I've managed to find enough workarounds that it's not actually impacting my workflow (or, more accurately, it's not impacting my workflow enough to stop me from working entirely) anymore, but updating all of these assets came with their own fun and unique downsides.
One such downside was that certain parts of the character models I'm working with (like the teeth and gums) weren't loading in the new textures correctly once placed in the studio environment so I could start posing and animating. What made this so frustrating and difficult to fix was that when I was in the dedicated character editor, the textures seemed to load fine and I didn't have the issue. This only got worse when I tried to reset the textures, because whatever way the new texture didn't load in correctly now applied to all textures for that part of the character within the studio. With the help of another dev, I found a workaround, but it required me to basically hard reset the character's entire head, which also reset every other updated texture, which meant spending more time updating Kouhai than animating her, especially any time you needed to see her teeth. Incredibly frustrated for a character that's supposed to be one that does a lot of smiling. And teeth weren't the only body part that had this issue - Senpai had his own problems.
The upshot of this is that it forced me to learn a few new things and get familiar with a few more new assets that opened up a few more new possibilities. Obviously it's pretty far from perfect since it's the first time I'm using some of these, but practice makes perfect, and that's what Precious Kouhai is for. All of this is going to go a long way toward making the visuals of my next major project much higher quality. And hopefully I'll have most of the jank ironed out by the time I start working on it.
I obviously still expect to get better over time as I use all these tools, both new and old. Putting time into individual animations is a big part of how good they look, and part of what I'm trying to improve on right now is speed. Which of course means the other thing currently driving me up a wall is trying to avoid spending three hours animating a custom walk cycle that I only need to work for about three steps, but knowing walk cycles are really difficult to animate and time correctly and actually having to figure it out for myself are two very, very different things. It'll probably still look at least a little weird if you actually stop and look at it (or roll back and replay it a bunch of times, since it only plays once before the game moves on) but I at least got it to a point where Kouhai didn't look like she was shifting into gear and sliding off-screen, and that's good enough for now.
There's plenty of other little bits that I still need to put some time into figuring out, but at the very least, I've learned some new things - which is always good - and I'm able to get some animating done - which means Precious Kouhai won't do what Maids & Masters did and balloon into taking more than twice as long to finish developing as I expected it to because it got more complicated the further into development I got.
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