What do rocks and character creators have to do with each other? If you say nothing - normally you’d be right. However, on Chaos Isle we do not disparage rocks as some other would do. They can be characters too, sort of.
The past month has BDKCreate focused on building the our custom character creation suite. It’s used to define characters and “races”. Not just races like in high fantasy, rather the idea of limited selection criteria for ethnicities within a single race.
Fun Fact: the whole system is based on blendshapes. Blendshapes provide delta values, differences to base, for each vertex (point of each polygon). This allows for many uses. A core usage is in animations. Many will are blend shapes to animate facial features. Using blend shapes can be preferable over using bones as it provides a higher level of control over the final look. Another is to change the looks of your character as a whole. That brings in the usage of another graphics technology, Material Property Blocks(MPB). They allow use to use all the colors for skin, hair, eyes without enormous disk space or RAM usage. But like all technologies they have down sides in GPU and CPU costs.
But what does that brief delve into blendshapes have to do with rocks? We had a chaotic idea, add blendshapes to rocks. What does that enable us to accomplish?
- custom rocks all over the Isle;
- animated rocks that can change quickly in real time and stay that way.
So we brought the rocks into the BDKCreate character creation. It is after all our best tool to manipulate and save blendshape models.
