Making Go Go Manfrog: 3D modeling and faux-photogrammetry

This post is a devlog of Go Go Manfrog, a small gamejam game I made for Mini Jam 218: Fire. The game is a 3D platformer with a jump mechanic similar to Jump King, with the added mechanic of a platform that is only solid when its color matches with the background color (and the background color cycles between red, green and blue every time you jump).

In this post, I'll write a bit about how I made the 3D model of the game. I thought it would be nice to have a "low-poly frog with high-poly real human legs" because it looked too funny in my imagination, even more so if I could use my own legs for the model. The result is this fella here:

I have some photogrammetry experience using Meshroom from a long time ago, but since I was alone and needed something "quick and dirty" instead of a high-quality leg render, and I didn't want to send a photo of my leg to any third-party provider, I turned to a local generative AI workflow to turn the photo of my leg to a rough 3D shape. The output was not usable for Game Engines (specially for a web build, which is much more constrained in resources), but it gave me the high-poly shape and a good estimation of the texture of the rest of my leg (under the right angle, at least), good enough to work on Blender and make it a usable asset in the game. All the rest is blood and gamejam sweat, including the funky idle animation, surprisingly cute for a frog with human legs.

Also, I'm pretty much a Blender newbie, so it was a good opportunity to understand some workflows in Blender myself while trying to make the mesh work.

Important Disclaimer

I know! Generative AI shenanigans. I only used assets either me or other artists I can credit created, but this particular case is fair use - there is a significant transformation of the final asset, itself an extrapolation of my leg. Also, I couldn't do a photogrammetry render of my leg on my own because I don't have a setup to take 180° photos without myself moving, so that was my only alternative for a poor-man photogrammetry job.

With that said, I'm somewhat interested in local development with AI, not relying on cloud services and such, so I learned some bits and added an extra tool for my gamedev toolbox. If you're interested in knowing a bit about it too, keep reading! For the good and for the bad, I don't think AI is going anywhere, so my stance is to experiment as long as it is interesting and fun, and without taking my agency on creating the game I want to make.