Art Style

Dynamically changing color is thankfully an obstacle I have already overcome in ogre as you can see with the flashing organelles that take damage and differently colored membranes.

I think we shouldnt worry about organelles upgrades yet and focus mostly on bacteria models since moopli already has a prototype. If threecubed would like to create the models and Nanu texture them, that’d be pretty dope, but only if you both want to do that.

As for photosynthesis, a popular theory is that life started out with a purple algae that absorbed all of the suns yellow and green light. This algae covered all of the top of the ocean, and only red and blue light, which wasn’t absorbed by the algae, managed to get through. In the, plants evolved that could use this red light (these are the green plants we see everywhere today). Unfortunately, the purple algae went extinct for some unknown reason and the green ones dominated.

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I can try to texture a few of my bacteria, nanu can help with some others and maybe we can find a common ground to these, obviously some bacteria would be more transparent than others but they all should be a uniform color yes?

Different colors and preferably different shapes for different bacteria species. The player needs to be able to easily tell them apart by looking at them, without thinking “is this the orangish-red flesh eating bacteria, or the redish-orange mitochondria bacteria?”

In that case should I use the models I made brogue for the bacteria? I can probably create appropriate textures for each, maybe. Unless nanu wants to assist

Brogue?

Brogue /brōɡ/ noun a strong outdoor shoe with ornamental perforated patterns in the leather.

You made numerous pill shaped bacteria. Now we either need to make them less high poly or just turn them into sprites, which is up to you. We also need grouped bacteria (like the 2 cells joined together ones), and just a plethora of different shapes.

While it may not be a popular idea, using 2d meshes would work nicely. they are low poly but still meshes, so they can be deformed and dynamically animated just like any 3d object. the only problem is correctly layering them. I can try my hand at making an animated low poly bacteria.

I can easily turn them into minimal-poly bacteria, after all if we want them to rotate or move around they would need to be 3d to rotate effecticely

not at all actually, the microbe stage currently only operates along the x/y plane. 3d assets are entirely redundant right now.

To make 2d meshes from a 3D model you need to simply change the camera to a 400:400 ration and click the render button. The png image can then be layered as a sprite on top of 4 vertex face.

I’m talking about animated 2d meshes, not a square png like the organelles

I made the textures for certain organelles (nucleus, ER, golgi, mitochondrion) greyscale. The result was quite interesting:






Basically, it results in better looking, if somewhat bland, colors.

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Yeah, Transparency is a must for our organelles. I’ll rerender all of my newer organelles in grayscale and with less alpha so we can use this method on our better looking organelles

I think that this might be something interesting we could throw in 3.3 even. If its just recolouring then choosing based on a “star type” variable.

Have you had any success with your bacteria models lately? Our forum has been pretty quiet lately and I think a new game element like bacteria can spark some life into these dormant threads

I thought I was able to show them and show that they’re kinda done, or atleast some of them…

I made these for the Petri Dish background. They do look a bit cartoony though.

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