13. Blender3d Shield

First Shield (Firewall) Animation#

Whenever Mazk touches anything related to 3D, my eyes start to sparkle because it gives me a reason to open Blender. Back then, when I was overflowing with motivation and pixeling every firewall-ring individually in Photoshop, I already knew this could not be the final solution. Sooner or later, I would need a smarter and faster approach.

Two Tutorials to the Rescue#

Working with nodes in Blender still feels a bit like being back at school. I have to repeat a tutorial several times and reuse the same nodes again and again until the underlying logic finally sinks in. Blender can be especially unforgiving if you have not touched it in a while. Because of that, I built myself a workflow where I know exactly which tutorial to revisit for the information I need.

Tutorial One#

A fairly simple node based tutorial that shows how to create a spherical shield made of individual faces. These faces can then be animated easily using an empty object. Tutorial by SumStudio.

Tutorial Two#

Once the shield is done, it still needs to be pixelated and exported as individual sprite sheets fro use in Godot. The exact process for this step is explained in the following tutorial by KitagawaGameDev. There are also some simpler tutorials just for the export, but here you get a deep dive into the possibilities.

Results#

Some metadata can be controlled inside Blender, including colors, face count, and face size. This makes it possible to extract a wide variety of useful animated assets from a single file, all sharing a cohesive and stylish firewall look.

How the firewall will behave in the final game is not fully decided yet. What I can already tease, though, is this: work on the first playable version of Mazk is currently running at full speed. And i am ridiculously excited about it.

NEXT UP: DEV LOG 14. Mazk Player Animation Redesign#