I turned my cat into a game asset

By entire technicality, I "did" turn my cat into a video game asset. But it was just a billboard for compositing her into a scene. I know my banner is currently that picture, but ˣ², I didn't have some surge from pride to make a blog about it; this was just one of my projects that sticks with me that I wanted to write first.

It started off with a... tech demo(?) It wasn't a tutorial, or a review. They were just showing it was possible to take a recording of somebody, and put it into a scene in Unreal Engine (🤮, I know.) From that point, I just had to figure it out.

I started off with just a picture of our cat: Patous, and a picture of my grandmother. I figure the first step was to make a cutout of them so I found a background remover from Adobe (https://www.adobe.com/express/feature/image/remove-background), It's not stellar, but it's freemium. I found a free program called SnapOtter (https://github.com/snapotter-hq/snapotter) that has a background remover, and everything I might need in the future.

Next, I took the photo and converted it into a normal map. There are a thousand (maybe?) programs online that do this. With some being horrifically worse at it. I had to try around a few before I found something I liked. You might get lucky and find one that generate more conversions.

Then, I added them all to a project I worked on prior, first was a picture of my grandmother: I made a new file with the picture without the background, and the normal map with the other conversions I made (I think I had specular, ambient occlusion, and roughness as well.) Then I created a new material, and added the main picture to the base color, the relevant material files to their correlated spots WITH the Alpha (the small A) of the main texture connected to the Opacity Mask of the material. This will let the background become transparent when you set the Blend mode to Transparent.

For a world to put them in, I tried a couple of different environments, maps, and made one myself before settling on a city by Meshingun Studio (https://www.fab.com/listings/9d6af06b-017c-4951-a9e9-2131585c5b95) for Patous, and a custom world for my Nonni.

I couldn't be more proud of how they both came out for my first time. There's a lot of stigma for using unreal engine. And I understand. Having one corporation, with an engine that nobody knows how to use, making games unable to run their own scenes is incredibly disappointing. But it is a good starting point: from unreal engine into godot, and maybe inspiration to learn blender, or maya. I know that after this I tried C++ with raylib, then moved onto OpenGL with https://learnopengl.com/book/book_pdf.pdf. I think that right now is a terrifying time for development in general, but it's also a great opportunity. Because we have the easiest tools to start, and the industry secrets aren't hidden.