How we improve custom-species editor

Author: Salireths

While it all started as just an experiment, the new art-style has exceeded my most optimistic expectations!

It keeps proving itself being a much faster (hours instead of days) and fun way to make new body-part models for creating all kinds of species, and with its unique appearance it just captivates me, I can't look away from it! 

With textures added, it's not even much different from the old style, but it has a more pronounced silhouette and just has more "oomph" to it in my opinion.

Also, it's friendly for modders who might not be very skilled with modelling too!

To create such style I pretty much broke all the preconceptions and workflows 3D artists usually have. 

I used the strengths that the technology offers, going with the medium and embracing its weaknesses, turning them into advantages. Things like seams or hard edges, they are "bad" when you see them on "realistic" organic models, but here they work as part of the style.

In fact, they create a lot of advantages to make a more in-depth customization system.

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Characters with more to customize

Customization in its core is about swapping/adding body-parts and picking different add-ons like plates, spikes, feathers, fur, clothing.

Shape of each body-part can be further altered using, familiar to every gamer, sliders.

You also change textures and recolor each individual region on the body. Say you don't want scales on the back (or belly) - just change them to feathers, or fur! And select a different color that goes with them. 

Selected textures now procedurally adapt to surface and create interesting transitions between regions. Before it was just a handful of painted predefined skins, each required a lot of work to produce by hand.

What would you change or add to this character? Perhaps changing the head? Or maybe add some plumage, covering him in fur? Maybe check what he has in store in that slit of his?

Just a quick test-beak that was made in less than an hour (!), it shows how parts can be swapped to create alternative looks, and they work together. 

Swapping entire head to one with a snake-like appearance. Due to the art-style "it just fits", even if it normally be a completely different, incompatible creature.

The art-style looks much better in motion, screenshots don't do it justice at all...

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Making the best furry character creation tool

The system we have already is good, but it has room for improvement. Here is some ideas we could work on to make it even better:

• An ability to pick and position additional patterns (spots, stripes), similar to what you have in vehicle-simulation games.
  
• Ability to change character's overall material (make them glowing, iridescent, or shiny and chrome).
  
• Define characters on a sliding scale from "feral" to "anthro", giving an ability to change the creature's locomotion method and posture (Biped-Upright, Biped-Raptor, Quadruped-Dragon,  Quadruped-Equine).
  
• Due to a much lower time requirement, making custom body parts for characters as Patreon Rewards can be made much more accessible to everyone.
  
• By making a special shared rig/skeleton (inspired by my work in SL) models can share body-parts from ferals or anthros, removing workload multiplication depending on number of creature types.
  Unfortunately that means that animations need to be re-done, but it could save much more time in the long run.
  

With creation of a special shared rig mentioned above, nagas, taurs, semi-quadrupeds, hydras, cerbers, and other popular creature types would also become possible to make.
Making this seemed impossible before we had the customization tech and the art-style. However this still needs a lot more research done first to see if it is, actually, viable to do - we're approaching this cautiously...

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Taking reference-sheets in-game

The character customization was always a big feature of our game, however now with the new style it became much more viable to keep expanding it. 

With all of this customization power, this essentially enables you to build your own custom 3D fursonas and invent new species in-game...

Think about it, there is a lot of people who would want to have a new character, but can't afford to commission artists to get them! Not to mention having them immediately available in 3D and being able to play with their body... That problem could be solved!

Would you have a use of the ability to make creatures, then export them as reference-sheets?  

If you're wondering why of all things tentacles: it's because I'm designing a character customization station, that, coincidentally, features those glowing medical-tech-tentacles. What? They are specifically good at healing internal damage!

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Conclusion

I can't help but think about Spore, game that is relevant to this day because of its unmatched creature editor.  People still play it to make various creatures in it.  

Our editor is, of course, not the same as in Spore: you can't sculpt the spine or attach infinite limbs. But I'd say there are other advantages to our system, as it's tailored specifically to create anthro or feral furry/scalie species.

While next build's version of the editor will be rather simple, it's something we could focus on right after we release it. Just let us know if you want it!

It would certainly be very nice if you'd be able to make your own creatures while waiting for us to produce new levels, sexual interactions, technology trees and other gameplay content in new builds! And by adding some simple photo-tools we can make a ref-sheet exporter for you use your creations outside the game.