Terrors Of Retopography

4K tris versus 8K tris

 Amongst a slew of bug fixes I have been designing a new unlockable playable character. This has once again led to problems of topology - or more accurately retopology from a not very high poly character to a much lower poly character.

You would think that there would be some automated plugin that could do all of this for you, that it could take a mesh with a lot of triangles and reduce it whilst keeping some semblance of the vertex point weightings. And there is, and it can ... except you have to kiss goodbye to your nicely laid out UV map. Now you try modding this ...

Behold the computer generated horrors beyond your comprehension

It does a really good job of decimation and a really terrible job of UVs, textures and materials in general.

The problem appears to be that my starting mesh is some +20K tris, which is great for an up-close viewing of the character - especially in the viewports of Blender - but not so great when you want it reduced auto-magickally. Especially as I hate manual retopology due to it being the utter epitome of donkey work.

If only you could just remove edge loops in a sensible way - but wait! You can! Blender has it's own decimate modifier, and surely loops can be reduced just as the can be increased? Yes but no.

Just auto-reduce loops bro! Yeah but nah, but really wtf is this?

However this is something that could be cleaned up, and in the end I did, thus using that as a new basic mesh to work from, and it's a much more reasonable 6K tris. And after customizing that to a new character, it can be manually reduced by merging loops to keep the bone weights and UV maps intact.

Try and spot the difference from the actual game camera height

 Once again the real problem seems to be the tunnel vision of working up close in the modeling editor, and I am sure that that 4K mesh could get some more reductions without anyone ever noticing. However it appears to be not just me that goes overkill on character meshes ...

Squint percentage per eye ...

Dragon's Dogma 2 character creator allows for squints by percent per eye ... but in-game, your character is barely a third of the screen in height. Not sure that is going to be all that visible when your character's head is only 64 pixels.

My new playable catgirl cosplayer is called Polaris, and does that 北斗百裂拳, Hokuto Hyakuretsu Ken thing minus the waaa-ATATATATATA battle cry, so you'll have to shout it yourself. The character portrait isn't completed yet and I'm still balancing the stats and attack attributes, so update to Steam should be next week.

It's British Summer Time, at least horology wise, I am removing the winter duvet, so naturally the weather has taken a turn for the worst. Maybe with April here Spring might finally start, as it seems to have done nothing but rain and be generally miserable since October.

 

I also had a thought about the methodology of making a roaming brawler, one where the player could upgrade to the move sets and customize their own controls based on fighting styles and how to code this as combat events. This brought me back to thinking about the melee combat system I coded an example of previously which uses hitboxes, and whether that would be good gameplay system; a (probably side) scrolling roaming hack and slash where you level up your character not just with attributes but also armour and weaponery, restarting each "run at the game" with all the new stuff you earned in previous runs. This way the player would start off very weak and get killed quickly, then spend whatever XP you acquired on better stats or kit and go again, eventually leading to the player becoming massively OP in early levels. It would work a bit like reverse permadeath, with the player's XP being permanant and allowing the unlocking and equipping of better weapons and protections but also melee based move sets that could be customized to control binds.

As Monsters Loot Swag near completion, 1 more level with enemy boss, and 2 more playable characters to add, I am beginning to think more of what the next game will be, and after having created the proof of concept for MLS NINE FUGGING YEARS AGO I think I need to work on a shorter development cycle for my next project.