Bird has a HAT
Added 2022-08-03 22:13:54 +0000 UTCLast time I shared concept art that had a lot of the hat concepting process, so figured it was appropriate to follow that up with
ACTUAL HAT!
Getting all of this right was weirdly complicated. That bird's face there is the second, or maybe third iteration of the mesh, which we pushed toward to make the face more expressive. Cuter.
It's about the eyes! Bird eyes are almost all about shape, because in practice they're (usually) just black shiny orbs. So you have to massage the geometry around them a lot, and give the black shiny orbs enough context to look cute instead of creepy. Sometimes that difference is as simple as slightly increasing the size of the eyelids, which is what we did here. Also necessary to give the blinking animation more geometry to work with, in this case, so double win.
Rendering the eyes properly is a still whole other thing. You generally need a very particular kind of high specularity high reflection that, never the less, doesn't actually reflect the scene, because bird eyes aren't shiny mirrors. And yet they have to be as shiny as mirrors to get the appropriate little specular highlight on the top (the white dot).
Also, just as a fun aside, we think we've hit on how we can start talking about the game more publicly in a less er, mysterious, way. So that'll be fun. More on that later. Bye! :D
