Grave of the Fireflies: Sprint 7

 This sprint, I updated some materials in the engine. I created the water material, as well as a ground material with dirt and grass color variants. I set up the ground material with vertex painting so we can paint in the dirt pathway.

Dirt Material

Grass Material

Water Material

Once Nitin modeled the tree trunks, I added the leaves. I created a card texture in photoshop. I modified spheres to get the overall form for the leaves, and wrote a script to duplicate the leaf card and distribute along the surface of the shape. Then I hand tweaked the positioning of the leaf cards.

Tree leaf preview

Tree leaf preview

Trees with material in engine

another small tweak I did was adjust the height of the fire, so it was shorter and more akin to a campfire.

Grave of the Fireflies: Sprint 6

 The biggest task for this sprint was rigging the two main characters. I created a full rig with FK/IK switch arms and IK legs, as well as finger controls. I also created an animation file template with the rigs referenced so the animators can update the rigs with the final meshes later and preserve their animation.

Seita model rigged and ready to animate

I began work on a ground material that I desaturated and added into the environment. I began looking into vertex painting so later we can have the grass and dirt materials blended via vertex painting.

Initial ground material

I also did a lot of cleanup in the engine. I set up the bakes for the tree branches and got them updated in the engine. additionally, I troubleshot issues with the physics on the pickup objects and moved the entire scene to be more closely centered on the origin to fix the physics calculation errors. I cleaned up material graphs, adding in desaturation nodes to strip color away from the scene as we prototype. Finally, I added variables to the Niagara particle systems so we may control them from the sequencer. To avoid having to remember the desired maximum spawn rate and other key values, I implemented float linear interpolations so that the value keyed for "on/off" for the spawn rate goes from 0.0 - 1.0, making it more artist-friendly.