If the hat fits… 2015-01-15 16:30
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Creating a Solomonk that fits snugly on 32 types of head (16 classes, each with two sexes) is a breeze, but a Louis XIV-style wig? Or, more recently, a Panthyrozy’s Mask? That’s a whole different ball game!
As you can imagine, adding eight new faces to each class two years ago didn’t make things any easier!
And now we have the sixteenth class (and their hoods!) to deal with. But you know DOFUS – we love a challenge! As luck would have it, the development of the Eliotrope class did not require much input from the art team, who were mostly busy designing backgrounds and new items for the patch. This left them enough time to double their efforts tackling this ongoing issue. We have actually been working on it for the past two years, and only now are we finally reaching the light at the end of the tunnel.
It truly was a colossal task. We needed to tighten, stretch, turn, shift and adjust each hat to fit everybody. Calculators out…
16 classes
x 2 sexes
x 8 heads
x 5 points of view
That makes 1,280 version per hat! And DOFUS has almost 500 different hat skins!
Naturally, some hats were easy to adapt (thank goodness). Others were similar enough that we were able to apply the same changes to them all. In spite of our best efforts, though, there remains a stronghold of incorrigible hats that we just can’t make fit!
The problem is that DOFUS uses animated skeletons to which all the graphic elements of each character are added separately. This system saves us time in various ways: we don’t need to animate 32 different running sequences, for example, and we can switch class faces quickly and easily. But it is restrictive when it comes to displaying certain class details. Female Iops’ pony-tails and the backs of Eliotrope hoods, for example, are still visible “through” certain hats when viewed from behind.
But don’t panic! All is not lost!
To correct these persistent problems, we are going to alter the skeleton and skin files themselves (see the screenshot above) to obtain better results. It’ll take us a little longer, but we’ll get there in the end!
We’ve worked our socks off getting this far, and we’re pretty proud of the results! Hat-wearing still isn’t perfect across all the classes, but the vast majority of hats now fit more naturally and look better.
Before we go, bear in mind that carrying out all these tiny changes really makes your eyes bleed after a while… Getting back to work will be tough!
Hats off to the whole DOFUS (art) team!