#player pascal

Today should be a shorter write-up, because physics are easy, right? I want Pascal's big shirt to be physics based, just because I can. (And it gives me something new to learn)

So I grab my base mesh, apply the correct modifiers and:

For some reason, my base mesh decides to eat the mockup sleeve. Nom nom.

I turned the whole thing inside out, requested help on Reddit, various Blender forums, looking all over for what the cause of this might be.

Different people offer advice, request screenshots, look at the numbers and suddenly we all realize:

The Normals on the Base mesh arms are inverted, so they push the cloth sim inwards.

One of the first problems to tackle with Pascal was: "How does an arm bend in Minecraft?"

The common consensus is that Minecraft arms bend at a sharp angle, retaining the blocky form you recognize ingame and in fan animations. This goes way back with animations by CaptainSparklez and BootstrapBuckaroo, but is also seen in more modern animations by people like Cubical.

Should be simple enough, right? Just make a rectangle and bend it with a two-boned rig, right?

Turns out it is not so simple.

Without using modifiers, constraints or other nifty tricks, meshes and wireframes want to collapse or stretch a little bit to accommodate for the movement of the bones. Long story short: This means that the blocky, rigid appearance we want to go for wont be achieved with just a simple rig. I needed to go Advanced™

At this point, for the first time since ever working with 3D software at school or professionally in over 10 years, I stumbled upon Drivers and Shape Keys.

Since Blender's documentation is a dry boring slog to get through, let alone to understand if you are a visual learner like myself, I had to shift through a couple of dozen YouTube videos to understand the basics.

The pink line you see above are 4 vertexes shifting around based on the value in my Shape Key. When I attach a Driver to this value, connected to the same bone that I move the arm with, I can finally create angles like these:

Expression: tan(rotation_euler/2)

Don't ask me (yet) how the math works, just know that it does. And if it does not, we will dive back in once we start rigging the full body!

Getting somewhere, but I feel like I should push the stylization a bit in the shader.

I was not expecting to run into this, but I wanted to ask Reddit a question regarding PBR textures and ran into this topic:

I figured to save this in the queue to easily revisit later, when shading and rendering becomes more relevant to the end result of this little project.

Some choice comments:

It seems that MCprep is a Blender plugin that allows you to import animated mob rigs, animated blocks and sets up "better materials"; whatever that might mean.

Mineways is a Blender plugin that allows you to import complete Minecraft worlds and manipulate them more easily inside Blender. This means that if I want Pascal to interact with any Minecraft environment, I can just set it up in Creative mode and import it later. Definitely something worth remembering.

I was already familiar with the Barebones texture pack; I have been using it as my go-to texture pack since I started playing again. (It just looks nicer in my opinion)

Mort Mort is a developer employed at Mojang. I`m not sure of their exact position, but it does not matter when they are such a lovely artist that puts out free tutorials like this:

A lot of things mentioned in this video were modeling basics, but there were certainly a few new things regarding Blender I had not considered yet, such as pixel perfect texture swapping and connecting Aseprite to Blender.

This is a set of resources by VortexTheBreadMan, which relies on the Goo Engine branch of Blender. Their shader is Eevee based and adds procedural highlights, outlines and gradients. They have a Volumetrics pack for, well, volumetrics and also two rigs: Player and Cat.

Last but not least, some good remarks about the renderer setup. Light sources in 3D environments were never my strong suit, so any pointers regarding those are always helpful. Not sure how willing I am to trust a Source on Reddit, but I`m sure its fine as long as it is not medical advice!

Have you ever tried to load a Genuine Minecraft™ texture onto your Model in Blender? The results may surprise you!

Turns out, when working with pixel art textures in 3D environments, you might run into some scaled blur issues. Luckily there is a fix:

When setting up your texture, you can use the Dropdown boxes below the Image Texture to tell Blender what to do with scaling.

Linear means it will stretch and interpolate between the colors, creating smooth gradients and a bit of fuzz between hard edges to "clean it up" for you. This is great for higher resolution textures, but not so much for the pixelated style we are going for.

Set your Image Texture to "Closest", meaning it will try to preserve hard edges between colors where possible!

While it may be hard to tell in the image above, it makes a world of a difference on more detailed models:

Lets do a show of hands, who here loves doing Fingerguns? 👈🐨

If we check the same reference from the previous post, we see that there are a few ways to tackle these blocky fists. Some people give them fingers, others leave the arms with blocky nubs, just like the official Mojang trailers, others swap models between shots to keep a certain simple look.

Since Pascal is not quite a Minecraft character, being a big lanky blue furry dude and all, so I figured to give him hands and fingers to feel the world with.

Using "Revenge" by CaptainSparklez as a baseline, who in turn used a model by BootstrapBuckaroo, I broke down how the hands might work in this blocky fashion.

One downside: the Usher model only uses fists and fingerpoints and the Player character only really uses their hands with the camera in awkward or obscured angles, making it hard to figure out how the other fingers might move around.

At this point, I figured the best way to tackle the blockout would be to voxel the base shapes together. Basically just 3D pixelart, to see how the fingers move and what the common angles would be.

After blocking out the basic shape for the finger positions, I whipped up some Shape Keys like I did for the elbow joints in my last post, and made a basic control rig. The idea is simple: move the circle between Z = 0 and Z = 1 and let the Driver handle the math. (listed to the left of the circle)

I kind of like the snappy changes the third option gives me, where the value pops over from 0 to 1 and the finger just >appears< from the fist. This may change in the future if there are more finger positions I need to account for, but works for now.

So far, the only really tricky part would be the movement of the thumb.

While your fingers are very limited in their movement, basically just curling and uncurling when moving in a very basic manner, the thumbs base joint is not where most people would expect.

As you can see, the thumb is also 3 joints long, while only 2 joints are clearly visible when glancing at your hand. In 3 dimensions, it is also positioned in a different angle from your other fingers and has a much wider range of movement.

Source image above: Researchgate.net

Constraining the thumb to just one axis, like the rest of the fingers, felt awkward and unnatural. (If that is a good word for a blue blocky 3D anthropomorphic koala).

For now, I left it at just that though, for easy fingerguns.

Once I have a bit more time to revisit the hands, to finish up Pascal`s rig, I will probably make use of a mix of bones, shape keys and drivers to easily animate the hand.