Over the last 14 days I've not opened Unity more than a handful to times as itwas finally tackling the most glaring issue with Trailscape, the playable character model. With most of the gameplay framework in place it was time for me to jump into Blender and see what I could whip up.

I knew I wanted the playable character to have a low poly look, but being completely new to Blender I had no clue how to start. I managed to find this amazing tutorial by Iacruzo on YouTube (click here for the link!) and was grabbed by his style. He compares it to early PS1 games like Megaman Legends which was one of my first PS1 games. I thought that look would mesh well with Trailscape so I gave it a shot.

And here's the result!

Obviously, this is essentially one for one with Iacruzo's model, within minimal liberties taken, but I wanted to first see if this style fit into the game before committing to tons of custom modeling. That being said I'm super happy with how it came out. Texture modeling and weight painting was a pain in the neck at times, but I can see this process being significantly quicker next time now that I have a bit of a workflow down.

I even got her to run. Again very basic but starting from zero it feels nice to have something fully my own (from an art perspective). I also dropped her into Unity and began playing with outline shaders. TBD on if these will stick around but it's neat seeing her in the environment.

The goal for the next 2 weeks is to get the placeholder model swapped out for this one and fully animating (run/walk/jump).

Alright, see ya next time. Thanks for reading!

crrash