Skybox, Time of Day, 3rd Person Camera, New Trees

3rd Person Camera

I got tired of the old cube dude model so I made another equally temporary low poly dude to take his place. I think he’s a little cuter. I’m having a hard time committing to a character concept, I really am stumped with this part. So I’ve just been going hard at the environment. I added in the old 3rd person camera, and I’m working on the controls because right now it’s shaky when traveling on anything besides flat ground.

Trees

New tree models were needed, and I think they look good. I’m going to make a few variations of similar looking trees to start mixing things up. I figured out how to unwrap a UV map in blender, as well as add ambient occlusion map to it in Photoshop, so from now on everything I model will have the sexy shadows in the edges. Only problem I see in the future is a world where everything is AO except the procedural stuff, so we’ll have to figure that one out when we get there. By making all the trees share the same one material with a texture and using more larger trees instead of a bunch of smaller trees I cut my draw calls down from around 7,000 to around 1,200 so the frames shot right back up.

Skybox

I said fuck it to the solid color skybox + fox + camera clipping for now. I just cant find a good way to make the fog work the way I’d like it to. So the default procedural skybox is in, and honestly is looks great. I’m going to try my best to work with this one. The major downside is without fog you see chunks generating in the distance. Oh well. I added stars that fade in and out depending on the sun angle, so that’s pretty cool. Still no moon though.

Night Time

So right now right time is really dark. The stars look great and the only light in the whole world is a very very dim blue light. I would like to have a moon cycle that would change every night, and depending on how full the moon is, the brighter the ambient night light would be. I think I have it figured out, and I’ll probably trying to implement that in the next few updates.

The lamp has been modified a little on it’s intensity, spread, and position with the player, so it feels a little better. It’s very rust-esque in the fact that you can see whats immediately around you, and you can sorta see stuff in the distance. I may model a little lantern for it soon to pop up.

Plans

I hope to start modeling more things to put into the world. Grass, campfires, lantern, animals, clouds, all kinds of stuff. I may not have a solid feel for the main character, but I have good pictures in my head for world objects and I’d like to start making it feel more immersive.