Devlog #4 The Birth of A Low-Poly Masterpiece

Greetings all, Minnie here;

I'd like to tell you all about the birth of the early 3D art in our game A Bird in the Hand.

Initially my amazing 2D artist vague_carrier sent me over a floor plan and a few character turn-arounds for the main characters. I hadn't really done much in terms of player character models, or movable models in general up till now. My experiences veered more towards environmental and architectural works such as houses, buildings, and furniture. As such, I struggled a lot in the beginning. My first asset presented to the project was a budgie. I spent weeks polishing, rigging, and animating him; pouring blood, sweat and tears into the little guy. 

It all started with a cube. A cube I stretched and pulled one way and the other for hours upon hours until it looked vaguely bird like. At that point, I realised the model wasn't even vaguely symmetrical so I cut the little guy in half and mirrored the model. Having fixed the overall look of the now budgie, I spent my next few days fixing any non-manifold geometry. When my budgie son was ready, I attached a rig to him and painted weights onto the skin of the rig. I then saved out in a single scene for just him and the rig, deleting any unnecessary assets.  I created three more copies of that scene and gave each scene an animation: a walking scene, a flying scene, and a little dance scene. To upload them to the game, I exported a copy of the little guy and his rig on its own, it is important to mention at this point, when I exported him as an fbx file, I made sure there was absolutely no animations attached to the geometry or the rig. Then, I baked the animation of each scene onto the rig itself and exported the rig with the animation attached, separate from the main budgie fbx file, giving them very specific names to connect easily within unity.

After presenting my son the beautiful budgie to my team (with a great reception) I moved on to creating the house.  The house  shall have to be a tale for another time, however, as each asset deserves its own appropriately sized ramble.

-Lovely meeting you all, Minnie.