It has been much frustration and hard work so far.
I have cancelled anything to do with Blender as a game engine, since it is too weak to make a big game world, and unstable as I stumbled into logic brick behavior that nobody at the forum could solve.
So I went back to an earlier idea, and developed a "choose your own adventure" concept that seems very interesting, using the Visiounaire Studio.
At first I was very inspired by the work of Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi for the movie "Fire and Ice", where they did an impressive work on both the asethetical look and animation quality.
See a remake sample with a topless Teegra HERE that shows the stunning quality of the movie. BUT making my own 2d animation of the same quality was, and is impossible. It takes too much time to keep the character of the characters and to rotoscope/emotion capture facial expression, flowing hair and fabric to make that lovely fluid appearance from the movie. My choice was to use 3d characters and I did a quick test.
I have cancelled anything to do with Blender as a game engine, since it is too weak to make a big game world, and unstable as I stumbled into logic brick behavior that nobody at the forum could solve.
So I went back to an earlier idea, and developed a "choose your own adventure" concept that seems very interesting, using the Visiounaire Studio.
At first I was very inspired by the work of Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi for the movie "Fire and Ice", where they did an impressive work on both the asethetical look and animation quality.
See a remake sample with a topless Teegra HERE that shows the stunning quality of the movie. BUT making my own 2d animation of the same quality was, and is impossible. It takes too much time to keep the character of the characters and to rotoscope/emotion capture facial expression, flowing hair and fabric to make that lovely fluid appearance from the movie. My choice was to use 3d characters and I did a quick test.
Ripping a frame from Fire and Ice from youtube to check 3d rendering match of a bald character without underwear.
I am happy with the mathcing of the above picture. It blends well with the background, but the challenges were many. First of all I am not a good painter and I can never by myself paint such good looking backgrounds and do the animation work at the same time. Second, the animation looked nothing near the realistic believable fluidity from the movie since it is 3d. I can not do full mocap. The movie catches subtle changes in the facial skin, removes or adds wrinkles and folds as necessary to create strong emotion of the character. This is way too expensive for me to do for this little project in 3d. And thus the character looks kind of flat and boring.
The next challenge was to add more depth to the 3d render.
Wow, the character has hair and more clothing!
This time it look definitely better, but the animation still didn't do it quite.
The third attempt was to add more texture and variation. It is better, but at the same time more like a bad attempt at conventional looking 3d characters.
The goal is to have sort of a comic style that fits with hand painted backgrounds and is detailed enough to give much expressions and emotions since the game concept will have no voice acting or sound FX, only music. Below is an image of the blocking of the interface, and you can see that the image frame does not take up the whole screen.
Sneak peak of a painted background. You may wonder what the thing on the right is :P
Will contiune this for a while to find a style that is feasible as I really like the mehcanical concept and the story idea. To sum it all up, this was just to show that I have been very busy and gone back and forth not only with characters but also with the backgrounds. I know where I want to go but I'm not sure of the direction and simply not there yet.
