Post by Orange Blue Hue on May 15, 2021 21:52:32 GMT -5
Introduction
Hello there ladies and gentlemen. I am Orange Blue Hue, a 3D artist for Thunderspy.
I've created this little sub category for myself (and any of the other artists) as an experiment to help categorize my thoughts about what I work on behind the scenes, to give you guys more insight as to what I'm doing, and to interact more with the non-discord side of the community. This entire idea was inspired by SilverAgeFan, a very talented dev artist on the Rebirth server. I thought this would be a fun experiment to try out so this will be my first go at it.
I joined the Thunderspy staff not long after it first sprang up under the application of being an artist, to lend my skills to create costumes and the like for our server. Unfortunately I was unaware of how the process of getting costumes into the game worked, and only just managed to figure it out almost an entire year later with the guidance of Bubblewrap. None of this would have been possible without them. It's a very roundabout way of doing things and hopefully the process will be much smoother as we develop a better pipeline.
As soon as we understood most of the process, I started us off with a pack that I thought the game severely lacked, insect parts. Horns, mandibles, antennae etc. The pack was generally well received and the parts are fairly popular in both insect and non-insect costumes. I also added in some miscellaneous parts as well like 3D glasses and a nurse's cap. If I'm not mistaken, this marked the very first costume pack any of the private servers had.
Afterwards, I put up a poll with many different themes for the next costume pack. Tacticool and Spooky tied, so I thought about combining both themes and release parts based on that. Halloween was coming up, so I gave the 31st of October the deadline for when the pack would be released. Never again.
I spent most of my limited time getting skeleton parts to work, and by the time Halloween rolled around, I had just barely managed to get all the skeleton parts, Shivan, transparent, and invisible bodies done (and had to remake my test server with the help from Socks). A lot less than what I had hoped to complete, but ironically, allowing invisible parts to be used opened the door to tons and tons of new costume concepts and characters. A new poll was made shortly after and through two disqualifications of rigging, Robotics won the next theme.
Robotics
I wanted to make sure that every theme I add to the list of choices feels justified. There are already a decent amount of options to make robotic characters, so this theme felt a little out of place to some people. My goal with robotics is to really make your character feel like a robot, not just a human with some metal gloss. So I set out to make some really abstract parts instead of the usual texture map over the default character.
There's been a good amount of testing to see what works and what doesn't. Unfortunately with the way the game works I can't really stray away from the humanoid form, so Battletech-like bots with those wide hips and features will look really weird at best. Maybe one day we can make new body types so we can really start to unlock potential character design. What really puts a limit on things are the joints between each body part. Hands to Chest, Lower Legs to Hips, etc. Because of how the game works you either have to make a costume end point line up exactly with the joint, or bigger than the joint itself. If it's smaller then you'll end up with these weird looking holes, you can see what I mean if you use invisible parts with anything.
I had a lot going on since the release of the Tacti-Spooky pack, and couldn't really spend a lot of time on Robotics until more recently. The project has picked up a lot of steam and well underway with a lot of costume parts being made. My goal is to make at least 2 different costumes for each part of the body, but that could change depending on if I want to get this out sooner or not. I'm starting to feel the burnout, but I definitely want this to be a stellar pack worth the time since Halloween and worth it to those who didn't feel Robotics was that great of a choice.
As of writing this there are 21 new costume parts that I am happy with and will add to the pack. 5 new heads, 3 hands, 3 legs, 2 weapons, 2 back options, and some detail parts. I do want to make at least 1 hip and torso part as well to help round things off. I'm very happy with how things are turning out and I'm hoping to get this pack done by next month at the latest. When it's done I'll be dropping the next poll to see which theme will be chosen next. I suspect Monster or Under The Sea will take the lead since they had such a huge demand last time, but because of the obvious rigging I had to disqualify them.
The next poll will take place on the discord itself to help prevent any kind of rigging again. We can see who voted for what and if there's a sudden influx of dummy accounts we can easily tell what's being tampered with. After the first week of the poll the top 5 choices will be put up for one final week of voting to see what will be next.
I'm thinking Robots will really let people know what kind of new costumes we are capable of making, but also help to understand what we're limited to. I'm not a miracle worker, so a lot of ideas I've been given are thrown out simply because they just cannot work with the current bodytype.
If only I could do this for a living.