Hey there, and welcome back to the LiveTale Character Art blog series! Today, we're going to dive into the creation of one of our first costume assets!

Creating clothing and other fabric-based assets for 3D characters can be a tricky process. Luckily, zBrush is a great tool for artists and offers a variety of sculpting brushes that can help us create the appearance of different fabrics that we’re shooting for - like leather, denim, and silk. We can use zBrush to produce a range of secondary wrinkles and folds in the clothing, adding realism and texture to our fabrics.

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Once we've got our fabric looking the way we want it, we do a quick retopology and UV mapping, and then it's time to move onto texturing in Substance Painter. Substance Painter is a powerful software that allows us to create complex, layered textures for our in-engine game models. We can use Substance’s layer-based workflow to create Smart Materials and textures that fit our specific needs.

One of the benefits of using Substance Painter is its ability to efficiently bake texture maps. These maps, such as ambient occlusion, curvature, thickness and normal maps, can be used when generating Smart Material for our model to enhance its appearance and make it look alot more realistic. It's amazing how much of a difference these maps can make.

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Another important step in creating any asset for a game mesh is to set up the textures with Material ID maps. This might sound like a technical term, but it's actually a fairly simple concept. Material ID maps allow us to mask out specific areas of the material to assign different textures across parts of our 3D model. If you want a shiny hex pattern across your sleeves and a matte camouflage on your lapel, Material IDs are how you separate the two.

Once we've created our base textures in Substance Painter using Smart Materials, we can polish the maps up by hand with a little hand-painted magic. Then, it's time to export our asset for use in a game engine. This typically involves exporting the textures and maps as separate files, as well as exporting the 3D model itself in a format that can be read by the game engine.

We hope you've enjoyed this glimpse into the creation of stock costume assets using zBrush and Substance Painter. By using these powerful tools together, we can create intricate and detailed textures that bring our characters to life. But we're just scratching the surface of what's possible with these programs! Stay tuned for more exciting insights and techniques in our upcoming LiveTale Character Art blog posts. We can't wait to share more with you in the future, so make sure to keep an eye out!

@TableTopProphet

HOW TO PLAY (in theory)

ideally the game would be thriller T for teen First person VR visual novel. Each playthrough should be able to complete in 1 or 2 sessions.

Replayability and story-driven players are the target. Twitch Roleplay streams and Speedrunning community is a secondary target.

a frame of reference might be elements of the Myst Series, Nancy Drew, escape rooms, FNAF, and choose your own adventure novels.

randomized and procedurally generated dungeons to explore and puzzles to solve. Each playthrough is unique in both design, and in decisions made.

the full story is for completionists. The goal being to play through several times (or from save points), unlocking new secrets from different characters.

the player acts as a spirit medium and empath, with a secondary specialized skill and personality traits which they choose. This explains the audience's ability to see or learn about memories of the past, and unlock NPCs secrets. It also adds other factors for the player, such as a sensitivity to the supernatural, making objectives for the player more spiritual than physical. The player is NOT a combatant, however, some crew members are, and their fighting ability would be used in puzzle-solving situations of which the player directs. The chances of the fighter surviving are based on how well the player knows each character's abilities for specific situations. This is learned by talking to NPCs, paying attention to their side chatter, and player knowledge from new game plus.

these custom feats allow the player to build relationships with different NPCs each playthrough. It may also be feats that are duplicated in other crew members, making some crew obsolete compared to others.

As the story progresses, crew members begin to abandon Fellyne, new people join the party, or crew members turn on each other. It's the player's job to be a peacemaker, and make the tough decisions on who to comfort into staying, and who to aggravate into leaving. There is no one right way to complete the story, but each decision changes the dungeon navigation based on party ability, and each decision opens new and interesting conversations allowing players to unlock hidden secrets from compelling characters to understand the entire scope of the lore and story. Each crew member also has a certain set of skills, and losing them at the wrong chapter may make the game more difficult.

gameplay outside of dialogue and crew management minigame consists of hide-and-go seek mechanics, scavenger hunt, puzzle solving, escape rooms, time challenges, maze navigation/exploring, and roleplaying. A blend of them all may be required to progress each new section of the dungeon.

@bramblesofice hey I'm not a dev or anything just some guy that's writing tales like you but I'd say you can use those story's just as long as you change anything that's copy written for example if a place in the story you have is named grayhawk or Neverwinter it's now called thronehill or if a realm you visited is called the umbra it's now called the paradoxiza just saying that's what I would do

@skindro i can see the zero gravity laser gun fights against space terrorists with jet packs and built in grappling hooks. I actually can see how the player stumbles into one of these space pirate suits...
U should put this in the contest.

Oh boy. Most fun? Buckle in.

I ran a TTRPG using Pathfinder 1st edition, Mythic Rules, Campaign, etc. (the whole rule set). I set this in Skyrim, a few years after The Dragonborn put The Nords back in control.

I built a custom class for using Thu'um (dragon tongue), and each player slowly learned a handful of words over time.

Then, I made a system where they can shout in unison to create 'multi-word effects'.

The best two are as follows:

1.) T-Rex tornado. Sounds like what it's titled. The draconic words for "Teeth", "Claws", "Tempest", "Gale", and "Animal" resulted in an enormous tornado filled with T-Rexes flying across the battlefield.
2.) Insatiable Lustful Hunger. An enormous herd of scavenger beetles the size of mini-vans was descending upon a town. The party used the words "Passion", "Desire", "Flesh", "Consume", and "Spread" to cause basically a beetle-only zombie disease to spread through the hostile army's ranks.

Very fun campaign, even more weird stuff happened later on (a tank with a main gun that took 1 year to recharge but did 100d10 damage, and 1-shot a Kraken, for instance).

Lots of good memories.

Possible Enemies that first years face are

Wolves
Spiders
Bandits
Rats
Goblin hordes
Void Cultists
Gladiators
Skeletons
Zombies

Possible Quest ideas

Catch a band of roam bandits and bring back the treasure they stole

Clear out the Goblin Horde terrorizing the trade routes

Guide a merchant to T'mir and back

Clear out the abandoned caverns

Hey @Maruvail! Good questions all around, I hope to hit all your points, but feel free to follow up with more if I'm not super clear.

What is a prop exactly?

Props are a bit loosely defined because of how much they encompass. I guess the best way for me to explain it is you have a bunch of "physical" components to a Tale; some of them are Locations (pretty self explanatory), some of them are Characters, and some are Props. Characters have autonomy, where Props don't. Something in a Tale might be a Prop where in another it might be a Character. E.g. A legendary cursed sword might just be that in a Tale (a Prop), but in a different one, you can "inhabit" it as a player and have it talk and shoot laser beams, now that it's gained autonomy.

Props range from tools and weapons to vehicles, to furniture, to spell scrolls, etc.

Do we need to talk about specific items in our submission in order to qualify for these points?

First of all, I would like to say the points and the point system isn't quantitative in that sense. A 60-point Tale isn't any better or worse, or more or less deserving, than a 100-point Tale. And as such, it's not going to get benefitted or damaged by having a different tally.

We have that minimum as a bit of a filter to only have stories where authors went in depth in at least some of the categories, not necessarily all. Once you've met the threshold, the criteria that will be important to select a Tale over another are: popularity among members, creativity, originality and diversity of themes.

The reason Props are separated and given separate points, is to be able to properly reward and keep in the running Tales that are focused around those. If you have an amazing story that revolves around giant mecha fighting each other, you're probably going to go into a lot of detail about the different types of mecha there are, and get a lot of Prop points in the process; allowing you to not go into as much detail about Locations or Characters (maybe you want to just let people bring their own, as long as they're mecha pilots).

That said, if your story has cool items and you wanna go in-depth about them, you're more than welcome, and we encourage it, but it's not necessary. It's more of an opportunity to give points where they're deserved than a checklist item to cross off for contestants.

Would unique monsters or plants qualify for this section?

I would say it depends on the context, like I said with the sword. Monsters will probably more likely be interpreted as Characters, since they have autonomy, and you could have a player playing as an ogre, or controlling all dragons the party encounters.

Plants could be Props for sure, especially ones small or frequent enough to be Props. I'm thinking the concept of a forest or even a giant tree might fit more into Locations. It's really more about the context and its role in the story than anything else.

@jdutton One note that I wanted to add is that I was heavily inspired by the Mass Effect series while brainstorming this idea. A helpful way to imagine this world is one in which the advanced cordyceps from The Last of Us evolved to fight animals so quickly that fungus became the dominant kingdom on this planet, then a crew like the one from ME: Andromeda both discovered and decided to settle it. But regardless of these inspirations, this concept is its own IP.

While replaying ME: Andromeda, I remembered how unfulfilled I felt regarding the base building. For this game, I charge the players with building and maintaining a community in a world that seeks to destroy them. Combat will occur (with monsters, no less), but most of the fight is against a threat that cannot be seen. I am no artist. My wish is for the fungal and plant life to appear familiar to players, but the advanced fungi should be depicted as alien, hostile, and somewhat intelligent.

Notable Aspects of the World

Magic System

There are two types of magic: that of Manifestation, and that granted by a divine being. All magic that is not divine is considered scientific.

Those born with magical abilities are known as Castors (they can be referred to by many different names like mage or sorcerer) and can tap into magical energy "wells", manifesting their will into reality. However, the magic that they produce is limited by the source that they use. Sources can be found naturally in the world, or they can be special objects enchanted with the ability to collect energy. Sources that have been depleted of magical energy take time to recover, and if one were to pull energy from a drained source, the source will "snap" and be permanently unable to recover its energy. Doing this grants a short burst of power to the user, but is seen as bad practice by Castors and is forbidden in many institutions. Every individual is born with a well of magical energy, which acts as an imprint of a person's essence after they die. To drain another person's well of energy, at any stage of life or death, requires special and very forbidden knowledge. To tap into one's own well is incredibly dangerous and looked down upon, but not necessarily prohibited. Once a person's well has "snapped" they do not take any physical damage, but they lose their "essence" and will be unrevivable if killed, and if they were a Castor they will be unable to Manifest.

Divine beings innately have deep wells of magical energy; they are "infinite" sources. They have the ability to draw energy from any source, including themselves. They can also imbue others with a portion of their energy, even non-Castors. Divine magic is often revered because when it is witnessed, it is the result of a blessing or a curse from a god. However, sometimes divine magic can be interpreted as demonic, but this is relative to the religious beliefs of the society that claims it.

Religion

The two major gods worshiped in Umbranest are:

Moiante, God of Chaos, Rituals, Divination, and Individualism
Moiante's influence permeates the entirety of the island and its history. She is closely associated with the Karakhan, Elder Folk, and the Kubari.

Amon, God of the All Worlds, Bringer of Enlightenment and Unity
A relatively new god to the residents of Umbranest. Those that worship him call themselves Amonis. Amon is seen by his followers as the 'God of All Gods', so while they do not deny the existence of other gods, they find their influence to be trivial compared to Amon's.

There are also several minor gods that have small followings:

Onx: God of Strength, Power, and War Feuga: God of Art, Music, Dance, Passion, Beauty Angorab: God of Nature, Growth, Disease, Decay, and Rebirth Lthig: God of Fear, Death, the Unknown, Exploration and Curiosity Itifi: God of Blood, Family, Lineage, Loyalty Xetoph: God of the Skies, Weather, the Elements, Luck

Current Level of Technology

While there is no electricity, no steam-powered inventions, there is coal and lumber and of course, magic. There are a few specialized factories in the city run by magical means, however almost everything is made by hand by skilled craftspeople. Some have rudimentary indoor plumbing while others employ the use of outhouses and water wells. The villages live in more medieval terms, while the Elder Folk live completely outdoors or use temporary shelters such as caves or large tree hollows.

Monetary Currency in Umbranest

Umbranest had been exclusively operating on a bartering system until the Apollyons established a form of currency known as "Bone Tokens" which have official guild or faction seals burned into them. Despite the factions' rivalries with each other, most of their merchants accept any official seal on a bone token. Bone tokens are often referred to as "chalk", or simply just coins.

Unique Monster

Deep in the Aberrant Lands live the Vikakarin, or "Vika", terrifying reptilian beasts whose speed and stealth match that of a mountain lion. They are few in number and extremely territorial. However, the Elder Folk have an understanding with the creatures. The Vika are known as Bog Watchers, and guard the land of the Elder Folk. They stalk their prey by exuding an aura of fear and causing the temperature to drop sharply. This disorients the prey making it more vulnerable to the Vika's attack. The creature's insides are fiery hot and can release steam to obscure an area. The creature will pounce upon its prey, and use its long tail to constrict its target. Its narrow, predatorial skull looks as if a sheet of skin was stretched over it. Without lips, its long sharp fangs protrude menacingly, while acidic poison drips down them. As an alchemical ingredient, its liver has potent healing properties, known to cure any ailment or stave off death for a time.

Unique Drug

In the marshes of the island grows a rare plant with bulbous blue leaves and a thick verdant green stem. It stinks of rot, and if eaten raw, it causes horrible hallucinations and sometimes fatal illness. This plant is known as Myrtilia, and can be refined into a potent hallucinogenic drug called myrtle. When brewed by a skilled alchemist, the leaves can be cooked into a digestible wax which blocks pain in the user and causes hallucinations controllable by the user as though they were in a lucid dream. There are no known major health effects from taking it long term, other than dependence on it due to its high addictivity. If one were to take the drug long enough for their body to acclimatize to it, the withdrawal symptoms cause excruciating pain that can make the user go insane.

Fantasy Races in Umbranest

The island is natively human (Karakhan/Elder Folk/majority of Umbranest), and there is a moderate presence of elves in the Araena faction. However, all kinds of people from lands overseas visit and live in Umbranest. Any fantasy race can be played in this world according to the desires of the player.

Possible Plot Lines - What can YOU do in Umbranest?

Choose your origin: are you from the city? The Karakhan or Elder Folk? Maybe you're an outlander who's come to the city in search of a new life.

Join a faction! Use faction resources to hone your skills and rise through the ranks. Discover rival faction plots and advance your own faction's schemes.

Join a cult! Start a cult! Destroy a cult! All manner of divine beings, gods and demons alike, are worshiped in Umbranest. Succumb to the fervor, or use it to your advantage.

Start or join a gang! Challenge the reigning factions, fight for your place in Umbranest.

Delve into the science of magic! Research and create your own spells, grow your power to accomplish the impossible.

Discover hidden libraries of forbidden knowledge, use the power or destroy it forever.

Become a master of alchemy! Explore every inch of the island in search of dangerous beasts and rare ingredients.

Be a mercenary, a merchant, a minstrel! Make a name for yourself as a legendary professional for hire, or join an established guild!

Live in the world of subterfuge and sabotage. Be a double agent for rival factions. Where do your loyalties truly lie?

Become an infamous thief! Master the art of stealth, pull off a legendary heist.

Explore the depths of Umbranest, what remains of Vekron, and learn the truth about the Basileia and her origins.

Travel to the Karakhan villages. Uncover the secrets of Zygos. Study the magic of Albiden. Discover ancient prophecies in the caverns of Belem. Embrace your connection to nature in Griseus. Earn the trust of Igrum and witness the beauty of the blooming fields.

Restore the Old Ways, help the Elder Folk tear down Umbranest. Or work with the Kubari to bring back the age of Vekron.

Traverse the bogs, the mountains, the forests. Encounter terrifying creatures, isolated hermits, and ancient ruins.

Become an unstoppable force of power in Umbranest. Will you challenge the factions? Will you challenge... the Basileia?

@BattleClown
WOW THIS IS SO GOOD
-Definitely not the above mentioned Jake 😉

I like it reminds me of the good old days of crackdown and saints row

This stream was so much fun! I strongly recommend checking it out if you weren’t able to watch it live!

@K-O IMG_20230405_210314369_HDR.jpg

Well, you can't really see him, he's about the size of a large rice grain, but I have a single brine shrimp named Dewey who lives in a self contained ecosystem as seen on the left side of the photo. If you're not familiar with those, it's a closed habitat that perpetuates it's own balance so long as you allow it some indirect access to sunlight. Inside, algae grows that offers oxygen and food for Dewey.

Dewey originally belonged to the building manager at my work. During a QA session where I was feeling rather slap happy, I asked him about it and if he named it. He said no and challenged me to do it. So I drew a picture of Dewey in the process and his response was what you're seeing there.

A month later, the building manager was transferring to California and asked for me. In short, he gave me Dewey and now the little guy lives on my lamp table where I can make sure he gets some light for his little home. I check on him daily.

@K-O Maybe I'm just recalling my old days in high school.... but what about if we did like a secret madlibs but for nerds? Could be text based, or could be a random livestream hangout where you ask for verbs/adjectives/nouns etc.

Also, what if we had a goofy MS paint thread, you know the kind. Someone posts an unfinished picture and others flesh it out, hopefully poorly, in paint.

@K-O Thank you so much for the thoughtful post! Speaking as a queer gamer, I am so proud to be involved with LiveTale. I truly couldn’t ask for a safer, kinder, more accepting community. Thank you to everyone for all that you do to make LiveTale so accepting.

Here we go. I’m not entirely sure how to define “fandom” but I do tend to go really hard with the things I love.

The Mountain Goats: Everyone who’s known me even a small amount of time knows my obsession. They may not know the extent of it: my largest tattoo, personalized license plate, bumper stickers, vinyl records, 23 shirts (that I can recall, I probably have more that I can’t remember), 11 posters (9 of them are tour posters and one is signed by the lead singer), countless stickers/patches/buttons, and limited edition promotional pogs for some reason. I’ve seen them live nine times and framed the ticket stub from the first time I ever saw them. I’ve met the lead singer (and cried).

Final Fantasy: I own and have played most of the games, have cosplayed FF characters, I have figures, music boxes, jewelry, game guides and art books, one tattoo (and another on the books for December).

Actually all but one of my tattoos are fandom adjacent: one from a book, three from bands, one from Final Fantasy. Another Final Fantasy one coming up (as mentioned above) and two more band tattoos planned but not scheduled.

One of my favorite games ever! I still remember when I first started playing it (literally years ago) and was blown away by how BIG it is! It’s beautiful, unique, and endlessly fun to play. I recently introduced my partner to it - he’s not much of a gamer but is a big Zelda fan nonetheless - and he will play it for hours without actually advancing the plot in any way, which I think is a sign of a really well-crafted world. And of course the art and music are both gorgeous. I don’t know if I have a favorite shrine but I love the ones that require you to combine your powers in interesting ways. I also loooove the giant horse, the Lord of the Mountain/Satori, the dragons, the Great Fairies, and the sand seals!

@Mariano The Uzumaki anime is FINALLY dropping - I don’t think there’s a solid release date yet, but before the end of the year. And there’s a new trailer!!! I’m so geeked ahhhhhhhh

Other than that I don’t really have anything in particular I’m watching at the moment, but I’m going to Youmacon (anime convention) in November and we’ll see if anything catches me eye.

And I have no idea when the new Berserk anime is releasing but the teaser looked pretty decent! I’ve been burned before by Berserk anime so hopefully this one is better.

@SwampCreature I went to a small tech/gaming convention back in 2016 because a friend of mine was competing in a live League of Legends tournament. It was a lot of fun, and I got to have my only experience with VR to this day, but I really hope to see something of the scale of a SDCC or NYCC.