This is a blog to wrangle in any adjustments I made over the final stretch of production to textures, my rig, etc.
Fidget
Texture
So the main thing I fixed was this baseplate, which originally I didn’t have any line art on. Looking at this it did seem strange that the rest of my work had line art and my baseplate didn’t so I had started to mimic the stony effect from the cave front onto the stones and then sent this to Tori, and she thought this was a good idea.
So I continued making some lines across the stones, making sure that they didn’t take away too much from my main character model.
I then wanted to see what it was like to have a line that would frame around the baseplate, but I ended up leave this off as I thought it looked too silly.
Then this is what the new stones looked like in Blender all hooked up. I can say that this looks a lot better, and as Tori put it, it links it all together well.
Rig
There was one last thing that I thought I could end up using before I started animating, and that was adding some squash and stretch to the base plate. I set this using shape keys and drivers, just like I had in my previous rigging post.
First I went and duplicated a bone and renamed it to be my SS CTRL, my squash and stretch controller. I then went into the bone and added in a custom property and named this accordingly. Then I went back to my mesh of my baseplate and added on a maintain volume constraint and worked out where I could have my baseplate scaled on the Z axis. I then set these constraints up on the custom property scale.
This was the shape key that I ended up using for squash, I added some extra loops around the object and moved these inwards to create this accordion-like effect.
Then this was what the stretch version ended up looking like, using the extra loops I used the proportional edit tool to scale the middle inwards.
I will be honest, I am not exactly happy with how these squash and stretches turned out, since I hadn’t designed the mesh to have any sort of squash and stretch on them. However, if I do end up using this I can always go and tweak it at any time with some feedback from my group (a particular area where it is obvious I hadn’t designed this with S&S in mind is where the feet end up sitting on this baseplate). So I have made a note to, for future models, when designing my character and starting to rig to make a list of all the elements that I need but also want my character to do so that I can make this happen.
Props
D6
Then I had thought it might be nice to give Tori a version of the dive in my cave wall to sit on the DnD table, and she also thought this might be nice. So I went and made a new version of the texture just for Tori as well as sending her the file with just the D6 model.
The original number layout I had didn’t work so I actually went online to look at papercraft dice templates, to get an unwrapped version of a D6. Then I was able to just send these over to Tori.
Title
One thing that I thought needed changing, was our title. I made this relatively quickly and long before we had decided on our style and concrete references. Along with this I had made it on a smaller resolution so I went ahead and remade our title in 1920x1090p and using references that I had when creating textures for my props. I wanted to try and mimic the design that I had been using so I chose a similar colour scheme, and I wanted to create the right painterly textures.
I went and sketched out this main design with the new elements in mind, I changed the design of the dice to match the design of what I put in the cliff face, and I changed up some of the rocky brick placements but kept in the same font design.
Then as I started lining out my elements I used some quick colours to help me visualise how I would create the same texture effect that I had with my props. I did this by using a light pressure and doing quick strokes with the Hartz brush in Procreate.
Once I had the majority of the line art finished I went ahead and added in my base colours, I used my work on the cliff face as a loose reference on selecting these.
I then went and added on those painterly, rocky details with that Hartz brush. I went and tried to have the same approach as my 3D texturing, looking at how the light generator dispersed the colours and working to achieve this by hand, as well as have loose gradation across the stone as well. I did leave out the highlight pass as my attempts weren’t coming out right.
Since I was missing highlights, I went ahead and added in some orange light that mimicked the torches in our dungeon model. I thought that this tied the title together quite nicely and you can really tell I spent more time on this than my first version.
