Blender: Images auto reload

It’s been a while I didn’t play with Blender. This morning I felt like using it so I worked on a mini boss I designed lately. I’ll explain more about it in the next post. Here I just wanted to share a plugin I found this morning. Even if I’m a total newbie with 3D and texturing, this plugin really helps me there.

When texturing a mesh, I work with 2 screens: one showing the overall result in Blender (with different views: front, back…) and one where I do the actual 2D texture in Photoshop.

Quick and dirty texture…

Result in Blender

 

 

The problem I had till then was I had to always go to Blender to manually refresh the texture to see my updates, which is quite a pain when you are as bad as I am in the matter!

I finally found a plugin for Blender that reloads automatically the images after a configurable timeout. Get it there.

It allows me to mess around in Photoshop and simply save whenever I want to see the actual result in Blender. Cool stuff!

A cat’s gun

Yeah, I’m trying to design my first enemy with a gun. The mesh will be the same as the walking cat but with new animations and new AI.

But before that I’m taking some time to design his gun. One of my friends asked me to record my screen anytime I’m in such a designing process so that I can share the video. It does sound like a great idea… I never thought about that, really. So here comes the first video I just recorded while sketching the gun I’m thinking to give to this cat.

Looks like a futuristic gun, huh ? Hopefully ! I’m still writting some “story telling” ideas, but most likely the cats will be invaders from a different planet. Well that will make the usage of my Cat Machine easier… This one :

In addition, having a futuristic setting means I can really mix a huge variety of assets. Great !

I mentioned in a previous post I would share some videos about my NPC Din making in Blender. But afterall the video is a mess and I’m too lazy to edit it, so I’ll make another recording next time I create a character.

Black walking cat

If you saw latest gifs, you probably noticed the introduction of a black cat. Yeah.. I started getting bored of my brown (Teddy Bear like) cat. But I don’t have yet the need  nor the time to model new foes. I will but not just now. So I just altered the brown texture into black (less than 2 mins using the vectorial version) then duplicated my other cat prefab, changed the texture and twicked the strength (5-10 mins) and DONE !

I assume I’ll make each enemy with 4 different skins at least.

My rule n°1 as a solo game maker : RE-USE.

It’s good for both velocity and performances.. Wait.. I didn’t actually concider performances that so far… It’s running well on my device (OnePlus 3) with shadows and everything. I can’t wait to test on other devices.. Later 🙂

Hierarchy

I’m almost done with refactoring (some parts are still horrible though). But the code looks cleaner !

I stopped my refactoring to add a little feature to the editor (and engine) : hierarchy. You can now attach an object to another one if they should be moving together and so on (Father node moves its childs).

Example :

Right now I’m working on the rotations. Then, using my animation timeline, hierarchy and rotation, I wonder if I will be able to make something like an animated stick-man. Well, I should…

PS : the sprites used in my tests are made in photoshop with brushes found here and there on the Internet. I’m not the creator and I won’t be using those brushes in any game.