Say hello to our little chef! (and some other friends)

Emma Lowry

This month, we wrapped up our new set of NPCs. This involved making game-ready, textured versions of construction workers, cultists, and mischievous burglars. Everything we sculpt at high-detail for characters must be “baked” down onto low resolution game-friendly models, so I chipped away at our new NPC wardrobe until this happy band of misfits was ready to run around in-engine. There’s always more to be done though, and I hope to revisit these folks soon for some more upgrades and variety!

We also took some time to get new animals ready to join Pigeon Sim. Now that Sophia’s awesome dog animations are done, I set up our goodest pups with ragdolls and other components needed for all their future adventures with our Pigeon. To create these ragdolls, we need to go through a character’s skeletal hierarchy and create rigid bodies, colliders, and character joint components on the appropriate bones. Then we tell the character joint components which rigid body it should swing from, creating a floppy chain of colliders along our characters’ skeletons! After that, its a matter of tweaking each joint’s swinging bounds so that joints flop realistically and elbows don’t go backwards. Quadrupeds can be a little trickier than humans, but most of the process remains the same. It’s raining dogs! (And cats soon too…)

Who doesn’t love pigeons with little mustaches? Say hello to Chef Burns, the latest Key NPC to join the cast! We conceptualized this guy quite a while back, and I finally had a chance to model him this month. Our pigeon NPCs present a fun artistic challenge: we build them off of our basic pigeon model that the player shares so they all play nicely with our animations, but we explore ways to make each Key pigeon fun and unique. In this case, some additional models, a bit of sculpting work, and unique textures help set Chef Burns apart from the crowd. He has everything he needs to soar into the story of Pigeon Sim - an apron, a chef’s hat, and some sick tats.