3D / 2D hybrid tree for OELVN (aka VISUAL NOVEL) use. I am GENIUS!!!

Finally, a solution to a problem that has plagued me for such a long time! How to have decent looking 3D trees but still have low poly count enough to shorten render times so I can get more BG’s produced in short time.

But first a bit of history…

What you see above are a bunch of 2D trees I’ve been using and abusing for a long long time now. I use them in my sketchup scenes whenever possible and it is very good decision because it make my scenes look good  and being 2D they are just one plane so very low poly count but…

Problem with 2D trees is that they are flat objects in 3D world so if you turn on the shadows you can quickly see the problem immediately.

So for a long time I used this really clever but depressing method of hiding the source of imperfection by hiding the base of the trees behind walls, structures, other plants and shrubs or make sure they are offscreen.

It works but this severely limits what scenes I can do which makes UNCLE MUGEN really sad…

Of course, there are 3D trees in Sketchup but chances are the poly count quota for the leaves alone is enough to model a whole town in sketchup. A single tree alone is enough to slow or even hang a low end unit and even if you have a high end unit that can accommodate such polycount intensive resource they don’t quite look anime’ish enough for use with OELVN (visual novel) backgrounds.

So UNCLE MUGEN comes up with a clever solution because UNCLE MUGEN is very smart. Let us combine 3D tree trunks with low poly 2D leaves. I am genius!… not only does it look somewhat OK for use with OELVN (aka Visual Novels) it is low poly count enough that I can put a whole forest of it without worrying too much that it will make machines all over the world crash… and best thing of all… I can now do scenes that I wasn’t able to do before using 2D trees… like scenes where the base of the trees are visible…

Anyway, this is just the first. it doesn’t look good right now but we’ll get better. As always, UNCLE MUGEN is releasing this for everyone to enjoy. You can download it HERE in the Sketchup 3D warehouse… more to come!

“POOF” (Disappears)

And now comes the big question… What in the World is Studio Mugenjohncel up to this time!?…

(No photos or images in this post… sorry…)

Perhaps some have noticed my lack of activity here in the blog. Rest assured my friends… I’m still pretty much alive and active behind the scenes but I have decided to limit release on all my OELVN (and other related) projects. There are several good reasons for doing so but let’s just say one of them is superstition related but I can give several hints on current projects running and completed ones that I haven’t had time to release properly (due to lack of music)…

Project 1 = (Technically Complete) Hammer and a Girl

Project 2 = 2 Twin Girls and some foreigner from the Netherlands…

Project 3 = (Almost Complete) Mushrooms and Explosive Diarrhea

Project 4 = (Technically Oh-Hold) Rock, Scissors, Paper and a few naked girls

Project 5 = Meddlesome Uncle

Anyway, that is all for now… I truly wish I can reveal more but I was advised not to do it and I must adhere strictly to our plan even though for an attentionwhore like me it is trully painful…

;_;

“POOF” (Disappears)

Next Mission… Organic 3D Modeling

What you see here is my current progress in Blender Day 2, which is familiarizing myself with the tools (trust me, you don’t want to see Day 1 but in case you are curious CLICK HERE at your own risk WARNING! NOT WORKSAFE!!!). Yes, I’m trying to teach myself how to use Blender and model organic things in hopes of one day creating my own Anime Styled Characters to replace manual drawing Sprites and CG’s.

Just pretend it’s a Macrophage floating in some liquid stuff…

I hate to say this but I have pretty much exhausted and perfected everything I needed to produce “decent” looking BG’s using Sketchup and Photoshop. I have streamlined the process to the point that making a typical urban BG from scratch takes about 1 hour (sans rendering time) and another 20 minute or so for post processing. It’s so efficient to the point that it is now pretty much boring. Sure, it still doesn’t look as good as hand drawn BG’s but hey… instant BG… you can’t complain…

Despite the simplified 2 tone shading it still took me 8 hours to finalize this sprite and that contradicts my Quick, Cheap and Efficient way of doing things.

Unfortunately, drawing sprites and CG’s is still something that I still need to take care of manually. For those who are following me, you are very much familiar now that I put more emphasis on Speed, Efficiency and Quantity over Quality… and I have no choice… I’ve been working solo on my projects most of the time and unless I found myself willing collaboratives who can share my vision… I foresee that this will be the case in the future. It seems, I need to move on to 3D too when it comes to Character Sprite and CG Event Creation if I wanted to maximize what little time I have. Besides, focusing too much on producing quality OELVN’s is pretty much not on my interest since I don’t profit from them but rather do them for personal satisfaction and the sooner I can produce content the better for me so I can soak in all the feels… another thing is I no longer have the luxury of sitting down in one spot for half a day drawing something. That is no longer possible for me. So the quicker I learn how to accomplish this, the better…

Even the Japanese is slowly reverting to 3D characters. Efficient and can be done and edited cheaply and still look anime enough if done correctly.

Unlike Sketchup and Scenery, Organic Modeling is pretty much alien territory to me. I am raised and trained in AutoCAD and relying too much on Sketchup that I pretty much ignored other 3D modeling software and mastered only what I think I will be needing to accomplish things and that turned out to be a pretty bad decision leaving me unprepared for organic modeling.

It’s not like I’m running around without a plan. I have a pretty much straightforward agenda that goes like this…

● FAMILIARIZE with the TOOLS

● LEARN how to EFFICIENTLY MODEL basic organic things

● LEARN how to EFFICIENTLY MODEL anime styled CHARACTER

● LEARN how to TEXTURE and BAKE MAP anime style

● LEARN how to RIG

And that’s pretty much what I needed to learn to accomplish the task I needed to do. Anything else will be useless for I don’t intend on doing anything else other than the task I am currently focused on and that is replace Sprites and CG’s with 3D.

This will be a long and bumpy road. Who knows how far I can get… oh well…

So I missed NaNoRenO… time to move on and focus on something else like… working on improving an older project :)

I’m still alive you know… barely…

So here is Ren’py Date Simulator, The Game (not again)… a tiny VN based around the demo VN included in Ren’py released back in 2011… Unfortunately, the rush to finish it before the end of the year left me with some lingering regrets and questions like what could I have done to make it better but still within my cheap, fast and efficient way of doing things… the amount of regret is so much I haven’t uploaded the game on the Ren’py archives yet.