Another week passes by, and more work has been done! This week was kinda short, since both Guilherme and I had other stuff that had to be done, so the time was more scarce than we thought it would be.

To help on this matter, we decided to spend one entire night into finding a good project management tool online which could be hosted on our server, and we found it! We’ll talk more about our project management on a upcoming post this week (or month) .

* Well, actually Gustavo has a test today (he does Computer Science) and I’m taking the boat here (since I’m a bum without collegWAIT WHO SAID THAT) *

Highlights

This week was very rich content-wise, lots of stuff to be shared in that matter, and we’re very proud of our latest articles, if you for some incompletely understood reason didn’t read them, you can check them here:

RTS Movement and Basic Behaviors on Unreal Engine 4, Gustavo takes some of his programming wizardry to explain some basic concepts of a RTS gameplay applied to Unreal Engine;

Making a Tileable Brick Wall (without sculpting), It’s about working around another method apart from sculpting on how to create a nice next-gen brick texture, without headaches. Carefully wrote by me.

Our furnace is finally warming, the guys from Sketchfab contacted me to put my article about Scanned Assets on their blog, also Blendernation featured it as well! The article about RTS Movement by Gustavo became a trend on Reddit and gave us some very impressive numbers on views, thanks for that, guys!

Lots of cool stuff are on the track, so don’t forget to click in that cute pink magenta button on the right to subscribe!

The main theme of this weekly will be: Organization.

Since this was responsible for 90% of what we’ve done this week, I can’t deny that we don’t have so many new cool things to show like we wanted, but this kind of thing is extremely necessary if we want to have a great workplace and a fast structured driven pipeline.

We’ve spent a whole day to find and implement a full cloud management system for our server, the change from Trello to our own project management system was very important for a greater control of what can be done and to have a centralization of all our tools streamlined together.

Here’s our current Admin panel for all the studio needs:

There’s a bunch of stuff happening in here, we have several different mails to contact with clients and also structured better our content hierarchy, so there’s an exclusive link to that, also our project management tool ensures deadlines and control all the work that is being done, File Cloud for storage, backup and sharing, Blog Dashboard for (guess what?! :o), and cPanel to control all the different buttons of our server (i’m a artist, that’s not my job, I guess it’s all magic :D)

I’m not planning to enter in greater detail in this subject yet otherwise Gustavo would kill me for spoiling one of his next articles, that will address precisely this issue.

I’ll just show a print screen of our current Project Management and also one of our previous one:

(a note to my FOSS fellas: This Project Management system is Open Source as well, how cool is that? :D)

Moving a bit from this to another related subject, talking about organization, this is a thing I really needed on my own workstation too, as I have two PCs, a Dell desktop workstation where all the hard work happens, and a Macbook Pro for general internet use and some Photoshop work, dealing with huge amounts of data is not easy when you need to transfer it between your devices many times. Just for clarification, I’ll show a print screen of what used to be my documents folder on my PC:



Now it seems fairly logical why I spent a lot of time this week just cleaning all the mess I made with tests, doesn’t it?

This delayed a bit my schedule, but sometimes we need to sacrifice some time in order to save some later, that’s the case. Giving proper names to your archives and folders can help you ensure all your content is up-to-date, and also avoid losing important data, which would lead you to madness.

My actual folder hierarchy consists basically of this:

Easy to understand and also looks pretty.

I spent the whole week fixing this up to this state, and also backing up things to do a fresh W7 install on it (I hated W8.1 with all my will, sorry for that Microsoft) that’s why this weekly is purely theory-wise.

But, hey Mr. Guilherme, screw all that theory, show us some pics!

Ok random imaginary guy speaking through my post, let’s see some pics (even if they don’t make sense):

Here’s some EXCLUSIVE brand new images showing our candles running nicely with a SSS Shader:

I can’t deny that I’m REALLY excited to start playing with all this together in Unreal Engine.

Later on, I’ll write the second part of the Candles W.I.P that will be covering all the shading goodness builded on this, be sure to not miss it!



Just a test on the fence’s texturing. Yeah, it’s a plane, 4 verts, 2 tris.

More shading tests on Marmoset.

Checking if the tiles were going alright in the BGE (ignore shaders!)

This texture was meant to be blended using a height map with vertex painting to create some interesting oldish brick look, with concrete over the bricks (maybe even a procedural one), that’s the reason why we still have no pics about the fully fence model to show for you.

On the math side of things, Gustavo was really busy setting up our Project Management network , so he had a very little time to really work directly in the game, but his spawn point system is already done, just needing some tweaks and final touches, that’s why he decided to show his stuff in the next week too.

Although, he still managed to make some tests with UE’s terrain system, and you can watch him playing with the terrain here:

He was trying to be a level designer (that’s why programmers are programmers) sorry for that, mate hahahah

In his defense, the last time I was messing with programming stuff, I ended up deleting our server whole file system(I’m not kidding)

But his character behaviors and RTS components are kicking ass, so I’m really looking forward too see what’s coming next!

Next Steps

Here are Gustavo’s plans:

Finish the neutral mobs spawn points;

Try to share project with me, so we can work together on some design stuff;

Coupling animations and behaviors was hard than it seemed, he said he’s going to take a further look into it.

And here’s mine:

Finish the fence model with some variations

Finish the candle lib

Create a lib of Ivy/vines decals to throw over assets

We hope we can accomplish everything listed here without any further complications, we’ll see!

And that’s all for this weekly, folks! 😉 (subscribe, subscribe, subscribe!)