Hello everyone! We are back with another development breakdown and this time we will be covering the creation of our beautiful little butterfly! Now, we know what you are thinking... "It's just a butterfly!" but in all seriousness it is our first step to bringing the environment to life and will give us all the needed experience to continue adding a variety more critters to the game.
Another reason for htis update is that our graphics artist owen has a habit of recording all the work he does, just incase he has to make a video or feels like sharing how he created something with us. With all this material at hand it seemed like a waste not to share the development process with you! So, without any further delays we bring you the initial sketches.
Owen started by doing some rough sketches of how he thought the butterfly could look. This allowed him to get an idea of what shape wing to use, and what the pattern would look like all before moving onto Photoshop.
Once he was happy with his sketches he goes into Photoshop and begins to lay down some line-work to define the shape of the wing.
Once the line-work is in place block colours can be added to help define elements within the wing. This will help with shading later.
After a base wing has been made the butterfly mesh can be started. First a plane in-which the wing will be textured is created, followed by the body.
After the mesh is created the details and shading can be added to the wing texture. At this stage normal and specular maps are also created.
The 3D Butterfly looked great, but the body alone was over 100 polygons, whereas the wings were only 2. Considering the main part of the butterfly, and the bit everyone will see in game will be the wings, it seemed like a waste to have these 100 polygons that nobody will see. We added the body to the wing texture, and saved the 100 Polygons.
A gif demonstrating how the butterfly will look in game.
A time-lapse video showing the entire development process!
We hope you enjoyed this insight into the development process, and if you would like to stay up to date feel free to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, join us on Reddit or watch us here on InideDB!
