As always I'm making news posts HERE on Newgrounds, Every two weeks. Letting you all know what's going on! Be sure to tune in.

So lately I'm taking a little break from Project Honey, my brain is a bit fried from working on it and I need to shift gears for a bit, do something else and return with fresh eyes. Not a long break maybe about a week or so. I need to do something else. I got some ideas for smaller stuff to work on and hopefully I'll have something for you guys by then. One good thing about working on project honey is that it has forced me to solve a lot of little problems here and there that have either never occurred to me or I never had need to solve. I've learned alot and am looking forward to putting those lessons in to practice. A big one was the rig I used for animation. Animating for a game is very different from animating for anything else. Or really animating for something running in real time is a big challenge in a lot of subtle and invisible ways. A large one is mesh skinning.

I always want to come up with a good solution to some of these problem but I just never really had a real need it until I started project honey. Suddenly solving them became a priority. For example, there are lot of issue that crop up with limb twisting. This image illustrates it pretty well.

"Candy Wrapper" twisting problem

There are a number of solutions to this problem that work well in offline rendering but options are limited for realtime rendering. The simplest solution to problems like this is just not have your character move like that. However, when it comes to project honey, characters are going to be frequently in "Compromising" positions so it's important that chracters can handle a good deal of twisting.

The solution I came up with works well enough and even simplified my characters modifier stacks in blender. Along with other bits and bobs I've solved, I'm bring those solutions to Luka and the gang.

But just change gears for a bit, character designs for project honey has been quite taxing for me. I wanted to keep things simple, really simple. This is how I wanted basically all the characters to look.

Old Body Shape.

I was adamant about making all the characters looks like this, square head. boxy shape, no actual feet. This was to make the process of designing charcters as simple as possible while allowing for a decent amount of wiggle room. But things just kept nagging at me. Like I really wish there were feet, or I want the legs and knees to be more shapely. This whole process of little and incremental changes has really slowed the design process down but I say it's gonna been worth it in the end.

New Body Shape.

I really didn't want to make all these changes to the body at first, but I just kept being frustrated with the old design. But all the characters all just look so much better now... and sexier... or at least I think so. I will admit I have made designing characters significantly harder now so I feel like this is a good place to stop, she looks cartoony and cute while not being too simple. When I get back to Project Honey I feel like things are going to go well.

And with that, I'm off to do something else.

See ya'll again soon.