Some of you might remember around this time last year I mentioned wanting to do some side projects, last month I largely spent my time doing that. Thing is I still consider myself mainly an artist, so these long bouts of doing almost entirely programing or dev work gets tiring. And I guess around a year is when I tend to feel the itch to do some side work lol.

That's largely the focus of this post but end of the post we'll continue with Our Apartment news.

Is what I'm naming this in general for now.

So, you might be wondering where this fits in the grand scheme. In short there's a few ways.

This concept isn't one I've been sitting on a long time, as such I'm less picky about it. More open to doing odd things and variety.

This concept has goals for animation and games, both cases involve rendering in Unity (using HDRP). Blender rendering is on the table, but just less likely I think.

This project aims for higher fidelity than Our Apartment, there's no android or web releases planned. But if it does happen at all, it's purely for marketing purposes. This higher fidelity focus means I can experiment with higher fidelity effects.

This project aims to have asset releases, I don't know when but the two main characters here will have their models released at some point. Allowing anyone to make animations with them and modifications. The asset releases may be blender and unity focused only.

Now on to what "Forest Project" is about.

The plot summary is basically about a wolf living in isolation in the woods not too far from a big city. While fishing, a girl introduces herself to him, apparently watching him for sometime, she's left the city too to live with nature. Problem is her attire, mere leaves and vines covering barely anything. And thus, the story of the wolf and the curious girl begins!

Quite the simple concept eh? There's a bit more too it of course, and maybe we'll get there in time.

The Wolf (pending name Kalan) is a character living on his own far enough out the city to not be found, but not too far that he can't get supplies when he needs to. He has multiple visible scars on his body that predate his survival in the forest. In his excursions to the city his clothing largely covers these scars.

He's made his living in a cave constructed into a house not far from where he meets the fox.

The Fox (pending name Naiara) is a character who recently left the city, wanting to escape city life and live among nature. She even wanted her clothes to be of nature, though she lacks the skills to do anything fancy she tries regardless. It's only been a few weeks in the forest surviving off of berries and what hunting she can do. When she stumbles upon the wolf fishing in a lake. Weary of the danger she watches him from a tree for a few days, until curiosity gets the better of her.

Until now she's largely resided in whatever tree suits her.

Last month (and the past week-ish) I like 95% finished the models for these two characters minus the clothing. I have not rigged them or anything yet and may not for another couple months.

As an FYI the modeling and hair was done in Blender, the texturing in Substance Painter.

T

hey will probably be rigged before I do any clothing, and maybe an animation or two may exist before even that. Just depends, I may not do the clothing myself.

This might be the last you see of this project for a little while, next time will either be a animation or a different little thing. I've mentioned before that there's an objective for a kind of smaller project similar to Our Apartment that I would use as a template to release content for characters but that blends in with Our Apartment stuff so it's kind of hard to plan that out.

Another reason I wanted to get these models done is a bit of practice, you'll note the hair cards here are quite robust, and that's cause I'm using newer hair tools. Now that I've learned these tools I will either end up using these tools to produce more hair styles for Naomi using existing textures and such, or I may end up redoing Naomis hair entirely.

Just depends, again, mostly on how much time I want to spend on the process. But I now have a solid pathway to new hair items soon!

Originally I wanted to do full particle hair for this project but we'll see, I may come back to that.

With this done I' m ready to return to work on Our Apartment, I know I said I'd have a roadmap soon and I will. Gotta do that story review stuff and things. And then there's the asset skinning updates I need to do to stop all the clipping, I dunno maybe I'll skip that just to get to the steam release sooner.

End of this month I plan to have a road map and some animation previews, possibly a build.

Thanks for your support and patience, feedback on this side project is appreciated!

~sacb0y