Is this the Missing Lynx? >w>


Heya floofs! Here's last week's update, a couple days behind schedule!


The screenshot is a lovely Lynx lady that I used to test a workflow from Daz to Blender to Unity so I can quickly populate a 3d world with anthro NPCs! She's in the nude and doesn't have any extra body stylizations, but I can reshape her freely with the sculpt tools in Blender and attach clothing and accessories to her rig (generated quickly with the Autorig extension!) It's a clean workflow and I'm excited at the possibilities it opens up. ^w^


Still working on the nsfw feral fox rig and getting him into an animation with fluidsim, nothing ready to show there yet but it's in the works.


I've also been working on 3d gamedev stuff for my visual novel. (Working title "April's Adventures") As a refresher, that's a game I started last year featuring some of my anthro OCs (fox sisters April and Cailey, and gray fox brothers Cody and Kevin Grey). I'm designing it in a 3d world - but instead of playing the game in 3d, it'll be pre-rendered out as a bunch of flat images like a comic book. This completely skips a whole slew of 3d game design worries like animation, optimization, camera movement etc, and makes such a game much more achievable for a one-fox dev team still learning this stuff.


The last few weeks I've been going through and making sure I have all the 3d assets needed to tell the full story. There's kind of a lot --

  • Mall (storefronts, theater, arcade, rooftop area, toy store, clothing store, foodcourt, parking garage)
  • Beach (ocean environment, rocks and trees, swimming area, underwater, snacks area, cove, volleyball, parking lot)
  • Pizza parlor (exterior, interior)
  • The girls' house (exterior and street view, living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen)
  • Greys' apartment (exterior and street view, garage, living room, bathroom, kitchen)
  • Cars (exterior and interior of the Greys' muscle car and Cailey's SUV)
  • Streets (environment with background buildings, street signs, city clutter, background vehicles)
  • Accessories (clothing, hats, swimming gear, volleyball gear, tasty food)
  • Weather and time of day (morning day and night skies, city backdrops from street and roof levels, beach and ocean backdrops)


And within each category there are specific little things I need like popcorn buckets, ice cream cones and funnel cakes, snorkel and swim goggles, slices of pizza, a street-racing arcade machine with a bucket seat, and more! :O


Level design is a HUGE process here, since even if I start with pre-made 3rdparty scenes (like the Mall environment I showed in my stylization tests from a few months ago) I still need to carefully choose and arrange each prop, expand or shrink various rooms, choose the lighting, line up cameras with art direction and worldbuilding and storytelling in mind, etc. I totally love doing this, so it doesn't really feel like a chore, but efficiency in my workflow is critical or I'll be spinning my wheels for many months.


Now that I've collected the 3d assets I need, the easiest way to approach level design is to use Unity's default 3d render pipeline (with no stylization shaders) and mix and match whatever props I need for each scene in the story. I have some Unity editor extensions that will help me further organize the 3d assets, position them, scatter them, snap them to grids etc. After fleshing out each area, I'll export the finished scenes (containing only the props I actually used) into a second Unity project to do stylization and render the final images for the visual novel.


Hoping to post another update before end of month! Boop you soon. <3