With the game all ready from a business logic perspective I next decided to look at the models again and make improvements that would allow for a fair amount of customisation. This took many attempts but by the time of writing this article I felt i’d got it about right. I’ll vaguely demonstrate how I went about this.
So the first design was just to give myself the idea of where I wanted to take it. I whipped it up the artwork fairly quickly in my 3D sculpting software referencing sketches i’d made for myself and as you can see from the mid-print photo above it was a one piece model that would be a pain to cast later on down the line.
So next up I separated each part and printed them all several times to minimise the mess left by badly positioned parts or poor supports. Over time I got better at this. It’s all new to me. I’m no pro.
Once I was happy with the parts I created 2 teams for better testing. As you can see from the images below we now have multiple stances which I feel make the models feel more personalised and dynamic. With fantasy paintball in mind I went for my former team from way back when and a team that I considered to be the best in the game when I was living the adventure. Impossible match ups made possible.
If you look closely at some of these images you’ll see that painting was evidently a nightmare and the 3D printed parts (even after cleaning up) still showed layering textures. Another note was that the battle packs (worn on the back of the player) fell in unrealistic positions depending on the stance.
So I returned back to modelling and made further adjustments. The image above shows the stages of improvement from left to right. One part model on the left. Multi-part model in the middle and an advancement on that shown on the right.
The later has lines on the gun barrel to make painting easier, separated battle pack and totally new arms and legs as I felt that the legs on the original stylised models were too small and the arms too skinny. I also raised the position of the marker (paintball gun) as in reality players don’t tend to shoot from the hip unless they are extra hardcore legends.
Next I modified the points where parts connected to allow for way more stances and the full set of parts were popped aside and coated in a fine layer of GreenStuff (a modelling putty) to remove any ribbing.
It doesn’t stop there though. I’ll explain more in the next post. The teams that I had created earlier were perfect for preliminary testing of a near finalised game.
