux, on avait donc un gameplay à la fois super simple (dans les plaines) et super chaud (dans les couloirs, car imprévisible). Désormais, les ennemis ne peuvent plus s'infliger de dégâts entre eux (ce qui vous force à les attaquer) et leurs tirs sont bloqués par l'environnement, avec un joli effet d'impact que j'ai adoré faire =) (mon tout premier =D)

Dernier point : les outils du photographe (bon, pas aussi poussés que dans la vraie vie, mais suffisamment costauds pour vous permettre de prendre de beaux screenshots, bien cadrés =))

On retrouve donc la règle des tiers, la spirale du nombre d'or et les diagonales (non-visibles ici, la capture date pile d'avant que je rajoute ces overlays), ainsi qu'un offset de la caméra qui permet de modifier la position de Mevenn dans le cadre (voire ne pas la cadrer du tout pour juste capturer le décor). On a également un focus qu'on peut soit maintenir en auto (il fera alors systématiquement la mise au point sur Mevenn peu importe la distance), soit en free, pour faire de la macro par exemple(les textures s'y prêtent bien en général). Et enfin un changement du FOV, qui permet d'aplatir ou d'élargir la perspective et par la même occasion d'accentuer l'effet de profondeur de champ (ça n'accentue pas vraiment l'effet, mais on le ressent + si le FOV est bas=perspective aplatie, les éléments flous seront "plus proches" de ceux nets ;))

Bon, et le tout devrait être dispo very, very bientôt. Des Bisous, et que la Force soit avec vous ♥

Hello there ! (one day I should stop beginning with this ^^")

It's been many months since you heard about SWR. But as I said, I want to bring a more finished version of the demo =)
it will still be just a demo, any kind of real game isn't planned, and I'll be switching to another project once SWR demo will be done

So, what's up ?

A few levels, in terms of pure art. Just cause I wanted to bring on more levels now I've defined a solid way to produce them =) (And you probably don't know my penchant for making overkill details & stuff no one but me will notice x)) New levels added consists in :

Jedi Temple on Coruscant, showing magnificent blue holobooks, one of the high places of Order 66. I found cool to create this interior environment,it was like playing the sims except you can craft everything you want. I learnt a lot while making this, especially on the texturing process. Making env. Art is definitely a technical problem to solve first, making sure your shaders meets most requirements, having the good texture palette (that's how I see an atlas, just a painter's color palette. Offering enough texel density & surfaces when covering most of the room).I initiated this level last year for just a single shot of the trailer, keep in mind that I simply wanted to show like... a wall behind Mevenn, and perhaps a balcony and a sculpted bust. I ended up making the whole place. It's always like that, I plan a little thing, then I add a lot over the first idea. Pfew !

I started off with a simple shape to kinda mimic the good old battlefront 2 level from Pandemic, just to have a starting point for the servers blocs. Then I brought a box around them and started to build some things. I wanted to bring the player close to the server towers in confined clusters, that's why you see a 1st floor. And this was only a starting point made roughly at the end of the day. Next was about to be much more exciting and it brings the Archives level to another pleasing state of nostalgia exploration. Archives was already good as is and "Servers Room" was only meant to be a bonus, for when I will have time to build it... and I finally added this to the level in nearly a little week of work (put apart the Jedi Statue sculpts ^^)

Statues are completely using the Jedi characters assets I made before them, but they are static and uses only a single UVSet without mirroring/overlapps, since I wanted to control completely the surface and avoid unwanted "butterflies" patterns. There came a wonderful tool of 3DCoat : UVs. Cool point is they are synced with paint layers, so if you rearrange them, 3DCoat will automatically bake old texcoord to new one for each layer. It's awesome how it saves a lot of time ! This way I could simply repack my textures per statue, reduce drawcalls and improve the final look while keeping normalmap/AO baked data =) It's wonderful ! An important point to keep in mind when doing this is to avoid to rotate or flip UV islands, else you will break the bake of your normalmaps. And don't worry, you'll see jedis next in the post ;)

Just because "pourquoi pas ?" =D Simply the Roughness render pass. These clones look terrific !

Except here I wanted to refine a technique I used on Lumberia Assets : make use of a second UVmap to add dirt over the base surface. This greatly helps selling the asset as part of its world and not just a 3D asset with tiling stuff everywhere. Making big environments of course you will use tiles a lot, but it's better if you can hide them as much as possible. One solution would be to make everything by hand on a 8K map, pretty un-optimized and not the best time saver...another is to mix UVs to actually texture your asset, using fewer maps. Like really fewer. It's also way faster than painting 8K maps per asset of course ;) I keep this for really important props and characters, but tiles are textured the same way : by hand. Smartmaterials are a base, just a base. It's up to you to take your best brushes and give these automated texture a better & more personnal look ;) The diff with how I approached this technique on Lumberia is on details put into the dirtmap. Lumberia has a shy paint look, I wasn't completely sure of the direction I wanted to take, and I had only straight dirt gradients. A lot of variants, colors...etc, but here what really helped me is I decided to add circular and rectangular dirt shapes, and when you have domes, boxes and curved areas, this rapidly becomes helpful. Else it simply requires more vertices on the geometry, just to support a second UVmap...I don't like it, especially if I can avoid it.

Here's the comparison of with and without this "Dirt" effect :

Looks better, right ?

Now here's how it looks once polished :

Also new characters, such as these R2 Units, with cool animations to enjoy of course. Animation is a fun part of game art I learnt to enjoy thanks to Akeytsu. Anim - I think - is often misunderstood compared to modeling or texturing. Sadly, it's probably the most interesting part =P. That's where things get alive at their deepest level. Especially an important point to keep in mind if you're in 3D. I've been making tons of environments & characters, but being able to animate them gave a new dimension to my work. I can finally give life to them, it's a really special feeling ♥

You can view more R-Units here : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/G881qd

Second tips : use "global" retopo to ensure smooth connection between cloth parts/layers. Here I had to keep the cloth bands following the Pelvis/Stomach/Spine/Torso, so I used a global mesh underneath to copy/paste skinweights, then I removed influences from shoulders and gave them to extra cloth joints. Just so I can adjust these parts if needed and avoid them to always depends on arm-cloth. If the jedi is in a relaxed pose, then I need to keep the shoulder cloth up =)
Also, as I wanted to have modular possibilities on my character like changing the lenght of the sleeves, their meshes needed to be split out of the main body part. Thanks to the same global mesh I could transfer the connected area weights and avoid having ugly seam when deforming each sleeves =)
Finally,if you look closer you can see meshes only has one side. This simply helps keeping final mesh thickness cause I'll source a single vertex for two targets, so both will end up with the same weights and reduce drastically front/backfaces overlapp fights

Isn't she beautiful with these skinweights ? Fun fact : twilek version wasn't planned at all. It was... (guess what ?)

A bonus. Hohoho =) But a really good one, that's my favorite version of the female Jedi Knight ♥

Below are some old WIP shots of the male version, the outfit colors wasn't good yet and I didn't paint over the leather of the boots. It looks a bit better once finished ;)

I wanted to bring a more painterly look to the base color (I really loved what Fortiche Prod did with Arcane. Animation is awesome, but what bugged me even more was the painterly look they managed to put everywhere, it's extremely fine, precise, aaaaand wild/bold at the same time. I love it so much ♥ So as overwatch did back in 2016/2017, Arcane inspired me)

To finish, please keep in mind that this is still WIP and subject to change/evolve up to an unkown level, it actually depends on how much time I can pour into the project. I'm working hard on it (like never before) since early March of this year, and I wish things will be over as soon as possible. But I don't plan to release something i'm not proud of.

Cheers, et que la Force soit avec vous =)

des Bisous ♥

Hi everyone !
Last year have been a quite huge one for me, and in the end, for the project. I wanted to leave it somewhere in the (already big) unfinished project stack, because I was feeling overwhelmed. And there comes a guy from the EcksToo youtube channel willing to promote the project on their youtube channel...

Honnestly, you can thank him/them, because this gives us a huge shot of motivation. After this video, a lot of users wanted to know if the project had been stopped/shut down, and they were so sad this project was about being abandonned that we decided to focus back on it with Thomas Chaumel (known as Akeyblack), Alexandre Cheremetiev and recently Thibaut Hunckler

Since then, we decided to make another video to explain at which state of development the project was, and, of course, to bring answers to most asked questions about the project

I definitely want to salute the outstanding work of mount & editing, and voicing (Your enthusiasm & energy is still really motivating us @Charlie McShane !) that has been done over these videos. If you have some time, don't hesitate to visit EcksToo's channel : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoZgb1Z-TB24berQsHvbQJA

Then, I wanted to explain a bit more things about animating these characters, since we use Akeytsu for the project since 2016, I think it was time to show of some serious stuff. For this reason, I try to regularly make livestream session where I animate a cycle with this brilliant software, and I more than encourage you to take a deep look at it

Here is also some level art on Unreal Engine. I rarely start with blockout (I don't really love this way to build stuff when I already have finished blocks & colors to play with)

Also, here is a reshot of the demo published in february (2020), with better FPS. I found that OBS can't record properly if it's running on a screen which has different fps than the screen you want to record...curious stuff, always =)

For those who still wonder what I am doing on it, here are my roles :
- Concept art ; basically drawing to imagine shapes of everything before diving into 3D/texture/tadvanced technical stuff
- Character design ; modeling modeling modeling ! And sculpting from time to time =) Also involves UVs, Bake...etc
- Environment art ; same as for character, with slightly more technical stuff involved to manage tiles, decalmeshes, assembling once in UE4
- VFX ; cause it's cool to relax with magic sparks and burn everything in your scene when you feel mad =D
- TechArt ; making shaders, R&D on technical problems (and solving them of course, else project stays forever still)
- Level design ; making these blocs forming an interesting path, hiding secret rooms, make danger zones...etc. This part stays quite OldSchool (I like to think about Rayman 2 & 3 when making levels paths)
- Level art ; adding nice assets over previous cubes, so you don't see cubes =) Also adding easter eggs anywhere I can ^^
- Texturing ; Ohooo...Tiling textures, characters, props...StarDestroyers, Clones and Lightsabers ♥ A cool part =) This involves a lot of time on 3DCoat to paint each texture by hand. I like smartmaterials, but only as long as they stay just a starting point. Brushing takes look to the next level, as one of my teachers said : never let the computer do art for yourself. You're the artist, not the computer. Or something like that.
- Shading ; make materials in Toolbag, UE4, assign textures to the good slots. It's fairly simple, once I've defined what my materials actually does (I love making VFX ones =))
- Art direction ; Decide how to do "art" in Star Wars Redemption. It's partly clone-warsy, partly overwatchy, a cool mix of both looks with my own touch over it. This takes care also on the animation part, how Mevenn has to move and how she shouldn't.
- Rigging ; Adding joints, making hierarchies for characters/props to be used then in animation. Not to mention this is fully done in akeytsu
- Skinning ; Once joints are laid out, adding weight to them on the mesh so you can control and animate it using joints. Also done in akeytsu
- Animation ; Creating poses, then animation. I didn't use to really work on this part a few years ago but the more it goes, the more I take time to add takes to the project. It's awesome to animate something, it's like giving life to objects, super exciting ! Done in akeytsu too
- Integration ; import and make sure everything looks good in UE4/MarmosetToolbag. This is crucial to ensure assets will behave well with others (like sahders, skeletons, blueprints...etc)
- Lighting ; put lights on characters, make some parts popping more than others to get the player's/viewer's attention...etc
- Rendering ; make heavy shots of assets so you can make wallpapers with it or later print an artbook =)
- Cinematic setup : mostly on UE4 and regularly on Marmoset Toolbag 4, assemble cinematic animation, VFX, animate lighting and make a good use of the Sequencer =)
- Compositing ; quite rare since I rather doing this in realtime, this part consists mostly of adding missing post effects and finetuning the overal look of content.

Pfew. That's...quite some stuff I guess, but it seems fine as long as I enjoy each part of this big cake ^^"

I've recently done phase II clone troopers with some well known skins (501st & Shock Troopers). At the moment there's no ARC trooper or armor variants since I can go where I want with only these guys, but I admit that I'd love to mess with ARC troopers too so, maybe they'll come one day ;) 

After some small steps, I've brought them to (still) life with some posings using Akeytsu & Marmoset Toolbag 4 : 

Then I brought them to the core of the project (UE4), so they can look like a fantastic team !

Also, as we've been busy, something gentle is about to come. Stay tunned
  

I've been busy  last months, I'm still trying to find a new job which sometimes involves doing an art test (time consuming but lots of learning), and I've been fortunate enough to work with amazing clients such as "I From Japan" (you're in my heart guys ♥), soooooo I had not that much time for Star Wars - Redemption (sorry sorry =X !) 

I've also made a first try for a waterfall

I've created some water effects for Lumberia, I want to add some other features such as underwater sun scattering but don't know how to proceed yet, except by placing manually some meshes with a fake effect, I'm not a huge fan of it as it's not something managed dynamically. But of course if the final level is a small one it would be a good choice  

This is our environment material. Almost finished (need to rework the variator's part, simplify some areas to be able to use this material over more stuff than walls and pillars, it's probably the most difficult part to achieve for me as I feel I'm new to game development tricks, especially about environment art). This one took me a lot of time and iterations as I wanted to have a specific result and didn't knew all the required tricks involved to make it, but things begin to look nicer and nicer and I'm pretty happy with the result I get at each iteration
Now we can simply blend two surfaces (here a sculpted Sith wall and bricks), add noise "Variators", animated or not, which I'm using intensively when I'm texturing all my assets on 3DCoat, add or not a "SnowSandMoss" layer over the whole mesh depending on Z+ projection, add a distinct color to each of these surfaces...each of the features are controlled by at least vertex color + most of the time a custom mask texture...and plenty of other cool controls =D The goal is to simplify a lot environment asset's creation while keeping an artistic control on top of it =)

I've made some new tiling maps for the upcoming assets (it's still WIP and may change later) :

I decided then to try out reworking some of The Venator's corridors using this new workflow based more on a good UV unwrapping (meaning a precise one where each vertex coordinate is wisely used and not just randomly packed) :

using mostly these two textures + a decal/trim for all local details and break the texture tiling :

(the following is an old one I did last year)

About Leveldesign, which is currently just not done (each "level" I did was only to test the assets, and how I could build things with them ;) I know it's just not conventional but initially I just wanted to create environments after my daytime job based on star wars universe, I didn't want to do a demo or a videogame at this time. It allowed me to push art in the direction I loved)

So...I decided to make a fairly simple shader that shows distances in our upcoming levels and will soon be used for starting level design, at last =P

And now we have a new Mevenn (new face, new Phoenix skin) integrated into unreal as our playable character ! New anims are rough for now but all moves are intended to be faster than what we had before, not meaning they'll be simpler ;) We really want to take advantage of Mevenn's ability to manipulate and control her lightsaber by distance, so animations may be more exaggerated on the next iteration =)

A first glimpse at the game now we've added more and more stuff, it's still really WIP on anim/gameplay level but it's also a strong base for all that we want to build up next =) Big thanks to Fantin Gislette (Game Designer) and Thomas Chaumel (Animator), this part is definitely yours ;)

There are some issues with popping objects in this level which may come from the huge forest being made in this map ^^"

That's all folks ! And really sorry again for the lack of stuff this time (probably will be the same next time, but as stated in the project's page on artstation, Redemption's development workpace is meant to be chaotic/irregular, but, well...it's just a fan project ;))

Hi folks !

Some news from Star Wars - Redemption, I know I know, it's been 3 months...and I apologize for that. I had to do some art tests and was a bit stressed about it. So there's some news, not that much, but I hope you'll keep loving this project, cause yeah, I received a lot of great feedback and encouragement from many of you, which warmed our hearts to us three. I want to join with Fantin and Thomas to say : thank you all for your awesome your support, it allows us to keep moving forward ! ♥

SO...what's up ?

 I Improved Lumberia with a reworked grass tilemap ( the grass under the grass ), vegetation's shader ( blend with ground surfaces using pixel depth offset instead of using translucent shader - Big thanks to Anthony Daneluzzi for showing me this cool tricks !  ), foliage is now fine tuned to allow painting a huge forest in no time, added VFX emitter that spawn somme flower's petal, little "force glows" in order to get a better mood, tweaked lighting a bit and finally I started to work on sith's temple assets using a method I guess is close to overwatch's one for faking sculpted edges with decals.

So here is a little screenshot of this trick, look at the wall's separation, in its middle : 

In fact, there's only two "boxes", meaning there's no bevel, only a decalmesh with a sculpt trim normal, it only blends with mesh normals which are set to hard edges each time the relief changes, good things with this technique is the amount of time saved on sculpting assets over and over again, no more tedious Uvwrapp, keep model simple, and go back to modeling with smoothgroops ( which is really important to me =P )

So first thing I needed to do was a tileable texture, using my dear 3DCoat it was fairly easy to do so : ( 0% ZBrush or maya or max or Designer here guys ;) )


Then, I worked on a new kind of material that could allow me to paint different surface materials depending on separate vertexcolor channels, here is a first test with a single plane, 4 vertices with one blue, one red, one green, and one with no Red/Green or Blue, in other words : black

I also blend depending on each layered material's heightmap

Here is what I've been up to do with all maps blended ( BaseColor, Composite 1 (Metal/Rough/AO), Composite 2 (Cavity/Emissive/Height), and Normalmap  ) :

Lumberia's Forest as it's now in the game =)

Improved all scene's colorimetry with postprocess which desaturate scene based on ZDpeth pass. Useful for Space maps where there's no "horizon" unlike ground maps

You've noticed that Mevenn's skin has changed on Lumberia's screenshots ? You're right ! Here come her beautiful new skin : Phoenix

I also went back on animation, I really enjoy this part of game art, I wish to better my skills at each new one I'll do as anything I'll have to learn =)

A quick comparison with her "Legacy" skin :

The rig is now really good, I guess it's not 100% perfect but we may call it finished ^^ I updated it with a "Fly" controller for better in-air moves, that was a request from Thomas Chaumel ( our Animator on Redemtpion ) who works now at TeamTo Valence, on several Animated TV series with strong rigs made on Maya, so he told me some suggestion I could implement in Mevenn's rig for bettering his animation workflow. The Fly controller is just a joint between the root and the pelvis which allow the animator to define a new mass center of the mesh, it's really important when you make spins and stunts, and you can offset it on each keyframe as you wish

Facial part has now more expressions stored in Akeytsu, facial rig is 100% ok to Thomas and I so we can make Mevenn live !

Training room WIPs, which is a rework of an old environment I did back in 2013, but optimized this time with better detail's management ( the old one had too many greeble/random stuff on areas we don't want to stick on. It's fixed now ;)

Old version ( 3dsmax+Vray, composited on photoshop, not in realtime =/ )

From this old mesh, I remapped UVs by hand on this texture sheet, made for another environment ( Mevenn's Room, in the works ;) ). The goald was to define clearly colors, and what's metallic or not. I also performed a vertice normals faceweight script so the model looked "highpoly", but in fact it wasn't.

WIP of the new mapped one, realtime on UE4 :

I also Improved shaders functions with a vertex color parametrable emissive, see how "light" on neons decrease progressively when going on top of the room, I think it's a good addition to help level design being easier to read

From there, I simplified all models and baked all PBR maps into Marmoset 3.05 on these new really low-poly assets. After this I simply imported the result into 3DCoat on my lowpoly models and refined all these textures, and as I already had informations about metal/Rough/Colors, all I needed to do was to pick there and paint precisely there, it took me a few minutes to do, here is the new map used ingame :

As model's Vertices normals were carefully oriented to arbitrary planar positions, I can also reuse this atlas on another asset =)

...Once finished with all textures baked and enhanced on new optimized meshes :

( Wireframe of this scene )

 Last but not least, the Grass tiles I talked about at the very beginning :

A variant with Clover cover ^^ I use it a lot on trunks/Rocks to generate a kind of lichen/moss, it works really well =)

  Not fan about this one, "Alcove", for Geonosis. It doesn't work well as is I think...

Yet some screenshots about others environment to end this new post :)

There's some dying Lucrehulk's control spheres in the sky =D A little VFX I made, it's looks really good except the beam which should come from clone army, at the moment it comes from the emitter's world position =/ It looked like a kind of a reactor trail, not a destruction beam, so I removed it for screenshots ^^" You can still see it on the blend vertex wall I posted above ;)

The little red guys should be an spawnable opponent =) 

Some Bacta heal Kegs on blue areas, I know that level design is ultra basic atm, cause we still work on gameplay/feel, once the character will move as expected we will start having real fun making levels ;)

And then the rest of Venator's interior, it's not "really" the one that may exist, I just take some references, moods, from films, TV serie and other custom projects to build my own version of this interior =)

That's all folks !

Des Bisous ! And MERCI BEAUCOUP again guys for your super support ♥

Hi everyone !

Things are moving forward on our project, I've added a new map called "Lumberia" which is the natal planet of Mevenn, the heroin of the game. Lumberia is under construction as Geonosis and Space map, it's very WIP but at the moment it's my favorite environment, things here are flourish, vivid, and full of colors ! This map was born months ago just as an idea of making an environment with vegetation, a green touch and a needed breath into the project which had only rocks, sand and sci-fi props everywhere. I wanted to make a mix between nature and these assets, and I also wanted to better the Mevenn's story, so here came Lumberia...I may add conceptarts later, I need to finish them and there's a lot to tell about this new place =)

First try with the first trees/grass shaders I made for Lumberia, cool but a bit noisy and damn laggy =/

( Here are few assets I made for Lumberia )

But if trees are cool, flowers adds a nicer touch to the landscape, so I tried to do some, and reworked how the grass worked ( from model to shader )

Yeaaah, almost that ! Now I just need to create a real landscape heightmap. For this task, I reused the Lumberia cliff's heightmap mixed with some variators (a "variator" is a custom noise I made by hand, well it's just a cool grayscale texture ^^"), it was done on substance designer, which has a really nice potential for this I think (with a bit more practice I could do some cool base for my levels). Once this map is imported into unreal I can quickly draw my foliage, it's WIP, but it's really pleasant to play in this animated and peaceful forest...;)

And of course now all things are optimized so you can really make huge plains of grass or ultra-dense forests ;)

I've also added Tesselation on the landscape materials, a feature that really adds to the environment surfaces variation feeling when you walk, for example, on Geonosis's Sand or near Lumberia's RockClifs

Another cool thing is about the skymap, which was a bit ugly when you looked at it under sunscattered fog. I used Normalmap compression setting and used channels Red and Green to define sky/coulds colors and add some movement near the sun area and all "lighted" clouds, so now skies live and their textures looks good ;)

I've aslo reduced the polycount of Mevenn's face which was ridiculously too high compared to the other character's parts

And also I've added more possibilities on her face rig, so now Thomas Chaumel can add creepy feel on her teeth by pushing out Mevenn's canines (and updated a little the joints hierarchy, added controllers and more joints for the tongue)

I've added some new facial expressions, but didn't have played on an expression yet which use these new controllers

-> Venator Wall 01

-> Geonosis Ground 01

-> Geonosis Sand 01

-> Geonosis SandRocks 01

-> Lumberia Treebark classic (up) & pine (down)

-> Lumberia Forest Ground 01 WIP

-> Lumberia Forest Ground 02

-> Lumberia Sith Temple Ground 01

-> Lumberia Sith Temple Ground 02

-> Lumberia RockCliff 01

Hi everyone ! I've done some stuff since last post =)

First of all, the splash screen is now 99,99% made on marmoset, meaning that this...

  ...Can easily be shot these ways :

And yep I've found a nice trick to do the Jetpack VFX, on marmoset it's quite simple, a model ( looks like a drop of water ) deformed by a heightmap ( a noise + gradient so it's progressive ). On unreal the technique is the same but I added a panner to the noise so the smoke/fire can move, I may add some heatdistorsion on a bigger shape and sparks to have a better effect, but I'm quite happy with the level of stylization I get =)

Some Facial expressions I made with Thomas Chaumel, this will help a lot when polishing animations ^^  

Another cool thing that Fantin Gislette added is the possibility to pilot the ARC-170, and it's soooooooooo fun to fly with it =')

Geonosis environment is on its way =) I made some rock formations, then separated them into smaller blocks in order to build anything ( okay guys "almost" anything ^^ ). The material adds sand on the top, it's fairly simple at the moment but I may upgrade it when I'll have to work on snowy environments =)

Some additional concepts, more focused on Geonosian Arch and dynamic shapes :

Concepts of a new enemy, a flying one ( imagine a head of a vulture droid in terms of scale, add a gun and a personal reactor, that's it =) ) 

Hi ! It's been a while since I've not posted a thing about the project, sorry about that ^^"

I had to take back a good pace between my new job and offwork stuff. I still work on Geonosis btw but nothing is really good enough to be shown ( even as WIP =X )

So here is a rework of the face's rig of Mevenn, as we can't handle all expressions due to bad topology on either her eyes / mouth ( not perfect loop/ring ). I had some problems with her face look ( bad anatomy ), so I reworked this part first on ZBrush, and get a new one with good loops, opened mouth and better face anatomy. Then I started to try out an enhanced rig definition ( basically : more joints ! ) after looking what others do ( leading reference was on overwatch's mei facial rig ). On the left is the old one, on right is the new face + first "new" rig test

I remade her textures too, still WIP ( too noisy I think, I may keep that noise on roughness layer only and smooth a lot the basecolor map )

Comparison between old ( left ) and new face ( center & right ). With its new & finished rig =D Closing/opening her mouth now just works perfectly ;)

Here are some facial expressions I tried quickly ( like 2 mins for each, just to test some limits and fix bad skinned parts

And the best for the end guys, here are some screenshots of where we are now on the space part ( still WIP about lighting mostly )

 =) Enjoy !

I used a base cylinder in ZBrush then added a circle of window I sculpted before, and used them as insert meshes for faster positioning. All these windows are also useful for detailing the environment separately to the spire so I decided to make them as separated models as well

Then to use simple objects to make a cool ground and environment around you while being still stylized I made these two rocks ( still using ZBrush + 3DCoat ^^ )

I'm not a huge fan of the following one, it looks too clean regarding its shape, the more we grind the more planar rock area should be small, to keep the planet's logic which is partially inspired by the monument valley I think.

In-game Geonosis Spire

And what I made in a few clics, just for fun it's not a definitive level. I wanted to see what's possible with the assets I made, if the direction I took was a worthy one =) I also tried to make an hologram shader, it's a fairly basic one at the moment but it do the job well ^^

I reworked the Venator's hangar in order to clean walls and detail the ceiling smarter, the forcefield was also a big issue as it doesn't have a big blue glowing piece around it, and it make it easier to find when you're in space approaching a stardestroyer now.  

Nebuleas =) A difficult thing to understand at the beginning, not as much detailed as I wanted ( see the second image over coruscant to have an idea of how low it looked before ^^" ). Now they are far better, issue was not only about the texture's detail but also the shader itself, I reworked it a little and added a map slots where you can add stars, here they are bigger to enhance the space deepness but you can put what you want ^^

And here is what the space looked like before new nebulaes, I should take a better screenshot for the next update ^^" Btw the planet won't be Coruscant but Geonosis ;)

Hi guys !

I'm working now on some concepts/studies about Geonosis Environment, getting to know how it's built, how this biome works, for next bunch of assets I'll make for the game =)

And I polished some concepts about Aelya ;) I still have some ideas I want to work on but I think her design is almost done =) Feel free to tell me what you like or not, what you'de love to add or any input & idea you may have ! =)