The Future of Environments

Hey everyone, Blacky here, and this is really a big one today.

Where do I even start?

So, first and foremost, our environment designer Pegashis has been heavily occupied with real life for many months now, and we honestly can't quite tell when or if he will ever return to the project in the same capacity as before. Around two months ago, I talked to him about RLD2.0, and he'd like to apologize for not having any footage. As a matter of fact, this is entirely on ice until things get better for him.

Meanwhile, as you all have probably already noticed, we are waiting until Unity gives us a clear indication of where the future of render pipelines will take us. Ideally, this will happen in early 2027, so quite a while from today.

Once the migration to that pipeline is done, we could introduce custom environments so you all could build your own maps and bring them into the app. But until this is actually happening and working, we are stranded and stuck with our fairly small roster of environments. And even once custom environments are live, people would still have to learn how to build and produce them.

New maps are something a lot of you are looking forward to. I know that better than anyone else, and back when I was just a small content creator building characters, I always felt like I needed more options to stage them.

Only bad news so far, huh?

Well, I have the bright side coming up right now.

A quick talk with Odes, a full week of learning, building, and engineering, and I am now at the point where I can announce that I will build a new environment for FVNE.

I definitely will give it my all, try to live up to what is already present, and help close the gap as an additional environment designer.

So, what do I want to create?

Well, why not combine what I've heard people would like to see, set a new vibe for FVNE while still making people feel "at home," and mix all of that with a small dream of mine...

Bedroom

Daytime

Vacation

The coast

Let's go.

So, as a working title, this is literally the "Coastal Bedroom" for now.

All images are taken in Blender without any real textures, but with rough coloration so you get a better idea of what I am aiming for.

The setup itself is already pretty much final, though.

We have a relatively large bedroom with a king-sized bed, a smaller, let's call it a lounge chaise, and a small pouf with a mirror.

Go out onto the balcony and you have a place to sit and have coffee. We have the egg chair and the love seat. Guess what that one's for 😉

So you can either have a cuddly indoor setup or be brave and go outside with whatever you have in mind.

Half of the shots I took have the windows disabled so you can actually look inside and out. You will have plenty of angles to shoot your scene from once the actual glass is in place.

I'll keep you posted on the progress of my map so the next presentation would probably be a look at the full texture setup.

Alright, small check behind the scenes:

The rest of the team is currently working on getting the kangaroo feet ready (Dogson) and refining the wrist and DQS systems we showed two days ago (Odes).

The final kangaroo template showcase, with the new feet in place, will be the next thing we want to show, and after that, we are aiming for a release around early October.

This brings me to the wrap-up:

Although the timing is, let's say, not ideal, we are all pulling together and making sure things keep moving forward.

I personally am very excited about being able to bring a part of my own vision into FVNE as an actual environment, so this is quite a big step for me.

Leave me some comments about what you think of the Coastal Bedroom, what you'd like to see, and so on.

Have a nice rest of the week and till soon,

Blacky