Re-visiting some old models – Dev Blog 49
This week I’ve mostly been focused on re-visiting some of the first models I made for Fringe Planet. When I started Fringe Planet (over a year ago now) – I put together some very simple placeholder models. I started with a snow covered tree, then created a cherry bush as well as a chest for inventory. These placeholder models allowed me to create an MVP of Fringe Planet and set the foundation for the game.
It’s now been quite a while, and these models are all still in the game. So I thought it would be a good idea to re-visit the older models. This job was two fold. Firstly, was to re-model certain ones, as my skills with modelling have increased a lot since I initially created them. Secondly, I wanted to use the same palette on every single model – to help unify them and make them all feel like they were consistent with each other. This was a mistake I made early on, using different palettes for different things. Needless to say, I’ve learnt my lesson and nobody is perfect.
Trees
The tree used to be a very abstract looking thing, so I decided to make it look more natural and organic. There are now two distinct tree models. The first one is a naturally spawning tree, the second tree model is used when a peon plants a tree. This will help rapidly identify any tree farms you’ve set up, if you haven’t walled them off. The naturally spawning tree will be randomly rotated on spawn – as well as being different sizes depending on how much wood it contains.
Other Plants
The cherry bush needed a few fixes, firstly (as you can see above) it actually was slightly too big in places to stay inside the voxel boundary – which could have caused some clipping issues. Aside from shrinking the model a little bit, the majority of the time was spent re-texturing it.
The Plyme fruit. A filling, though bland meal for a peon. I tweaked this model a tiny bit and then with the new texture added some more structure and depth to the model, making it feel a lot more organic.
The blue mushroom. It will cause vomiting if eaten raw. Overall I was happy with this model (it’s a mushroom after all, not much to do with it!) so this was mostly just updating the shading to make it feel a lot more natural.
The fibre plant model has changed a lot. I was fairly unhappy with the original model due to the complexity that I’m trying to show with it. The fibre plant rapidly grows material that the peons can harvest and turn into useful materials – clothes and rope. I’ve added a lot more fibre strands inside the model, as well as used two very different colour schemes to indicate the difference between the fibres and the plant itself. It’s a bit tricky to tell what is going on in a 2d picture, so here is a 3d GIF of the fibre plant :
Conveyor belts
The conveyor belts in Fringe Plant allow for various things to be automated – mining, construction, hunting. I’ve completely overhauled the textures on all of them, replacing black and white functional concepts with much funkier orange cog work, inspired largely by various Steampunk influences. You’ll see that though the designs have stayed identical, the new textures add a lot of detail to the models
The green slit in every model is meant to represent the power that is flowing through each machine, and the possible start of a wiring system (more information to come about that a later date). Finally, here is the conveyor dropper in full 3d, so you can see some of the details on the back of the model.
Machines
The chest was one of the earliest models in the game, and as functional as it looked, I decided to completely re-design it. Chests contain inventory for peons and can also be loaded from a belt. This allows peons to directly access materials which have been produced on belts.
The automated arcane builder is a machine that makes items. It will take an input from a belt, and will do something to it (for instance take metal and turn it into nails or cogs) and then output that item onto another belt, or directly into a chest. I tweaked the model here as I felt the frame at the top of the model was a bit pointless, and replacing that rather yucky brown with the more wooden shades of brown vastly helps improve the mode.
There is a lot of detail on the model that you can’t see from one direction, so I put together this quick rotational image of it.
Doors and furniture
There are a lot of different doors and furniture in the game, and I’m planning to update them all as time passes. This week I just re-textured the wooden door – the first tier of doors. There will be a lot more model updates coming up in the future months!
There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try: