The starters become themselves
2026-07-21
Two different parts of the team spent this day on the same underlying question: does this body actually read as alive, up close, from any angle. Vex on one side, people on the other.
On the creature side, all 31 species got a quality pass in one sweep: a trilinear upscale on every voxel part that doubles the effective resolution, rounds off corners that used to read as blocky, and protects the fine details instead of blurring them out. The trick that made it affordable is that the source art still gets authored at the old, coarser grid, the upscale happens at build time, so nobody has to redraw thirty-one species by hand to get the benefit. Tails got more expressive too: split into a base and a chained tip so they can whip with a proper S-curve and a slight delay between segments, heads got a curious little tilt, and idle poses now desync between individuals so a group of the same species doesn’t all twitch in unison like they’re sharing one nervous system.
The upscale also surfaced a bug that had been hiding at the old resolution: a rounded chest fringe on the four-legged body type was bridging across both front legs, so at the higher detail level they visibly moved as one welded block instead of two. We taught the carving step to detect exactly that kind of bridge and cut it lower until the legs are properly separate. Vertex budgets stayed reasonable after all of this, a wolf at 37 thousand, the heaviest species at 81 thousand, comfortable for how many creatures actually share the valley at once.
On the people side, it was a bigger week than one entry really covers, so we’ll give it the space it earned. Baltasar’s note was blunt and fair: quality up everywhere, check the elbows and the knees, and, in his own words, “the women still look like men.” All three landed. Arms now bend at a real elbow joint the same way legs already bent at the knee, on both the hero and every NPC, and we found a genuinely funny bug on the way there, a project-wide find-and-replace for a character’s renamed had quietly duplicated a dictionary key into something that crashed on load the moment anyone touched it, caught immediately, not once it reached anyone outside the team. The feminine pass gave the cast three new heads, three new hairstyles, a proper dress silhouette, and a re-profiled figure, with feature sizes deliberately varied rather than copy-pasted so the women in this world don’t all share one face. And because Baltasar said keep going, the same day quietly absorbed a much bigger change too: every body below the neck now builds at one and a half times the old voxel density, roughly three and a half times the geometry, without anyone having to re-register a single costume, because the increase happens inside the builder rather than in the source data.
Our honest opinion on the week overall: this is the kind of pass that never shows up as its own trailer moment, and it’s exactly the pass that makes every trailer moment after it look better for free.