FMP 12 - 26th July

I figured it out! This is quite ingenious, I really must say.

The sprites in the game were giving me a bit of headache - not did they cast no shadow, they didn't receive any shadows either, or were affecting by lighting. All surmountable issues I would say, but graphical fidelity is paramount, and the sprite model breaking itself because of which angle you viewed it at was unacceptable (no help arrived from the Unity forums btw).

So what I did instead was the following: textures, rather than sprites, do not show through each other, so I could make the model with textured quads!

Issue 1!
Quads are 1-sided, which means they only display their graphics in 1 direction, and this conflicted with changing directions, because I wanted them to rotate. In Paper Mario, as the models are made of paper, when they rotate you can see how thin they are - more paper-y subtle goodness!
I could resolve this issue by making the model a very thin box instead, but the texture might show on the top and sides, and the top especially frequently displays a small disruptive line, which was unacceptable.
What I did instead was to take a box in Maya and simply delete the middle, then, selecting both faces, I'd map them from the same direction, so when a texture was applied it would be 'facing the same direction', thus correctly being able to rotate!




















This worked like a charm, and I was quite pleased with that. When several objects had to be stitched together in form of individual limbs (for animation purposes), the setup it took was like this:


A bit time consuming, but it was the only way I could think it might work.
However, one problem still presented itself, and that was to do with any objects behind the actual model - for example, in a side-view, the arm and leg on the opposite facing side of the character. Until now I had controlled which objects were visible on top of each other by adjusting the scale of the 'double-quad' in that direction, but this could not work with these limbs rotating the character, because they would show on top of everything when rotation.

To fix that I made an inverse version of the double quad, that is, a box with the sides cut off, normals inverted, and then UV mapped like before, and that worked! I haven't applied it to a finished model yet, but I'll upload a picture when I do.

Till next! I might take a few days break from this blogging, it is tiring me out and it's almost August already.