Building a Modelling & Animation Environment

It dawned on me that PxBoy is going to be rather limited if users weren't able to easily make and edit their own parts and add their own animations.  While this isn't much too look at, it's a solid start.

On Signed Distance Fields

I've been getting a few requests and questions on whether user's will be able to create their own models and accessories.  There currently exists a method of importing GLTF formatted models into PxBoy, but supporting it seems cumbersome to develop for as it's features are limited and are entirely different than the geometry PxBoy centers around Signed Distance Fields (SDF's).

If you've ever worked with SDF's you'll understand just how elegant and simple it is to get attractive and stylized looking models quickly, it's an entirely different workflow than traditional 3D modelling.  You work with primitive shapes, and through adding and subtracting them you build up complex shapes, the novel thing about them is that their implementation allows them to smoothly blend into eachother as well as produce other interesting effects with relative ease as behind the scenes it's all just math and numbers.  To have a better understanding of SDF's and what introduced me to the world of them you can take a look at:  https://ephtracy.github.io/index.html?page=magicacsg

Having stumbled onto them, it made a 1000 sense that this was a method that even young artists and folks who don't consider themselves artists would be able to produce pleasing assets rather quickly.  I'm not the first to think so but there are limitations to them for games, and that's chiefly performance and whether one's hardware can handle them, without an engine specifically tailored to them or heavy optimizations, you'd be hard pressed to build a game entirely with SDF's that didn't chug at a snails pace.  Their usage in games is usually limited to isolated VFX.  

However these issues don't exist when you pre-render them to images, which is why PxBoy exists.

The Modelling and Animation Environment

The models currently available have been thrown together using my knowledge of the Godot Engine.  Some of the methods used are obscure and not user friendly.  The question of having a proper SDF modelling environment that's configured for PxBoy has long sat around, ever since I began exploring them in the spring of 2023.  Sparked by another question this weekend, and out of curiousity I wanted to  estimate just how long it might take me by doing some basic implementations.

This isn't my first rodeo building a 3D modelling environment: PixaVoxet was a project I worked on during the final days of Vagante, you can directly trace the influences of it in PxBoy.  PixaVoxet also supported swappable parts, however geometry centered around Voxels, that were then rendered onto the screen as pixel art.  The implementation was slow due to my lack of knowledge around shaders.  What it did have was a voxel modelling environment as well as an animation editor.  With my current set of knowledge I believe I can build out these features with better performance and usability.

The hurdles to overcome when developing this kind of software are: user input, controlling the camera, how to select geometry and transform them, implementing the various modelling tools and settings specific to my implementation and how to implement the blending and animation features.  As well as how to make it all user friendly.

The most unintuitive pieces for me to code the transformation gizmo and viewport camera controls are implemented.  While there's a lot left to do, it's rather straightforward, with the animation timeline being the most involved.  I estimate that a large portion of this editor can be done within a month or two depending on whether or not I line up some contract work.

This doesn't exclude the new assets I had promised for this week, but they are being pushed back a week as this week is looking a bit busy.

I've never been one for self marketing but I setup a ko-fi if you want to support my work even further as I dedicate more time to this project:

https://ko-fi.com/leftyspurlock

I've also setup a discord for folks to talk PxBoy and follow development:

https://discord.gg/6VDjrH3y

Thank you,

Keo