These past two weeks were actually so incredibly productive for me! I spent a lot of my time the first week finishing up cleaning up my animations in MotionBuilder and getting them ready to bring into the game. Since I already had experience of using motion capture in games from my game workshop game, I had somewhat of a sense of how to do this process, but I had always had trouble perfectly looping animations so my walk cycles were never 100% perfect. However late one night while I was working and following a tutorial that Steve Pettit sent me I stumbled upon a feature that was not taught in that tutorial. Basically what it does is that it easily and painlessly transfers the rotation and transformations of a keyframe from the first part of an animation to the very last frame of an animation, resulting in a perfect loop! This literally made me cry tears of joy because it is going to make my life so much easier as we continue to go through our motion capture pipeline. The animation I am most proud of is the male walk cycle because I was able to go through the base animation in MotionBuilder and then add a whole bunch of supporting key framed animation on top of that to give it a much more realistic look. The resulting walk cycle was pretty good! I’m uploading that to SketchFab and will be showing that below. (I just realized the animation on SketchFab has some skipping at the end. I promise this is not the case in game.
I spent the second week while on Thanksgiving break learning how to implement characters and animations into Unreal Engine 4 using Persona. This took a lot of time but I was finally able to implement the male character animations into the game. I ran into some problems with Persona automatically blending two animations together, but I found out that making those motion capture clips longer could sometimes fix the problem! I also got all of the dragon animations into the game.
Pros: I was so productive and spent the majority of my Thanksgiving break working because going home to visit "family" is overrated. I was also able to learn Persona and I feel like I'll be a lot more helpful to the programming team when I'm working in engine now. I also found that it's so much fun to work in engine! Cons: The blending between some the run and sprint animation is not perfect and it really irks me, but it shows that our pipeline work so this will be fixed during winter break. The idle animation looping is broken now also... I will also fix this over break. Time spent: 30 hours. Up next: MORE ANIMATION INTEGRATION. ALSO I'M GOING TO CUBA THIS WEEKEND AND IT'S GONNA BE AWESOME AND I'M GONNA BUY SOME CUBAN CIGARS.
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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.
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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! This week I was finally able to start rigging both the humans and the dragon. Sally was supposed do the human rigs, which are very simple since they are for mocap, but the first rig she did was not bad, but it wasn’t ready for mocap. I was not 100% sure how to do it, especially since it was modeled in A-pose, but I figured it out by rigging one of them, and made notes for Sally, who rigged the second one successfully.
The Dragon required a more complex rig since it is going to be hand animated, and it requires a different rig than a human. Going in I knew that the model is going to change, but I’m not sure how significantly. The rig I finished is still pretty rough, and is missing a few features that I would like to add, but I have decided to wait until the beta version to do that. My hope is that with the new model I will not have to change the skeleton structure so that I would have less things to redo, but I do not want to limit how much the model will be able to change either. This was also my first time making a rig for the Unreal engine and there were some issues when putting it in engine, but those seem to be taken care off. We also did another mocap session, and we have already exported all the data we captured. Pros:
These past 2 weeks have been pretty successful for me. We had a 4 hour long mocap shoot where we got both male and female animations. We started off with the more advanced takes which included dragon mounting, wall climbing, wall hanging, barrel rolls, and then we did some idles. After that we switched actors and brought in our female actor so we could have the variation. Since we had over 60 takes from the first shoot Ricardo and I decided to split up the takes so that we could get them all cleaned in the two weeks. Below I have videos of the clean shots in Vicon Blade.
I also met with Matt and we discussed how to proceed with the buildings for our villages. After meeting with Dr. Wagner we decided that we would go with a modular building system so we can easily create new buildings without having to fully remodel everything. However I had already made a model so I’ll also show that since it shares similarities in the architecture style.
Pros: Got more of the art figured out. We are scheduling another mocap shoot this week so expect new data!
Cons: The mocap clean-up took longer than expected. The shots were more complex and the ladder really screwed with the cameras. |
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