Welcome to 2021! May this new year be full of lots of wonderful memories for us all. I hope your holidays were great as well. 🙂 What did I do over the holidays? Besides eating lots of food, collecting some sweet loot, and spending time with family, I also did what you’ll see below.
I decided I was tired of Jasper looking so “static”. Watching him stand there in the beautifully blowing grass, he looked very plastic. Borrowing the same shader code that the grass is using, and leveraging the amazing power of Vertex Colors, I made it so the feathers on Jasper now ruffle in the wind! 😀
The greener the vertex, the more it’s affected by the “wind”.
And this is it in action. I’d like to apply it to the wing and tail feathers a bit as well. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out a way to make the feathers work like actual feathers (which don’t bend, but rather pivot from the source), but this ripple effect works pretty well. (Sorry for the low quality. GIFs take up a lot of space!)
I’ve also added some rocks/cliffs to the scene, so it’s not “just” rolling green hills. I’m having to be careful not to cover too much with rocks though since it’s pretty fun to do. I also added the yellow flowers you can see there. I plan on adding several different varieties of flowers, shrubs, bushes, and trees before this level is done.
Random face-palm moment I had the other week: I’ve been scratching my head for awhile trying to figure out how to do the borders of the islands. Trying to get some clean lines, while not having it be too smooth. I initially had things flat shaded, but that didn’t work. Then I tried this cool triplanar material, and it worked ok-ish. But I wasn’t happy with how it clashed with the flat shading.
All I had to do was make it all smooth shaded…
I want to experiment with different “noise” textures which are controlling the border between colors. If I had a somewhat geometric noise texture, that could turn up some very interesting results. I might experiment with that later.
Last but definitely not least, we now have a design for the Monument. I’ll be going more in-depth in another devblog, but this monument is important for the history of the island, the Voyagers, and the mysterious Thunderbirds.
Thanks for dropping by!
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