Delicious Dev Report #5 - Slice of Life

Howdy doodles! Pat here with a peek at our approach to modeling the prototype characters.

The truth is.. I'm more than a little enthusiastic about this project. I've got a generic humanshape model that I couuuuuld be using for the prototypes..

Baby's First box model

..but it turns out it's actually super useful attempting to model these characters while they're in their "first draft" stages! Making BellyBuster's patty spin for attacks was something that jumped out at us after an early point in his design, and that's something the generic model wouldn't have been able to do.

A real gutbuster

Over the last week, I've been working on the prototype for our next character: Slice!

Not the latest version, but the first solid piece of the pie!

To start, I take Pablo's design and start box-modeling it up in Blender. I split a cube down the middle, add a mirror modifier to it across the x-axis so any changes I make are automatically mirrored.

This step always feels weird..

I extrude out the limbs and head, and start sculpting the model to round off edges and make it look a little less cube-y.

Now we're getting somewhere..

Next I UV-unwrap the model chunk by chunk and use the colors from the draft image to texture this baby up. When we get to doing this properly, we'll mark seams and export a texture map image for Pablo to color but for now this works!

S-sort of..

After a bit more work...

Phew..

We're ready to roll!

Next up is creating an armature for the rigging. This can be kinda tricky and I'm a little rusty so I've been referring to this guide as a resource. After parenting the rig to the mesh, we get something like this:

That we can start moving around like this:

Finally we start referring to our shot list and animate the heck out of her!

This is what happens when you forgot to clear your turnaround keyframes..

Wait, uh...

Yeah, more like that. To figure out how we want all these moves to look, we discuss the kind of personality we want the characters to have and come up with moves that would mix that with the design elements from the initial renders. For Slice, we wanted her to come off as real peppy and excited to get into battle.

Once these are all done, we export it and start the process of importing them all into Unity!

That's it for this week's Delicious Development Report! Hope y'all found this interesting and feel free to hit us up with comments or Qs if you wanted to know more!

-Pat
0w07