Legacy Game Project Update 01

Making Of / 15 July 2021

Hello There!

Here is some insight to what I've been doing during my spare time. The last few weeks for me has been waking up at 6am, work until midnight with breaks for taking care of the puppy, eating and occasional outside activities :P

In general I've been relearning how to code (ue4 c++ and blueprint), rig/skin, animate, sequences, VFX etc.... basically all facets of game-development so that I can basically just try and do stuff by myself as far as I can go time-wise.

I also decided to reboot my old UE4 project, scrap the old code and in with the new. Rewrote locomotion, got proper state machines for my locomotion states (not the animation graph stuff, actual state machines so that I can properly encapsulate the code for when you're in different states and not rely on millions of bool checks).

Generally code-wise, the project is in a much better and organized state than the previous one, which is a great.

and then I started adding in the basics again.

(all actors interact with the water (ue4 water plugin), playing sounds and particles now)

Such as:

- Creating State Machine Functionality for Locomotion

- Character Movement (3rd person movement + strafe aim mode)

- Character Actions (Jump, Sprint Jump, Mantling, Interactions)

- Interactable Objects (Pickups, Readables, Weapons, Switches)

- World Interaction (Sounds, Particles, Music, Water Shader + FX/SFX)

- Combo System State Machine (Attack classes + tweakable modifiers)

- Combat Juiciness (Hit FX/SFX, Hitstop, Screenshake)

It's hard to put everything on a list without it growing into a huge thing of tiny specifics. Essentially what I want is a decent foundational framework that I can use to get started.

Doing this of for the last month also made me realize how little time I actually have spent concepting the world or the characters..

(character water sounds + splashes)

I do have some idea about what I want it to be but doing concepts (not that Im good at it) or creating 3d or levels can kind of come after I've created the basic functionality of most of the things. Like yesterday when I started making the basics of the enemy base class and I started thinking about what kind of enemies I want, and then spiraled into thinking conceptually what I want but also production friendly stuff..

(interactable objects basic features)

I realized that at some point soon I have to kind of decide on what bone-setup I want for the different enemies, it'd be good if I could rely on a minimum set of skeleton setups (4-5?) would be awesome so that I could reuse most of it and model/retexture characters.

I guess I have to think about that some more or start dividing up my days during summer for different department tasks XD Right now I'm just going off my own Trello board of every basic thing I need to get in before I get started blocking out the starting areas.

(fooundation for combat, combat state machines, hit-timing etc)

Oh well, the next thing I'll probably hop on will be basic AI Behavior Logic & States and it'll probably just be the weird straw-man idling , picking new locations to walk to within his zone and then following the player around trying to attack him if he enters the detection radius (and potentially sightline?) :P

Eeeeeither way, that's the update

If you've made it all the way to the end, congrats :P If you're interested in what I'm doing you can always join my patreon or twitch streams, follow me on twitter or here on artstation.

http://www.patreon.com/chrisradsby

http://www.twitch.tv/chrisradsby
http://www.twitter.com/chrisradsby

Until next time !
Warping Out!

//Chris Radsby

Hobby Game Dev & Progress

Making Of / 23 June 2021

Hello!

It's been a couple of months since I took a break from programming, however I'm back to it and actually decided to reboot my own project and make sure the foundation is actually better and less messy. There were a couple of decisions for this:

I went to fast into programming detailed game-mechanics (free climbing system with IK, Physics based ropes swinging)
The Foundation was bad. The walking, running, jumping all felt kind of crap
The foundation for some of the programming was bad

Here are some old gifs of that:

Onto the new

So I went back to basics and made sure the locomotion went from Basic UE4

but I had to do some update to my character, so I redid the skeleton, rigging and skinning
(it's definitely not a fun part of this whole thing)

To this below, which generally allows the user to move around more smoothly. I also have an aiming mode so the character can strafe and aim. Later on I'm intending this mode for stuff like a rope-hook or something like that or throwing things.

With the basic "feeling" of the locomotion in I had to deal with the biggest issue I had in the last iteration of the project which was that my movement states or any state for that matter was handled by either UE4 Enums or by pure boolean checks. Making new functionality really messy.

https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/state.html

Here is a good read if you like this kind of stuff, but essentially it boiled down to, whenever I made a new function for my character I had to manually ensure that the player couldn't access other functions whilst doing something else. Example, not sprint when jumping in the air. This meant that generally I spent a lot of time just bug-fixing things.

The solution for this is to make sure that when a character enters a state , he's accessing functionality that only exists in this state , the easiest way to do this is to use a Finite State Machine. The main issue is that UE4 doesn't actually support it natively, so you have to rely on kind of a messy workflow using Enums, which work but it's a bit annoying to get a good overview of what you're doing.

So I got to work and actually got my hands wet with a code plugin called Logic Driver Pro and with the help of a kind soul (Alzahel) on discord I started to learn how to work this plugin since it's definitely not a plug and go type solution, however when understood it's pretty straight forward.

My character now enters the right state (as shown on the preview visualisation) allowing me to run certain function upon entering, In the state and when the state is exited. Which is perfect, whilst making sure the transitions to other states are limited. Extremely powerful and very helpful.

After this I decided I kind of disliked looking at the gray character so I made sure I brought over the cel-shading and my eye-tracking solution from the previous project.

That's pretty much it for the last few weeks of work, if you're interested in this stuff then you can always follow me on my Patreon to get more insights , check out my livestream on twitch where I stream Art and will eventually move over into more game-development as I go ( I want to hit a good foundation before I start streaming game dev stuff).

oh and if you have any questions just ask em below!

Until next time!
Warping out

//Chris Radsby

[UE4 Abandoned] Stalker inspired scene

Making Of / 08 June 2021

Hello!

I thought I'd do a little update here as well, I've just posted my latest environment. You can see it here:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lxWZL5

It was the environment we created during the 10 sessions of the www.twitch.tv/chrisradsby art-stream. Where we started completely from scratch and set this up. It's mostly using asset packs from the Unreal Marketplace and the main point of it was to teach composition and set-dressing. We did our own water-shader and mess around with particles. Setting up characters in the scene etc. It was all quite valuable stuff and videos are available on my patreon. www.patreon.com/chrisradsby if you're interested!

Next thing up will be a stylized interior made in UE5, which I'll be updating on here later this week.
Until next time!

Until next time!
Warping out

//Chris Radsby

New Horizons - What have I been doing this year and since my latest update

Making Of / 17 October 2020

Hello There!

This year has been interesting so far, apart from the horrors of the pandemic it's been a year of learning, self-discovery and new horizons.
Early this year I decided to once again to completely change 3D-package. I decided to move on from Modo and into Blender.

The way I do this generally is to just uninstall any other 3D Package I might have and concentrate fully on learning the new package. As for my art, behind the scenes my art has gone through some more changes, I've been learning how to rig, how to animate & going deeper into learning about how to set up VFX.

My two-three latest personal projects are basically the result of what I've been learning from January -> June a lot of which I've also covered here in my blogposts.

June marked a new beginning for me. It's the month that I decided to re-learn C++. I learned C++ in high-school, but back then the application for it was never learning it for video-games it was about creating PC Software stuff and it never really stuck all that well. Now however, I decided to relearn it and deep fully into trying to become a one-man army game developer.

I'll try and list my journey of learning since June.

Programming: C++ Basics
Programming: UE4 C++ Basics
Blender: Creating Armatures/Skeletons
Blender: Creating Rigs
Blender: Animation
UE4: Learning Blueprints
UE4: Learning how to use the Animation Graph
UE4: Coding Health/Stamina Systems
UE4: Coding NPCs & Simple Behaviors
UE4: Dealing with Items/PIckups/Weapons
UE4: Player/NPC Attacks & Damage
UE4: Item/Enemy Spawning Volumes
UE4: Level Change, Saving & Loading
UE4: Setting up a Custom Character (from Blender -> UE4)
UE4: Setting up Multi-Skeletal Mesh Character for Character Customization
UE4: Created an "Eye-LookAt" function for my Character.
UE4: Implemented my own Freeform Climbing System that works with moving & rotating Objects
UE4: Learned how to use IK with the Animation Graph
UE4: Implemented more character traversal: Learned how to set up Mantling
UE4: Created my own "Rope Gun" a la Thief (Spawns a rope on location and unfolds into a longer rope)
UE4: Run-time Spline Creation for Random Awesome things you can do with Splines
UE4: Created my own Rope-Swinging System
UE4: Decided to learn UMG for UI/UX
UE4: Learned how to setup controller navigation in Menues
UE4: Decided to create my own Inventory System

This basically covers 3-4 months of me learning things on the side of the 8 hours I spend every day at work.

Game-development isn't at all fancy, it's nitty gritty and most of the time things just look whack and considering that, most of what I have recorded isn't probably interesting enough for you guys to look at for the blog, but I thought I'd just show two things that really had me feeling "wow, this is going somewhere".

Developed a new look at function for the custom character I implemented.

Of course there has been a lot of head-aches during this time and I think generally I've gotten a deeper understanding and appreciation for the work that others put into these things and since a lot of this stuff isn't very exciting to look at, here is a quick video-straight from the editor of me trying my own swinging system that I made from scratch.

Kinda cool huh? Blood, Sweat & Tears I guess! But it's been a lot of fun for me though!

Now you know what I'm up to, and the reason I'm not actively posting art-blog things anymore. I'm busy learning more about game-development as a whole and I'm not gonna lie:

I'm loving it :D

but there are still plenty of time left until the end of the year so let's continue working hard and learning new things eh?

Warping out!

/Chris Radsby

Creating a Series Pt 16 - Legacy Project - Updating the Canopy Shader

Making Of / 04 June 2020

Hey there!

So I was kinda unhappy with my current versions of trees canopies, which is kinda funny since I've already released this scene "officially" haha but there is never anything wrong with upgrading your art & scene performance!

In terms of my needs for a visual look that works from all distances the original canopies were:

Obvious looking polygon cards
Inconsistent from all Distances (ie with the shadowing and AO acting differently form all ranges)
Probably a bit too "realistically shaded"
Not enough stylized control.

SO. I spent an hour early this morning reworking the shader

Here is what they look like from a distance with LODs included.

So the new shader does basically everything I want it to:

It makes the tree canopies shade more consistently across a distance, even with LODs optimizing the heck out of the trees.
The shader is more performant and runs faster than the previous shader. (Better visuals + better performance woop!)
The look is more unified and easier to deal with for production
I have way more control over the Stylization of the Canopies. (How bright, how colorful, how dark the shaded side is etc)
- Ie I can change everything easier, so even if the shaded side is to dark I can easily change that and if I want them to not be as dark in the distance etc etc.

Here is a quick gif of time-of-day and how the canopy shading acts.

So I'd like to think this mornings efforts was a success!

Until next time!
Warping out!

/Chris Radsby

Creating a Series Pt 15 - Finalizing the Forester Camp

Making Of / 23 May 2020

Hello!

It's been a while since I last posted , I thought I'd give some updates on what's currently happening!

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/6a96v0

So most of you already know but I've finalized one area of my open world art project Legacy. I decided to go ahead and finalize it so I actually have something to show people when they ask about what I'm currently doing and planning for the future.

Super happy that I'm getting a lot of attention and love for this piece. I think this style is something that I've kinda been trying to do for a long time, ever since I made my stylized attempt at Konoha a long time ago.

I think what inspires me the most is games that I've enjoyed as a kid most notably Zelda Ocarina of Time and the tranquility of Lake Hylia.

The Nintendo 64 days, it's weird how they affected me that much to the point where I want to make art and worlds just like it. I think most people have some kind of trigger for the art that they want to make though and this is just one of mine. Together with Outcast from Appeal back in 1999. (which I'm also currently replaying with the complete visual remake).

Project Legacy

it still lives like you can see and I'll continue my explorations into the world I'm creating but I also thought that I would show some development stuffs while I currently have your attention.

Added the new sky/atmospherics, trying out the volumetric clouds and whilst doing this I just ended up improving the lighting and color-grading.

The birds are Morph Target animations (Blendshapes/keys?) that I modeled in Blender then used a script to apply the vertex positions into the UVs and then use UE4 to read them and blend between the morph targets. So that way it became a convenient Static Mesh + Material which I could easily feed into a particle system. Looking back I'm sure just using vertex-blended Sine Waves would be just as good but I wanted to try to get the workflow working in Blender and learn how to do it so I did haha.

I've also been looking into doing some small grass / moss type things so I've been looking into efficent workflows of setting that up inside of Blender. So far the results have been good but I've yet to figure out a super optimal way to do it though but the shading is fluffy and works at least.

I'm also tried making a Gerstner Wave Material Function that I can use to plug into my water eventually. I will probably only use it for oceans though and not lakes. I will eventually try to blend it with the Distance Fields along the shore to have the waves calm down and turn into shore-waves.

Oh yeah and I made this little camp tent, just super quickly with Blenders Cloth tools and some new wind particles that are more optimized.

For the next area I'm going to go something new. Even though I like the deserty stuff that I was working on I kinda need to transfer all of that into the single-level that I'm creating. Before I used World Composition to make everything which is good but it also made my life more annoying in many ways. So I'm gonna see if I can just create everything in the one single-level.

Oh well, until next time!

Warping out!

/Chris Radsby

Cyberpunk Challenge - Part 03 - Fleshing things out

Making Of / 12 March 2020

Hey there!

So I've been working kinda slowly lately, a lot of stress popping up now at work and in my life in general I feel but I have tried getting some art-time in. I do feel like I'm heading somewhere good? Let's hope so at least. Let me know what you think! But first!

Answering some more questions:

Whos' design is this? Do you have a concept?

No concept! These days I design my scenes mostly by myself since I want to create artwork that is unique to me.
Inspirations I have plenty, mostly for popular cyberpunk shows and animé.

Teach me senpai !?

Sorry to say that I'm somewhat overworked lately, so I'm trying to focus a bit more on myself. I will however continue with my mentorships when things calm down :)

So the main things I've been working on since my last result

Detailing foreground by adding more pipes, decal text, more lights.
UVd my sewer tunnel, made a concrete texture.
Made a flying paper VFX, added some small moving cloth bits (vertex shader)
Made electric arc VFX.
Scaled the character up
Added more detail along ralings
Made a powerline thingie + pipes leading into the hole
Added emissive around the hole in the back, to light up when the eletric arc VFX hits it.
Added a hole on the right side, with some green light coming out and trying to add more interest to the foreground
Moved my camera back to be able to add more detail in the foreground and puss less attention on the background.

The flying paper VFX with the spawn-rate turned to stupid.

Progression shot

and the current update, a video showing everything in motion in it's current state.

That's all folks.
If you have any questions let me know!

Warping out!

/Chris Radsby

Cyberpunk Challenge - Part 01 - Getting started

Making Of / 17 February 2020

Hey guys!

I thought I'd get started doing the cyberpunk challenge as well. To join the others in the community trying to create kick-ass art.

My reference board is similar to everybody else I would believe. I'm doing asian inspired stuff, especially Hong Kong. But since it's so early days I haven't really spent enough time looking into the exact look that I want.

I don't really have any compositional refrerence right now and kinda just going by what I feel looks good for now ^^ Though I bet that during the time of the challenge things will quickly change.

So I decided to not do a blog post until I got at least a decent blockout up and running, so this is what I've got so far. I'm going a very different direction from many of the others I believe. I'm going to lean heavily into stylized rather than go fully realistic. I'll still have realistic shapes but I just want the whole thing to be very artistic and stylized across the board.

I'm currently using only dynamic lighting, no RTX-features at all.

So yeah, until next time! Hopefully I'll be able to spend a couple of hours each night on this but we'll see :) Between work, getting fit, mentorship and gaming it's kinda hard to get this done haha. Gotta keep up with the youngins eh!?...I'm not that old.

Oh well, until next time!

Warping out!

/Chris Radsby

Creating a Series Pt 13 - Mentees & Desert Region Buildings Start

Making Of / 25 April 2019

Hello!

So it's been a long time since I last posted but some stuff has happened since then. Let me first say that I'm super proud over my mentees who've been outputting some really sweet art but also writing some 80.lv articles. They've been working super hard to get some art out there O_o.

Honestly guys, probably borderline unhealthy but great work :D

Patrick Ziegler
https://www.artstation.com/patrickoziegler

Stijn Van Gaal
https://www.artstation.com/stijnvangaal

Rasmus Kristensen
https://www.artstation.com/bagner

Really well done guys, insane amount of work and care put into these :) Super happy for you guys and I hope it opens new opportunities for you :)

Legacy Project Progress

As for my own progress I've been in somewhat hiatus lately, been a bit overworked but I'm still trying to do something while I'm waiting. I find making stylized materials much harder than making realistic materials for some reason xD It's all very tricky to get right especially since most of my project is relying on Gradient Mapping, I end up having to really rethink my approach on how to handle Albedo-Colors. These I have here are just the colors I use for previewing.

I've been updating my materials and especially the "crack-logic" or whatever you would call it for my tiled-stone materials in Substance Designer.

The cracks have been mostly worked on to make them feel more stylized and suitable for the type of art I'm making.

But I've also started building my desert-region buildings and it's all going well so far. Very slow and steady progress, don't want to rush things and I'm trying to remind myself to have fun doing it as well. There was some times there where I kept thinking about my project more as work rather than a fun side-project.

The start of the Desert Region Buildings

This is the color scheme I'm currently going for this region.I want the water to be greener generally than what it is in the grasslands, I want this orange nice color contrasting with the blue skies. As well as redder looking base-wood colors.

Right now I'm just spending more time developing the base-module shapes I want to be using for these style type buildings. Right now the building designs are very inspired from the mud-type buildings you find in Africa.

After that I'm going to add more detail, more wooden beams, tarps, decal shapes etc. I also want to infuse more fantasy into them but for now I'm quite happy with how they're turning out...

Oh well, until next time!

Warping out!

/Chris Radsby

Creating a Series Pt 12 - Landscape Grass Coloring + Questions

Making Of / 27 March 2019

Hello!

These last few weeks have been full of procrastinating (no shame): The Division 2, Devil May Cry , Sekiro.
A bunch of good games have come out so I've spent even less time working on my project and even then it hasn't been that much in the way of art but organizing and doing technical stuff which I'll talk about below!

Legacy Project Progress

This week I've been setting up a new region in World Composition, it'll be the desert region that I've been wanting to work on. So I've been properly setting it up and doing all the preperation work with folder-structure and shader-structure to get it up and running. Sadly I don't have anything super fancy to show.

So , I've been thinking about ways of coloring my grass more dynamically. The current way I'm doing it is by using a terrain color texture that the grass is sampling from. However I wanted a workflow that would take my Landscape Material Painting in my so I decided to try out a thing:

Landscape Painting Render to Texture

Here you can see the material painting being painted straight onto the texture that the grass later will sample colors from.

The grass (wavy, blurred area) is picking up the landscape materials colors perfectly

So even with this working, what are the main pros & cons?

Texture Sampling

PRO - Cheaper & More efficient to use a static texture

PRO - Texture Resolution is very true to the texture itself (ie the quality from texture to color sampling is detailed)

CON - Not dynamic at all, would have to export a texture for the whole landscape every time I want to see change

RenderTarget Sampling

PRO - It's all dynamic in real time

PRO - Works with any color pickup sampled from any of the materials I paint on the terrain

CON - Even at the same resolution as the static texture somehow the detail doesn't come through. This is important to me because I rely on having a colored noise in my grass colors so that you can see individual clusters of grass.

CON - Performance , it's quite expensive to do on every frame while you're working. Higher resolution textures are real VRAM hogs as well so using bigger resolutions you might end up crashing or have crazy slow-downs.

Static Texture Color Sampling - Showing that it picks up even the smallest changes in the texture.

Landscape Render2Texturer Sampling - Has the same resolution as above texture, but yet, ends up not being very detailed at all.

(Maybe I've missed something here, I'll keep looking at it)

Summary:

Even though it's super neat to have it real-time and it picks up colors from any material I paint. I find that the lack of detail in the texture is annoying me since I don't get the same quality. That said, for other projects that have more detailed textured grass it would benefit them a lot to use a Render2Target texture for the whole terrain for dynamic color pick-up.

Questions

So I thought I'd spend one of these blog-posts answering some of the questions I've been getting. So If you have any questions please let me know and I'll try to answer them more in detail in future blog-updates!

Why do you only keep showing one time-of-day setting?

The main reason I keep showing one time-of-day or one weather setting is that I don't really feel the need to explore different times of days yet. I'm approaching this project like I would creating a full-game. Time of Day & Weather is pretty far down the list for me.

That said, I have time-of-day working in game currently, I don't have weather and if I were to show it I would actually want to implement a system for it rather than actually just faking everything which I usually do for portfolio pieces.

What texturing software do you use?

I use mainly Substance Designer/Painter and Photoshop. My texturing needs are quite light, I've never really felt like I need to expand my texturing to Zbrush. It does happen from time to time though but I try to stay away from it since it's severely hampering production times.

Teach me senpai!?

Ehm, I'm still learning as I go myself xD I do run a mentorship with The Mentor Coalition where I teach artist what I think they need to focus on to up their game. So far it's been very successful and I've seen my mentees start making art at a higher level.

Oh well, until next time!

Warping out!

/Chris Radsby