Hi hi! 🥰✨
Modeling our lovable PuffPals for PuffPals: Island Skies was a delightful journey filled with creativity, imagination, and technical experimentation. From start to finish, each PuffPal model was carefully crafted with love and attention to detail. In this post, we'll take you behind the scenes to share our process and show you just how much fun we had bringing our PuffPals to life through the modeling journey! 💖📝
✏️🐮 How it Started 🐮✏️
All of the PuffPals we’ve modeled (except for two 👀) started as plushies! Lucky for us, we had 3D scans featuring many of our beloved favorites! These scans provided us with an excellent starting point for modeling our game characters, which was great when perfecting the proportions of particular Pals like Bean! We used these as a foundation and built upon them to create the animated, interactive PuffPals that you'll see at the end of this post! 😍
🦝🎨 Next Steps 🎨🦝
From the existing 3D scans of our PuffPals, we began retopologizing the 3d scans to match the mesh and painting textures to ensure that they looked perfect for our game. At this stage, we had to make some subtle changes to the plush designs to make the PuffPals look good in such a different medium. Some plushies like Mabel and Buster already worked in game, while Bean needed a bit more tweaking to get the proportions to feel right to us. We were excited to showcase our progress by including these updated models in our Kickstarter trailer, giving our fans a sneak peek into the adorable world of PuffPals. However, we didn't stop there- we wanted our PuffPals to be FLAWLESS! 👀
✨📝 Optimizing and Refining 📝✨
To accommodate all platforms, we needed to fine-tune the PuffPal models to ensure that we could have more of them on screen at once without sacrificing performance, and to better allow deformation during animation. Our extraordinary art team set off on a remodeling spree, not only by multiplying the PuffPals on screen but also giving birth to NEW models (ahem, say hello to Helios!). Our character modelers put their own spin on the PuffPal designs while consistently maintaining their original charm and personality, resulting in a cast of enchanting characters that we hope you will fall in love with and enjoy spending time with in game. 🥰💕
👏💗 Where we are now 💗👏
We are committed to making PuffPals: Island Skies the best it can be, which means continuing to optimize and adjust our PuffPal models. The art team continues to develop and make improvements to the modeling pipeline to make future PuffPals efficiently! We are always open to feedback and suggestions from our fans and will use this to improve and expand upon the world of PuffPals. We can't wait for you to join us on this exciting adventure and interact with the cuddly Pals in game!
Which PuffPal would you like to see brought to life next? 👀💖✨
Fluff and Love,
The Fluffnest Team