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
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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.
Pros:
Cons:
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:
The biggest thing these past 2 weeks was our Motion Capture session,which gave me plenty to work on afterwards. Rob set up the studio, and I was not there until the second part of the session, so I missed everything Kevin acted for, but was present for the entirety of Aviva’s. We set up a Google Sheets doc, and took down notes for each take, which has been very helpful. Since I was not there for Kevin’s part of the session, I suggested Rob and I split up the work by who was actually in the studio. Kevin’s parts were more complicated, but there were a lot more takes for Aviva’s, so I thought it seemed fair, but Rob has been talking a lot about how what he has to clean up is harder than what I’m working on. I’m not sure if he’s bragging or complaining ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
So far I have exported 18 shots, and have looked through a bunch more that I determined were not good to use. First I do the Blade post-processing pipeline, and I watch the capture clip several times from different angles. One thing I have found to be helpful is to hide everything except for the solving bone, since it is what gets exported, and it is easier to spot any jerky movements than on the labeling bone. Almost all of the shots I have worked on are fairly simple, and the actor remains upright the entire time. There were some mistakes in the session, the two biggest ones were that a hand marker was on Aviva’s thigh for 17 takes, but it’s not a huge issue since the hands usually don’t give fine data, and have more markers than truly needed. The second is that the boots seemed to be a little loose, and flopped a lot when they hit the floor, and the takes that have running lose the auto label on most steps. That has mostly just created more work for clean up, but may have made the data overly shaky. I am making good use of the spreadsheet though, and taking detailed notes on the specifics of each take. Other than that I modeled a tower, which I was intending to make a lighthouse, but I think I would rather use this design for a simple tower, and save the lighthouse for something more obvious. Tower V1 by ricardotnet on Sketchfab Over the course of the last few weeks I have become more comfortable and enthusiastic about our game idea. The changes we made last time were pretty significant and put me off a little bit, leading to my negative first PPJ. I want to note that I wrote a similar PPJ for my Game Workshop project, Moo Dairy’s Shoppin’, and ended up loving the game and worked very hard on it. A concern I had was that due to my lack of experience and interest with more strategy-heavy games, I would be less participatory in the game design. This turned out to be untrue, and I have been much more active in our meetings. We also created a paper prototype as suggested by the faculty after our pitch. I spent a good amount of time with it, and once we got past adapting our game to the table top format, we developed a better understanding of our game. I think it was somewhat fun, but that is also taking into account that the action oriented gameplay will be fun as well. I created a quick conceptual model for the split hexagon idea, but we are still not sure if we are going to do it. As it stands we are going to have hexagonal islands to match the gameplay, but the downside is that the levels will look fairly bland. A solution to this that we found is to have hexagonal islands but split them into 2-4 smaller ones with varied shapes, and when the island is captured, they will form into a hexagon in order to attach to the team’s island. I am not sure if we have confirmed that it will function properly in game, and it would mean more work for the art team as well. Hopefully this helps bring us to a conclusion. Since I am supposed to rig the Dragon, and we don’t have a model yet, I did a practice run for one. Going off of Riley’s concept art, I did a basic model and IK rig (with no controllers) for the wing alone. I do not have skin between the wings because I did not want to spend too much time putting this together (it would be a lot of weight painting), and because it is possible that we will have a particle effect in it’s place. Overall, the rig went well, here is an animation test: I am less nervous about this undertaking now, and have some notes I can pass onto Riley to make sure the topology of the dragon model does not give me a hard time when I rig it. Here is an example of knee topology that we can use on the wings as well: Pro:
So far we have been off to a somewhat slow start, but that is okay since we have not officially started production. Especially for my position, there is really not much I can actually do this week, and we are still not 100% on each aspect of the game. We had 3 meetings throughout the week to even further discuss our game design after presenting to the faculty. We made some pretty big changes, and the game is now more of an action-strategy game than the party battle game it started as. I think these changes overall are an improvement on the game as a whole, but personally I am not a fan of those games, and because of my lack of experience with them I don’t think I will be able to contribute as much to the game design meetings as I have in the past. That and the generic overall theme we seem to be decided on, I hope I can find something I enjoy working on soon.
Pros: -Game is more fleshed out Cons: - No actual production from my end - I like the game even less now |
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