Game development career thread:

That color to index thing got really strange. The math didn't make any sense, so I tried again for just an ordinary number as an attribute.

In the gltf exporter there's an option for custom attributes, and the tooltip says what you'd expect. However, because I am old and blind as a bat I have a huge mouse cursor and it was covering up the important part. It only exports if the name begins with an underscore

Nomatter the format it converts it to float, but it seems to convert back fine in my tools. I was worried an index of 7 would turn into 6.999999 (and get truncated to 6).

I'm using the index for a specular power table as well, and will do an emissive bool later for glowing bits. If I had shaders from this century I'd probably do metallic / roughness.

Mixing a texture with the table colours is a bit strange. For the body I wanted slightly reddish knees and cheeks, and I might shade in some creasy parts here and there. It seems to work best to just add the texture value, but it does make it too bright when the texture affected area is in darkness.

I tried a texture color * texture alpha + vert color * (1 - texture alpha) but that seems to blacken the low alpha outer edges of the rosy spot. Multiplies also look strange.

So I spent an entire day retopologizing a character model by hand (for the second time), and I'm really starting to wonder if its not worth just using an auto-retopo tool like the one in 3DCoat to just do it more or less instantly. I suspect I can get an acceptable model with ~1/3rd of the polygons if I do it by hand, but I'm wondering if thats even going to matter. Can't help but wonder in poly count is likely to be a throttle-point for performance or if I'll see it from lighting or some other UE5 crap. I have plans to do at least 20 models myself and if you figure I get twice as good, thats still half a day each so ~15 days of work, vs taking 20-30 minutes to properly configure auto-topo for each model... the downside being the models are say 15k vs 5k if I did them myself.

I dunno, I have a tendency to try to do it "right" but in cases like this I can't help but wonder if its really just a waste of time.

EDIT: Oh yea and I guess as a general update I've blocked out my first dungeon in a format that I more or less consider final, so once thats finished and I get some textures on it maybe I can share some SS. Hoping to have at least 1-2 finalish character models too using this new workflow. My loose goal is a playable demo Q1 2026 so I figure if I don't get something visual I'm happy with now thats not going to happen. System-wise I'm in a good spot, combat is in a more or less complete form functionally. Added weapon procs the other day, gear/inventory works entirely outside of a lack of visuals (hence the art stuff I'm doing now). Have a handful of class abilities for simple combat loop testing. The lion's share of the work from this point is visual stuff and the game is like 90% functional. I'm sure I'll find plenty of stuff thats not working right as I move forward but the core loop is playable outside of some of the character progression stuff thats not fully implemented.

Flobee said:

Can't help but wonder in poly count is likely to be a throttle-point for performance or if I'll see it from lighting or some other UE5 crap.

Click to expand...

Just load up a bunch of models and test it? No need to waste weeks on premature optimization. How many models will you be showing on screen at once? a few tens of k polys this way or that doesn't seem like it should much of a difference.