Well, my winter break was 5 weeks long. It was pretty good. I spent the first two weeks living in Cuba doing a study abroad trip with the film department! We shot our short documentary on race relations in Cuba vs. in the US. When we stayed at EICTV, the national film school that Fidel helped start, there was a cafe that had $1 mojitos. Those mojitos were pretty damn good. But the scenery was amazing and Old Havana was beautiful. I did get pretty sick on the 4th day though and that was not fun. Other than that we ate some good food, smoked some good cigars, drank some really good rum, like every night, and yeah. When I was in a cigar shop in Old Havana I ran into two Drexel grads from 2015, it was really weird to meet Drexel people in Cuba. We also met up with 2 Drexel professors, one of them was there to get married, and the other was there playing at EDM shows. We went to his EDM show and it was pretty lit.
Then I came back to capitalist America. I told myself I was going to get a lot of work done. I got around 80% done on 3 of the 4 weekly models. I spent a lot of time catching up on sleep and just spending much needed time with my family. I did however do some unintenional research while playing one of my new favorite games. While everyone else was fighting off zombie-like creatures I was busy inspecting all the game models and textures and was able to figure out some new modeling techniques. Also unlike everyone else, I have 2 production classes this term... yay. Pros: I'm all rested and ready for winter term! Cuba was great. Alcohol was cheap, food was good, the people are all really good looking. Cons: I have production classes and I have to resubmit a final from last term because I wasn't able to finish it fully. I might die again later in the term, but its for SPROJ. I really miss the carribean weather... we really could use that right now instead of this cold weather. Film students aren't that bad after all. Ruins01 by banditofernando on Sketchfab Ruins02 by banditofernando on Sketchfab Ruins03 by banditofernando on Sketchfab
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Winter break was, unsuprisingly, unproductive. Now that the new term has started It's time to see what needs to be done with the project now ad work form there.
After an exhausting finals week, I decided to take the first week off and take a break. When I started work on the second week my hard drive crashed halfway through the week, so I spent most of my break trying to fix it because my hard drive wasn't the only thing that broke apparently and I'm wasn't going to pay apple to tell me what's wrong with it. (take that capitalism!)
Luckily I was able to fix my laptop and recover all my data last week (thanks 2017), but I lost a lot of time in between. However, before my laptop died I did squeeze in some work before everything crashed and burned. I started modelling a newly designed male armor for the final build. For now the alpha model is fine, but I plan on replacing it with a more professionally polished one later in the term. I also started modelling island hexagons with more detailed rock and roots on the bottom. I also helped Healthy and created a base dragon head that I plan on helping her finish this week. Overall although I didn't finish what I started, I'm glad I got the ball rolling. *Will add pics later* Did I mention I have no production classes this term? I'm so happy.
Over break, I took some much needed rest (I had a blood analysis, and the doctor said I needed too since my pituitary gland was weak, she even prescribed supplements). I spent almost two weeks at home doing very little. I watched a lot of movies, the best one was Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s. The art team was assigned to work on 4 models of ruins over break, and I eventually got around to those. I am especially happy with my “Tower Entrance” model. You can see Sketchfab versions of those below. The last week I was on vacation with my family and could not have gotten any work done, even if I wanted to. All in all, a pretty good break, I would say. I wasn't expecting to be especially productive, but this term I am only taking one other (non-prouction) class and will have plenty of time to work on this game.
Random Bits by ricardotnet on Sketchfab
Here's some photos I took on my trip, and a 3D scan of my dog.
Lucas by ricardotnet on Sketchfab
I had to make adjustments to the rig so I would be able to have decent animations for alpha. I also started on making more environmental assets. Although I did not need to work on those, I believe they helped our game a lot. Each environmental piece took me some time, but in the end, they do help our game. I also was able to start animations. I struggled getting decent animations. I complied a list of things that need to change. I’ve done more than usual, but I’ve done so little in comparison to Sally. But going forward, I will have more time and no excuses for how much work I get done. Here are some of my things and scroll down all the way for my pros and cons!
Pros:
We are in an okay state for Alpha Going forward, I know what needs to change for our rig. I know what needs to be changed for our dragon. I know what I want for a dragon animation and how I can get there. I just need more than one week to do it. NO MORE PRODUCTION HEAVY CLASSES! SPROJ GETS ALL MY ATTENTION NOW! Just like the clingy boyfriend I never wanted. Con: Our rig will most likely be completely redone. But that was inevitable since I was able to figure out what needs to be adjusted on our dragon proportion-wise. I am terrified that the process for me to get the new dragon and rig will take 8 weeks to get to me for clean up… This was the worst Thanksgiving ever. After our previous presentation, I made sure to address as many concerns about our game as I could during the thanksgiving break. I think I could’ve done even more, but as an animator who has little experience with games I did spend a great teaching myself more about substance painter, zbrush, and how to transfer maps to keep our game relatively low poly than what I’m used to. Pros: I added alpha textures, normals, and ambient occlusion onto the characters. I made some environmental models such as trees and a new island that I quickly threw together. I was also able to texture Healthy’s existing buildings although everything is still very rough people can have a better idea of what to expect our game to look like. Cons: Spent time learning programs set me back a bit. I think about a fourth of the time spent on the game this week was just getting comfortable with the programs, but now that I understand them a lot better production will become more efficient. Also I think my mom hates me now because I didn’t go home for the holidays and I didn’t answer her calls because I was working on this game. It’s great for the game, but bad for me... Total hours: 35+ hours (I didn’t track my hours accurately this week because I was just working constantly on the game throughout the day)
Now that the character rigs were finished, and all the mocap footage was cleaned, I was able to work getting the captures on the character. Although I was pretty experienced in MotionBuilder, I had never edited mocap for a game before, and it is a very different process. Game animations are usually simple, clean and loop perfectly, which is not something that is inherently part of the motion capture process. The most important part is that is loops correctly, and that is what I focused on primarily, I did not modify the poses of the animation for exaggeration yet, and focused on getting as many loops made as possible, so they could be in the game. I made a quick video to demonstrate the entire process, starting on the mocap stage and ending with it in the game:
Also here is the same clip on sketchfab. Although I finished exporting 4 clips, this is the best one to demonstrate, since some of them are split up oddly in order to blend into different clips.
Pros:
Cons:
The past couple of weeks, I had been making different blueprints of buildings made using the modular assets Rob and I created. So far, I have seven different buildings created and plan on making even more once I create more complex modular assets. I did not make as many things over the past couple of weeks due to many things like the holiday break, many different assignments being due for other classes, and other serious issue.
Pros: We have a workable number of buildings in the game currently. Cons: Not nearly as many buildings as I had planned.
On the programming side of our team a lot of things were accomplished. First and foremost, our 3 main programmers worked together for many hours and were able to find a fix for our biggest game breaking bug, hooray! This bug made it so the inputs done on the client side game was not being read by the server. The fixes were applied to all the characters and we no longer have this issue. Kevin also continued his work on the AI behavior trees for our island movement and made great progress. The islands will now move around each other when connected to the main base islands instead of just getting stuck. Josh spent time getting combat into the game, as well as working to retarget the default Unreal animations to the male character that Sally brought into the game. Pat worked on remaking the main menu UI for the game. Ruben updated our menu AI so that IPs can now be manually entered in the game instead of hard coding it into the game like it was previously done.
On the art side a lot of progress was also made. Ricardo and Rob did another motion capture session and were able to clean up all the data and even started applying it to our male character. Ricardo worked on rigging our alpha dragon in preparation for the animations and implementation into the game. Sally worked on finishing up the rig for the female character as well as going back and adding additional armor to both the male and female character. Healthy started work on environmental ruins for the game as well as creating monoliths and altars for the island capturing system. Matt and Rob worked on creating modular building assets so that buildings can easily be created in engine. Riley finished up the rough alpha dragon model and created a bow and arrow model for the male character.
In other news!! We were contacted by the Drexel Audio Post Club and we were assigned 3 juniors and 1 senior! We can't wait to get to know them and know what they are focusing on so we can figure out all of the audio for the game.
These past two weeks have been pretty productive. After meeting with Dr. Wagner we decided to create modular building assets so we can easily put together a lot of different variations of buildings in engine instead of spending the time to model and texture full buildings in Maya. I started with a basic Plaster and Wood style wall with variations that have a window and a door which are shown below on Sketchfab.
We also did another motion capture shoot where we ended up gathering the easier shots from Kevin for our male character that we did not have time to get during our first session. I also finished cleaning all my shots from the first and second sessions and started applying them to our male character. At first I went through this process in MotionBuilder which took around 3 ½ hours to get a looping walking animation, however, when I started working on the idle animation I stumbled upon perhaps one of, if not the most important tool that I could use in MotionBuilder. It essentially allowed me to creating looping animations quickly, which in turn turned the 3 ½ hour time down to around 30 minutes. This will be a huge help going forward and I’m really happy that I was able to find this setting.
Pros: I was able to start working in MotionBuilder and I found that setting which will make my life so much easier! Also it is getting closer to the holidays, and to celebrate I made my first gingerbread house of the year. Also Wawa has Eggnog already!
Cons: I did not get to work on the buildings for the 2nd part of this sprint since I switched entirely to motion capture so we can get as much animation in the game as possible for our alpha build To do for the next sprint: I am planning on learning Persona, which is the animation editor in Unreal Engine 4 so I can implement all of my animations into the game. Hopefully this won’t be too hard! |
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