Our salutations, fellow Kindred!
Previously, we shared with you a bunch of juicy things coming in the summer update, the biggest of course being Team Deathmatch. But we also discussed how we have addressed your most requested issues, meaning the reload bug and the desynced Red Gas. If you missed that article, you can check it out by clicking on this link.
In today’s article we will ask and answer a question that has been on many of your minds as well as ours; how can we get more cool vanity items to pick and choose from, quicker?
The “BIG RIG”
We are completely revamping the rig system of our vampires in Bloodhunt, it is a collaborative effort between the character, code, tech art and animation teams here at Sharkmob.
Its main purpose is to speed up the vanity creation process and pipeline, to allow us to make outfits faster.
Not only is the process faster, but it also gave us the opportunity to upgrade the visual quality of our models.
But what is a rig?
The rig is the skeleton inside the character model that makes it easier for us to scale, move, and animate the player. The initial rigs we created for the game were made during an early stage of the development of Bloodhunt, where creativity and experimentation were key. Once Bloodhunt became the game that you know of today one outfit would have to be made into 7 versions since we needed to adapt it to each clan and body type, with additional versions needed per added future Clan. Tattoos and makeup had to be transferred across body types in the evolution of Bloodhunt we realized that the workflow we had was neither fast enough nor future proof.
The many advantages of “BIG RIG”
With this new rig system, we have removed all our previous rigs and bodies, and instead sculpted a brand new feminine and masculine body so we more easily can adapt clothing, hair, apparel, makeup, tattoos, and all vanity items, resulting in a more efficient creation process for more visually pleasing content, all whilst maintaining our realistic art style.
With the new process, if we want to create an outfit for all the clans, we now only need to create two versions and then pose the differences directly on the bodies to create a unique fit for each Archetype. This lets us maintain the distinct looks of our different clans and any future clans we may add without compromise.
However, we will still at times create outfits specifically for clans as they might have a specific type of theme that feels at home with what one would expect from them. For example, we might still want to create a unique Nosferatu outfit in the future that really feels Nosferatu. But in general, the goal is to have fewer of these clan locked outfits and create more outfits that fit all clans.
Additionally, as there are only 2 versions now of an outfit, there will be less data to load, both in terms of file-size on your hard drive, but also in terms of what needs to be loaded when you are in-game, this should help with the performance and decrease memory usage in addition to reducing the games size.
Also, as a positive side effect we happily could increase our polygon count for our vampires which means that the characters have a bit more detail, so as you can see in the video there is a slight increase in graphical fidelity.
More work now, less work later
As you can imagine, this was quite an undertaking as we spent a large amount of time developing this new and improved process pipeline. But we absolutely believe it was worth it as your feedback showed us that you want to have more options in creating your own ultimate vampire, and as we can now create new vanity items more quickly, we hope that we will be able to cater to your needs at a more rapid pace going forward.
It has been a rough ride, but with the summer update we are finally ready to release the new updated character pipeline we call BIG RIG, with all those nice improvements.
Closing words
We are now in exciting times for Bloodhunt! The summer update is closing in quickly. After the update we will be listening carefully and watching your feedback and a survey will be going out shortly after the launch of the next update, and we will read all your feedbacks our social media. This feedback will be vital for us as it will help shape what we do in the development of the next community patch!
Until the next time, see you at dusk!
/Sharkmob
