I'm thrilled to accounce that the next new film from Octopunk follows your fav street kid, Lazzo Fratello, in an original new adventure. And this one's built and animated in Unreal Engine.
The short follows Lazzo on a quest to obtain a new arm for his android girlfriend Tayla, even if it means stealing one. It's funny, it's romantic, it's a lil bit heisty, and it also introduces in original new (not DBH) cyberpunk world for Lazzo to occupy - the canals and chaos of Neo-Charleston.
I'm thrilled to collaborate with MJ Slide as my 1st AD/other half of my genius, and Neil Newbon as our Performance Capture Director! I've wanted to do motion capture for nearly a decade, and I could think of no one better to guide me and the actors thru the process.
And of course JJ returns as the voice, likeness, and performance capture of Lazzo - cause who else could fill those neon shoes!
The film is fully funded by the South Carolina Indie Grants program, in collaboration with Trident Technical College! Production begins early 2024, but if you want behind the scenes updates, be sure to check out my Patreon from now thru next year, and YouTube for production vlogs, BTS, etc.
Been looking over an old Unreal site I used to frequent back in my college days and it got me to thinking about the poly counts of my models for Unlucky - mainly wanting to make sure the game engine can handle them, even being made in a toony style.
Specifically, I was reading an interview that explain that the character models for gears of War in Unreal Engine 3, used about 10,000 polygons. That seems like a lot! But for Unlucky we're using Unreal Engine 5, and I learned how to check, for example, the poly count of the hero character, and she currently has about 6,661 polygon faces and 13, 188 triangle polygons. So, hopefully that's within a decent threshold for the engine.
I don't care for how demanding Unreal Engine 5 seems to be (I have to run the editor in in potato mode on both my computers or else the frame-rate dies), but judging by this video of 1000 sleeping doggos in the engine I am at-least glad the engine itself seems able to handle waaaay more than anything I've thrown at it so far.
So, yk that project I planned like a year ago about making otome environments in 3D and intractable?
After a year of my game dev college program and a load of extra knowledge from Youtube and Twitch, I made it happen. Here is my first room built out of sooo many more to go, but damn I'm finally good enough to start doing this!
Here is a video of me running around in play mode (using wasd and mouse) in Unreal Engine 5:
Comparison photo: original Olympia Soiree Switch screenshot (left), my Unreal screenshot (right)
Modelling process: Modelled and UV unwrapped in Blender, textures painted in Substance Painter:
Exported texture maps (in order of textures, normals, OcculsionRoughnessMetalic, and emissive):
TO WATCH ALL THIS HAPPEN, CHECK OUT MY TWITCH CHANNEL! THANK YOU
twitch_live
Now, rambles as usual:
Jesus Christ that took long and lot of work... even had to get a new pc cuz old one couldn't handle Unreal5 and Substance paint, had to upgrade...
Had to learn sooo many new things, before this I only knew how to model 3D objects. I had to learn how to UV unwrap, entire process of Substance Painter, and Unreal Engine 5.
In modelling, I had to learn the low to high poly workflow, and edge shading settings. That's the only new stuff I learned.
UV Unwrapping learning wasn't too difficult cuz the UVs didn't have to be perfect. Substance was gonna be good enough to handle them. Textile density and all that is still new and I'm still trash haha but it did the job for now.
Substance Paint tho.... had to learn all from importing low poly mesh, baking the high poly into texture maps, how to paint, masking, allllll of that, and finally export to get the 4 textures above.
Unreal 5 intro was a solid few days of pain. Starting from navigating the interface, dealing with importing meshes, textures and making them into materials, landscape & foliage generation (that I didn't use for this project yet), lighting settings, colliders, bit of blueprint.... yep but thank god I knew some Unity so it wasn't terrible.
SO... ik a lot of things still need work and missing. The books on the shelf are unfortunate cuz they weren't properly baked in Substance Painter. Some little props like books and stuff are not yet made either. There's a lot of weird edges and shading issues on the model. The lighting and stuff still needs a bit of work as well, it's not right on yet.
But,,, damn I'm soooo happy for what I was able to achieve, I didn't think I could do it this early! When I played it in the engine for the first time, it felt soooo real, I felt like I was in the game universe. I'm very excited to keep making more, and getting better with this stuff!
In the far future, I'll export it as an exe so you guys can try it out as well!
Next up in future again is probably rooms in comte's mansion, Sakamaki's house rooms, some piofiore rooms, and continuing with Olympia Soiree. Those interiors seem the easiest to start with.
comment to be tagged in future updates of this project!