Dylan

17 Sept 2024

Seasons

Is there a better, more automated way to smoothly connect things together. I have these "fur tufts" (left) that are just intersecting, and I want to merge them into the main mesh smoothly. Doing it by hand (right) is annoying (and time consuming lol)

Pirate Froggy NPC DONE. He works the shipyard and sells you boat upgrades, different sails, and other decorations to put on your boat! (needs a name though!)

Dylan reposted

ARE YOU A 3D MODELER WHO LIKES MODELING SIMPLE ANIME CHIBI HAIR? CAN I PAY YOU TO DO IT FOR ME? I have way too much on my todo list, and hoping to find someone help lighten my load a bit and take care of this task for me!

Bunny clothing shop NPC done I think. How's she look? Any name suggestions?

Dylan reposted

ʟᴜɪs ʜᴇʀɴᴀɴᴅᴇᴢ ⚡

@beetlenaut.bsky.social

My solution, make a version of the body with the legs combined as if they were a dress, copy the weights from the body mesh, then adjust the weights between the legs on the simplified mesh (fewer verts, non-complex geo = easier!) then copy weights from that onto the final dress!

Dylan@dylanmeville.com

Getting in the groove of making new clothing pieces but every time I make a dress/skirt having to manually paint the weights is KILLING me I have a great system for most things, just copy weights over from a base mesh, and transferring morphs, but UGH fixing weights

Its a pain because there's thickness to the skirt, so I have to make sure I weight both sides properly otherwise the backside clips through the front. And it NEEDs to be thick because of how I'm doing outlines in game. Need to come up with a better way

Dylan reposted

Christian Sparks

@hippowombat.bsky.social

Hey there friends! Unfortunately, I was among those impacted by layoffs at Heart Machine last week. If you or someone you know is looking for an experienced Unreal Engine Technical Artist, I'm available for full time, part time, or contract opportunities.

Next NPC is the clothing shop owner, doodling designs and thinking of something like this. She needs a name!

22 Sept

Working on the outfit for the first NPC you meet, Professor Whiskers. He uses his magical staff as a fishing rod! (also slowly adding more equipment pieces like little hair tufts you can place etc!)

19 Sept

While working on new clothing, I decided being able to choose colours from a limited palette only is kind of lame. So I added a colour picker, and a way to save colours so you can quickly use them again later. Still needs polish though!

8 Sept

NPCs look great and whimsical. Castle Town looks fantastic and bustling. Loved the mist under links feet in Kokiri forest. Why is link so shiny though. And the dead stare when doing the item get showoff. Underwhelmed with Links design, looks uncanny. And so much looks plastic

Ur a wizard harry

Can any Maya users explain why this happens? Sometimes when I extrude the original face gets duplicated so the object stays solid. Other times it moves the selected/extruded face up and leaves a "hole" where it was. Is there a setting for this? Or something?

4 Sept

Meow. New cat ears, earrings, wizard hat, and some quick legging variations today. Slowly working my way towards the wizard cat's npcs outfit

1 Sept

Added shoes as a new equipment type that properly changes your characters height. And some accessory tests that you can manually adjust the placement of! (also new hair, and clothing models on this character but it was just a cleanup pass as I nail down the workflow)

14 Aug

Spent the working on the first boat and polishing it up. Incudes adding some details to make the boat feel a bit more fancy, a magical steering wheel the character actually turns, and new splash vfx. Ready to go sailing on the great sea!

13 Aug

Is there a trick to getting a Niagara ribbon working when it's inside an actor bp? If I place the vfx in world, and move it around manually it works great. If I place the vfx in blueprint viewport and move it around it does NOT show up at all. Whyyyyyy??

12 Aug

Added a magical steering wheel for the boats on stream today. Player used to just stand there unresponsive while driving, so this little bit of polish really levels up the feel!

8 Aug

Game devs, what do you use for project/task management? Been using trello for a while, but gearing up to do a bunch of art stuff and having a single card per object feels overcomplicated (and not easy to see at a glance what is yet to be done). What are easy to use good options?

And also see like all the tasks at a glance, laid out at once, instead of trello showing me like 10 tasks at once in this massively tall column.

8 Aug

Lots of different suggestions so far! I guess I should have specified that I'm looking for something that works well with a (small) team to track progress etc, so not just something that's local for just me!

I don't really want to overcomplicate things with some huge thing. I just want a list of tasks that I can manage, assign, write comments on and upload images to, and track their progress. Google sheet kind of gets me there, but no easy way to add per-task metadata nicely

7 Aug

Which house are you choosing?

21 July

OooOoOoo misty ground particles spawning on only the water/shoreline/island meshes. Gotta figure out how to make the billboarding not look so dang gross but works good!

Dylan@dylanmeville.com

Unreal Niagara/VFX Question. Thinking about adding a "ground mist" effect like particle spawns close to the ground and flowing along (for rainy/stormy/misty weather). If the ground is just meshes (not landscape) how could I do this?

21 July

Niagara system to trace downwards and position the particles. It took me way too long to figure out I had to add the collision thingy in the map get lawl I always struggle with niagara so hard

I think there's a niagara landscape interface which would sample the landscape heightmap but... I am not using landscape, just meshes directly for the ground and stuff. So what is the alternative? Can't really just sample the SS buffer because that would pick up treetops too..

21 July

Can I make a new trace channel on the ground meshes, spawn a particle, trace it downwards, and if it hits that's where it starts? Hmmm

19 July

Anyone know of workarounds on how to make SetActorRotation on an obj sweep properly? My boat is moved via SetActorLocation/Rotation. SetLocation has a sweep option, so if I move forward (without rotating) I collide properly. But if I don't move and only rotate, I clip through!

17 July

First house design done!

6 July

Working on cleaning up the wallpaper/flooring items. Got proper previews in the house now!

6 July

System is easy to set up with as many different materials for flooring/wallpaper as I want (even animated ones!) and they're all colour-customizable just like all other furnitures!

4 July

Made this little item details panel today

4 July

Doing this kind of UI stuff is my least favorite gamedev thing though. I'm struggling so hard to make a passable UI. Adding animations does make it instantly feel way more fun though

Crab trading card

(trying to design a "details" panel in the inventory, that shows item preview and other info, thought it looked like a playing card. Maybe I should make a tcg)

1 July

Making some huge placeable building parts, I realized I can't take them to the customization shop to change their colours like normal furnitures, so I added paint that you can drop on any item!

Unreal Devs: What do you use for version control? Where do you host? Need to migrate my SVN repo to a new host (old host is shutting down), or choose a new vc+host, and looking for suggestions/input. I solo dev. I like simple. I just throw all my files into the repo

SVN + Assembla seems like an option? Assembla seems to have been around for a long time. Prices are meh, but an investment in insurance making sure my projects are safe I guess. Other options? Git + LFS + Some host? Is working with Git + LFS still annoying with unreal? Is it much diff than SVN?

My server host that I've been using SVN with for all my version control (for the last decade!) apparently decided they are fully removing SVN support. I found out today when I couldn't connect to my repo! So annoyed, having to deal with this instead of getting actual work done :|

I like SVN. Last time I looked at Git it seemed complicated to deal with (non-text) assets and LFS stuff or whatever. Is that better now? I do the most basic version control ever. I work solo. Only working on a single branch. Just shoving all my files in the repo.

15 June

Love it when I wake up and try to compile my unreal project that works working fine yesterday but today it fails with some random obscure error that was not there yesterday. I didn't change anything! Now I get to spend days probably trying to get things running again.... 😡

Added a 3d item preview in your inventory, so you can see the item (and the customizations on it) before you place it. Will also use this as a details panel for item info!

It was either this or figuring out a way to dynamically colour the icon images directly (which is why I have put off actually drawing most of them so far). This seemed easier, and more fun!

Added a 3d item preview in your inventory, so you can see the item (and the customizations on it) before you place it. Will also use this as a details panel for item info!

(there's a hidden room way below the level that spawns the item, and a scenecapture camera that renders it to a texture)

Dylan reposted