Resculpting the Tech - for free
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Last January's campaign was wild. The results went beyound my expectations, not just because it made quite a bit, but because I really wasn't expecting that much of a reaction for a solo mode for Full Spectrum Dominance.
The plan was simple: make some fun space crabs (thanks to AL Voss and their imagination), and a brokend down version of the Tech, my best-selling faction and the first one to enter the FSU (Full Spectrum Universe. I've decided it's a thing!)
Remaking
Making broken-down tech models implied starting with a non-broken-down version of them, and the old one was old, underdetailed, and the meshes were a bit all over the place.
Lately I've been doing my hard surface in Plasticity, and it felt pretty logic to use that to resculpt the robots. So I did, and the results were pretty good.
Stepping Up
At that point, the logical step was simple: redoing all the Tech robots in higher details. How would I distribute them? It's still a ton of work, but selling them as a new package felt wrong.
Luckly, the campaign went really well, and I felt justified to simply doing the new models, and upgrading whoever got the Tech till that point onwars. It's... probably not the smartest move business-wise, but I feel that the community that is supporting FSD has been so consistent throughout the campaigns that it's only fair. And hopefully people will appreciate all the extra work poured into something "just to make it better".
Lastly, having one of my 6 factions so obviouisly behind in terms of poly count, detail and general readability was not great for my image. Now I can say that all six factions are something I'm proud to showcase.
Zenos and Socrates
Resculpting the base meshes is one thing, another is posing all the variations, support them, test them. That took a while, and I'm still working through the rest of the forces. But, to this day, both Zenos and Socrates have been updated in the army bundle.
The six Zenos have been replaced with the six new poses, roughly matching 1:1 the previous ones, but with a much better sculpt for the body
The Socrates feature all the weapons and body options from before, plus six pre-posed versions, presupported and ready for play.
New Socrates Cards
Another change, coming in the 1.8 of FSD, is that the three old profiles for the Socrates have been replaced with SIX new loadouts. I still did not want to go the Corsair way, where each weapon implied an extra card, but wanted to offer more options, using ideally all of the potential weapons in the pack.
The new Socrates have the Unique keyword, which means that you won't be able to field two of the same kind, and that only adds to the feeling of each being a unique thinking being, with its own preferences and peculiarities.
So yeah, here's that. A considerable amount of free stuff for a considerable amount of people. Yay!
Jack