Smoke Fumus

Commissions, commissions and more commissions. 

The most annoying one from the late ones been port of a dress between bodies. Which turned out to also be a bakedown and reduction 

Download: https://mega.nz/file/EokXwT6Q#aonnBdAtcUYl8zntyTW3RkkiD9AQMXlFYzy_OUsHaWA

Tips are appreciated and encouraged.

So yeah, i've been stuck grinding 3d commissions for the past several months. However, one project I did get started on was second remake twinsen's house from little big adventure 2. Original:

Current: 

This is actually second time I remaking it. First time was 10 year ago, back when I was just screwing around. It is very subpar to say the least. And i only spent 7-9 hours on that one. I'm 24+ hours in on this one. 

This is the 10 year-ago attempt btw:

Why am i doing it second time? Well quite simple - I wanted to see just how much I improved/slowed down over the years. Results so far are inconclusive. But remake sure looks nearly identical to the original. Should be done sooner than later anyway.

A small report on a progress up to date 

A week before prior one i was working on a new map for a Complex Doom invasion mod for zandronum. Majority of textures are made from scratch, with some machine learning involving for downscaling baked pbr from 128x to 64x pixel resolution without loss of important detail.

I'll post full story when it is done. 

That's a lot of info to go through but here we go. 

The iterative process 

Iterating over

Loaded into unity3d, adjusted lights, did direct downscaling - doesn't look good

Lancoz downscaling looked ugly

Area downscaling via python scripting

Adding an triangle depth normal edge detection + downscaling "lineart" pass, this one via lancoz because of lack of color detail, which made it decent

Almost painterly enough

Unwrapped, added green demontech plasma corrosion

Finally added 50% mixed soft posterization 

And finally everything together, with new sounds to boot.

Basic pipeline is this - I render at 640x400 in unity with sharpening, SSAO and posterization.

Then i render the plasma puff effect separately but without the alpha channel on a black background. Bring those over to a separate python script which creates alpha out of black channel, while also normalizing the color so it doesn't have colorbanding, resize it down.

Then I render the edges at 1280x800 separately, then bring it over to quite extensive python script which takes the sprite, scales it down, 50% multiplies it with the edges, then overlays it on top of the puff, after which it saves with the correct sprite name.

Sourcecode is included https://gist.github.com/smoketh/814bc095880bc48bc64058d52fb108c8

And that's pretty much it. 

Here's a tree. It's an edit of old doom tree but with leaves. 

And here's my attempt at mimicking said leaves.

The secret? proper source material on a model and a selected color palette to match it. 

There is a bit more work which could be done, like even sharper rim color, but that shouldn't be that noticeable.

Before all this activity happened I've been sitting making a shmup.

Got sidetracked to porting this https://probabletrain.itch.io/city-generator

to unity 3d native so I can permutate it in-situ.

Tl;dr after a lot of screwing around it got back to the point it was where i started and then some. By that i mean i had to export to STL and then spend an hour or so in blender + in unity unwrapping the whole damn thing. Now - it's doing everything in editor. 

If you recognize this, first of all - good digging skills, and second - yes this is mazinger z shmup color palette 

Currently several things happening. One of them is editing CDM09 (of Complex doom invasion mod) and remaking demontech repeater. 

I'll update as i go along.