Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working a bit on animations, learning animations, and some tweaks to lighting.

I think in my last post I may have mentioned something about the Alive Animation Course in Blender. Turns out, the instructor there talks a little bit too fast and covers a lot of concepts that ended up being a bit difficult to pick up on.

So…. I ended up purchasing a course from gamedev.tv. Specifically, this course: https://www.gamedev.tv/courses/blender-complete-animator I’ve generally been rather happy with its pacing, and I’m currently, about a third of the way through all of its lessons.

For someone like me, who never had official schooling in game development, it’s certainly been helpful going through the practice and working through the paces to see what practices are possible.

I have worked a bit on the Dining Room Nicole scene as well, working in the two animations posted below. They’re on the softer route between Sam and Nicole.

In this second animation, you may see that I’ve incorporated the Split Lighting that Rauko covers in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkreLRinFjc&list=PLd0pZurhbbTZv01nUubZZQxY9eV45FNMt

It happened to be what I generally liked in terms of accentuating Nicole’s curves in the scene. I may, however, need to retouch up some of the background/ambient lighting though to take away some of the wall highlights, or to diffuse more light on the walls. Then again, the shadows/contrast may be sufficient currently as it is. What do you think?

I pasted the Editor view above so you can see the faint blue lines for the split lighting’s rough lighting positioning.

As, I had purchased some courses from gamedev.tv from a recent Humble Bundle, I’ve also been toying around with Godot via the course: https://www.gamedev.tv/courses/godot-complete-2d/

It made me think that maybe I could introduce some minigame into the game. (i.e. 2d side-scrolling shooters/space shooters where the ship is a sperm or something.) But well… shower thoughts. Always more work to do though, but learning new stuff as I’m working is always interesting.