Was getting a bit of work done today, when I start thinking about how I miss having the large spherical bushes, and I remembered why I had to take them out: huge performance issues from many stacked alpha cards. I was about to make a post asking if anyone knows a way to make alpha clip not so resource intensive in Unity, I figured since there is no transparency with alpha clipping vs. opacity, maybe there's a way around this. Then it dawned on me... 

I could just cut around the damned things and make them a generic opaque material, vertex count isn't that big a deal these days... So i got to clipping, and when I was done I had a working, TRUE cutout. It felt good to dust the old 3ds Max out and do some art like in the old days, remembered all the hotkeys, and everything and slammed it out pretty quick. Then I imoprted the bush... it looked terrible. I had forgotten that another artist had done the original mesh an that they used maya, and in Maya it's very easy to give folliage spherical normals. So i poked around in Max to see if there was a solution, but I only found a very rudimentary tool called "Edit Normals". Poked around online for a solution but nothing was showing up.

I watched some youtube videos but nothing seemed to have a solution, just a few where people were working with VERY Low poly assets form 10 years ago and them setting the value by hand. It appeared all the settings weren't applicable to transfering normals from one asset to another, and that they were mostly for fine tuning low poly work. I was just about to give up when I decided to try something using some of the various settings from below, the "average normals" setting looked like MAYBE it might work if it worked like a soft select.

So I attached several heavily subdivided sphere at various scales to the bush, the many vertices would work to overpower the bushes normals when averaged so when compiled the normals would be largely sphere like and not a bunch of planes with their facing angles. I was really surprised, but it actually friggin worked. This would have been a pretty big discovery many years ago in certain art communities I used to frequent, but there are probably tools that make htis a lot easier in newer version of max, or some other software package, I don't really deep dive into art these days, have enough on my plate doing the game design stuff.

It amazes me how many tiny hurdles like this will pop up in gamedev TIME and TIME again. It's insane how many technical issues we run into all the time if we're working on a broad set of things. But the bushes are in now and they should be a hell of a lot more performant than before so i can actually use them now.

I also got in some pretty neat distortion effects, that i'm really happy with, but it's funny how we fixate on the really pain in the ass things and forget about the cool stuff we get done that's really easy.

I don't know where all the time goes. Some days I get massive systems mostly done in the span of several hours and i'm amazed by how much I get done. Other times I spend 4 hours trying to fix some small graphical issue, think it's fixed, and it comes back to haunt me weeks later.

Gamedev is fucking weird. Things are going really well though, think i'm going to indulge in a bit more environment work tomorrow, the game is taking on the hand made miniature style that i'm really digging, and i've learned so much about code and interacting with effects over teh years. I have some neat ideas that I think is going to make poking around the ocean lots of fun. I read something somewhere about how the World of Warcraft developers had a motto for their world: "World is Toy" and that's always resonated with me. I've always wanted to build up this watery world to be a sort of playground, where you bounce off certain things, and candy rains down from obstacles if you whack them, and underwater rainbow waterfalls spill all over creating reflective, shimmering silver puddles on teh sea floor.

It's kind of a fun predicament to be in. I REALLY want to get these item mods in because I think it's going to really punch up teh fun factor and all the combat systems are going to come together, but I'm also super excited to get organized with prefabs, build things up smart, and create some really nice looking areas that also play well in a fun environment that's fun to poke around in even without enemies to face off against.

I'm burned out on code and design, so tomorrow is gonna be some art and level creation.

I'm really pumped by how much things have been coming together the past month, it's kind of nuts.