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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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.
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!
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. The majority of these past 2 weeks for me have been spent on taking a step back and looking at the bare bones of our game. We created a sturdy paper prototype that we have used for many in house play tests and all of these have provided amazing results. We learned so much about the gameplay, map size, how many players should play, and so much more. I am personally very excited that Dr. Wagner advised us to take this step because we were able to play test our game without having to create a digital version of it.
I have to admit that after our horrible presentation last week I was very scared for the status of our project. I believe that none of the faculty believed in our project and I hope all of this work that we’ve done will be able to change their minds. I also started doing some simple 3d concept models for more rustic and rural houses located in and outside of the keeps in the environment. These two models are shown below and are based off architecture found in the Lord of the Rings universe. Pros: We finally started prototyping the game and found that with 4 teams the game actually can get really fun! I started making art concepts which I had a lot of fun doing I’ve been watching Ruben work on the networking, including helping him test it, and he almost has the split screen networking working on both machines! This is so exciting!!!! Cons: We really disappointed our advisor and probably the rest of the faculty but I know we will be able to make up for the lost time. The labs still don’t have Unreal Engine 4! This is really starting to anger our team because it is so unfair that we don’t have access to the programs we need. This week myself and three other members met with another GMAP professor to discuss our game and its mechanics. We got a lot of useful information out of this meeting and caused a lot of massive changes in our game. We had two more meetings during the week where we discussed all the changes that were being made. It was a great week and we got so much done during our two meetings.
Positive: We sat down with a great game designer who gave us a lot of feedback and made us think about certain mechanics in new ways. This really benefitted the game since now we really are focusing on the main mechanic of our game which is the floating islands. We cut back on a lot of ideas so we believe we are no longer over scoping our project. Negative: I spent the entire time in meetings and figuring out what changes the idea needs. I did not start working on any concept art yet which I wanted to try to do. While we cut back on a lot of things we also added some very difficult things to do so that might come back to bite us in the ass. |
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