Devlog Update!

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Hi everyone! As development continues, I’d like to showcase some of the things I’ve been working on. Though there have been a few personal issues I had to deal with (including an unfortunate leg injury) and that explains the hiatus of sorts, they are now mostly behind me and I can get back to properly working on Project VokCel.

Since the last update, I have finished up adding the ability to directly paint on the modular 3d pieces that will constitute compound models. I also greatly increased the speed when it comes to rendering chunks in the game-mode, as well as improving the topography of things like lakes. Lastly, with permission from @PhilXG, I created a cool looking model, the likes of which I plan to add more as development continues towards the launch of version 0.1. These models will be added as demonstrations of what can be done with VokCel. I’ll break it down segment by segment:

 


 

3D PAINT MODE


 

The ability to paint on 3d pieces is necessary in order to remove the need of using other programs to modify the textures that VokCel will generate for each model. This is in keeping with the vision to try and provide as much as possible “in-house”, even in the earlier versions of VokCel. The paint functionality is also very easy and intuitive and consists of 3 modes:

  1. Modulate mode: this mixes the colour of the brush with the underlying colour.
  2. Shadow mode: this allows one to add ambient occlusion, something that is highly recommended to make the model look much better.
  3. Undo mode: this simply “undoes” whatever changes were made in modulate mode or shadow mode.

These three modes are demonstrated in the media below:


 

As can be seen, they are very easy and direct to use. There’s not much more to say about paint mode, that’s really it and it should cater to most needs. As with everything in VokCel, simplicity and ease are key.

TERRAIN CHANGES


 

The terrain is a work in progress and will continuously be updated probably for the entire course of VokCel’s existence. This may sound strange to some, but the philosophy for the terrain is to build better tools that allow the user to modify the terrain in whatever way they desire and not to excessively focus on procedural generation. With that in mind and as has earlier been shown, VokCel will feature the ability to create your own 3d-terrain-brush and associate it with a model (piece or figure) that stores it. With this, the terrain can be moulded to whatever the user would desire it to be. Here is a short reminder of what was already shown in the introductory post:

 


 

 

That being said, some improvements have been made to make the colour-scheme less erratic and the topography of features such as lakes have been made to look more natural. 


 

 

NEW MODEL

In the spirit of demonstrating VokCel’s versatility, I made a new model and tried to animate it. It came out well, especially considering that it’s basically programmer art. It was reproduced with permission from @PhilXG, an extremely talented individual who would definitely do a much better job at modelling and animating it than I would! In spite of that, because VokCel is so easy to use, even a talentless hack like me was able to create something cool!:


 

The model features easy to use materials that make it look stylish in the light, as well as smooth animations that bode well with how it glides through the air. Connected to this are motion trails, which will be part of a larger particle and emission system that users can associate with different parts of their generated models, this will be shown more in detail in the future.


 

 

CONCLUSION

That’s it for this post. I apologize for the delay, but it was really unforeseen and there was not much I could do to stop it. Development is still on-going in line with the roadmap that was shown in the prior post. In the next post, I mostly plan to delve on how one would share the content they have created in VokCel via packages.

Thanks, see you next time!

Gust.


 

 

 

 

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