Admittedly I did not work on LexiConquest as much as I wanted to over the break. I spent time working on a new layout for my website and some other personal modeling projects. I spent a lot of time reading and studying turbocharging. That being said I did spend a good 10 to 15 hours working on LexiConquest. I worked with Ben on the book intro animation, I built the basic rig for the book and passed it back to Ben who added pages. Ben has now passed the book back to me to add individual pages to the rig. I also spent time working on King Arthur. Below you can see his idle animation loop. His default animation loop is not anything special to see yet. The plan is to have King Arthur fall down face first as he drops his sword.
New Improved Book Rig (Adding skeletal structure for the individual pages and animating the book opening)
Finish King Arthur’s Idle animation loop
Finish King Arthur’s Defeat animation loop
In the Gantt Chart you will see that this week I will be finishing up two animation loops for King Arthur listed above, you will also notice that I started them over the break, as I mentioned earlier in my post I did not get as much done as I had originally planned to. You might also notice that the Library Textures item on the Gantt Chart is assigned to Ben and I, we are talking right now about splitting the workload.
Ok, let’s start off by what I did over the break. Not that much to be honest, and there’s a little to show but I will explain them one by one. First of all I spent 2 to 3 hours to change the look of our PPJ site so it matches to the actual LexiConquest site (Hopefully you remember the old theme.) Second, as I explained in this post (I believe you guys never got a chance to read our week’s 9 PPJ, and I highly recommend reading this post for some clarifications) I needed to work on a CSS for the back end of the site or the Administration panel. I stated that since the back end design is the second priority for us, I will spend more time on it later when I get a chance, and the best chance was the break. The admin panel was incomplete, but now if you login to the site you can see the changes. (Ted already has an account, and if you don’t, registration is open for now) The whole thing took me about less than 2 hours. Below is a screenshot of our admin panel anyway:
I also spent some times researching about different possibilities in Drupal and different method for making a custom image gallery. There’s a module in Drupal call CCK or Content Construction Kit that allows us to add custom field (which is a built in feature in WP) This module can be combined with other modules such as Image field and Image Cache and Javascript in order to make any kind of galleries. We can use these combination for our cycle image gallery and the “random facts” section. I spent around 4 hours just to get myself familiar with CCK, and believe me … it is so confusing and complected, and yet very powerful. Here’s the link to what I have been following.
And lastly, because I was not very pleased with the functioning of the clavicle and shoulder joints in my character, I decided to re-rig the upper joints and specially the arms. This time I followed the instructions from “The Art of Rigging” book that Ben had shared with us. It works a lot better, and I’m so glad that I re-rigged the character because the scaling was a bit off too, so I took care of that as well. So, now both Robin and Tins Woodman (Ben’s character) are in the right spot in the library. I spent around 4 to 5 hours on this as well
And what I will have done for the next week?
I will take a break from any of the web stuff for a week, and I will spend the entire week to work on the arrival, attack, defeat and idle animation for Robin Hood. My goal is to finish at least the Arrival, defeat and idle animation, and probably leave the attack animation (along with web stuff of course) for next week since it’s a bit more complicated. By finishing these animations, I can put all my efforts on the website.
Over the break I spent a little bit of time (~6 hours) on programming. I have rewritten a majority of the code to better handle our library of cards. With this new design all card data is stored in a series of arrays. There is the main array card[] which contains an array for each card. This will probably make more sense looking at the code. It is linked here for your viewing pleasure. This allows us to enter the card data in one location for each card as opposed to storing them in separate variables as we had used for the demo.
This week I will complete the following animations for the Tripod character:
Attack
Defend
Idle
On the programming side, I am going to complete the architecture for the animation library we will be using. This will be very similar to the way the cards are stored. I should also be getting the fiberglassed playing station either tomorrow or Friday.
I didn’t work on anything for LexiConquest over break and got some much needed rest, well, as much as I could get while still working my job full time. You can count my hours as 0 for last week. Now I’m charged up and ready for a new semester.
This week I plan on posting playblasts for all spell cards. This won’t show most of them very accurately due to liquids and particles, but Ben said this will be helpful to have. This way I can get feedback about any changes that might need to be made or possible improvements.
I am going to have “beauty shots” of at least 3 of the spells so that those images can be used to print the physical cards.
Jason is working on some of the code this week, and I expect to start having more coding responsibilities in the upcoming weeks. If I get to work on game code this week it will be a plus, but that’s not part of my original goal. I will be updating our gantt chart to reflect my timeline for the following weeks.
So, over break (during the weekdays) I didn’t have Maya at my disposal, but I put in some time before I left campus. I did some editing of the cards after we discussed that the attack descriptions for the character cards were unnecessary.
The textures and new colors for the cards were on display during the post, but I did some fixing on the option screen border designs (width, texture, gloss). The opacity’s around 50% now since the opening screen, won’t take up the entire screen and the library’s going to need to be visible in the background. (2 hrs)
Device Card
character card
I also sculpted some new faces for Tim- for the beauty shots. I ultimately decided to go with the first one for the beauty shot since it’s s pretty similar to his concept art and I can have him blowing the snow particles like I wanted to (4 hrs)
Over the weekend I made the idle animation shorter and less jerky, and I finished the defeat animation. Right now, I just have the intro animation and his spell effect to do. (4 hrs)
I’m going to be completely and totally honest here: I didn’t touch LexiConquest this break. At all. Not even a little bit. So, count my hours at 0.
That’s not to say I headed to Mexico for tequila shots and bikinis, of course. On the contrary I was kept busy with two pretty intense projects that had been largely ignored all last term that I was finally able to give some attention to:
My personal website, bcary.com After years of having a shoddy display, I finally have something I can be proud of when filling out applications
A Freelance project I nabbed back before senior year even started. From Drexel, actually. I am modeling 3 of the new floors in Hahnemann’s new medical wing. I have been asked to model over a dozen different rooms for the project. It was a big endeavor that Spring Break allowed me to finish, and the pay will help feed me for the rest of the term. Huzzah! Here are some stills from that (as though you think I’m lying). If it helps any, some of these assets will be able to be used in the library scene for senior project. I have permission to do so.
Additionally, I spent a lovely weekend in New York with my family. It was very nice.
I apologize if all of this seems a bit tongue-in-cheek but I’m glad to have all of this “off of my plate,” as it was important stuff I needed to get done but always felt too guilty to do during the term.
Of course my attention has been promptly redirected back to LexiConquest, and I’m already back at work. Biggest goal of all this week is to get the group resettled and refocused. For me, this means animating. I’ve already gone back to getting Tin Woodsman’s animations completed, and should be able to be done and ready to render/move onto Billy by next week, if all goes well. The only real x factor here is how well animating the attack goes but it should be fine.
So, down to specifics. What I will have done this week:
Tin Woodsman Arrival Animation
Tin Woodsman Attack Animation (which includes Tin’s animation as well as the particle effects and axe animation). I should have no problem getting HIS animation done but I’m a bit worried about the particles behaving.
Beginning to texture the library. I would like to have the walls and floors completed.
This week I focused on getting assets ready for our presentation to faculty in the two upcoming weeks. I also spent some time working on code for the demo version of the game, so that it will play a movie clip in the center of the stage when a card is placed. This is very rough at the moment and will make more sense once Jason and I map out what the entire game will look like.
I also worked on getting my current card effects not only into the library file, but also into Maya 2010 (from Maya 2008 – most things transferred well). I did have to do some resizing of some of my effects in the library file and this caused flames to not be potent enough, and other issues. Below are images of the Graveyard Daemon card plugged into the barebones library. The fluid effect emits from an invisible object below the card and I set it up so that the fluid collides with the card. I also gave in and used some flame paint effects to create the animated circle of fire around the card. This was less expensive than regular fluid fire and I found it still looked pretty decent. I originally did have some fluid fire there, but with the resizing it just seemed silly to keep this.
I spent a good amount of my time trying to finesse the Frankenstein’s lightning card into the library file. The tesla coil effect that Jason worked on doesn’t seem to want to import properly, but that could possibly be operator error. I’m going to check with him this week and see if he can help me import it. For the moment it’s just showing the base lightning strike that starts the rest of the chain reaction. This is toned down from the previous lightning I had (in terms of glow and thickness – so that it’s a bit more jagged and unpredictable) and Jason’s lightning is much smaller and very erratic.
I am still working on rerouting the particle effects for the Deux Ex Machina effect as the resizing made them look pretty bad. I may have to rebuild their curves from scratch, but it shouldn’t be too awful to replicate. I just wanted to focus this week on getting some nice renders for the presentation.
This week we have been working on finalizing the character development. All the characters moved or are moving into the animation phase. We have been working the presentation for the faculty and breaking down the production for next term. You will notice that our gantt chart for the remaining development period is becoming more defined.
MIKE – Tweaked King Arthur’s shoulder armor, finalized King Arthur’s textured, recorded the announcer V/O, worked on King Arthur’s rig. Next week I will begin animation on King Arthur and work on the announcer V/O in pro tools.
JASON – Completed sculpting of foam for fiberglass playing station. Improved upon existing cardboard prototype of playing station.
LAUREN – Started animating for Tiny Tim, also began putting together the look of the main menu and fixed the design of the main cards.
TRACY-Worked on some coding for the demo version of the game and reconfigured/rebuilt the existing card effects to be added into the library file.
This week I began the animation process for Tiny Tim. His hair needed fixing, though, so I adjusted it so that it looked more like it was coming out from beneath his hat. I think some of the intersection might have caused Maya to crash, but I was able to finally get it looking better than before. There was also mention that the leg braces looked alittle strange, they are placed right under where his knees are, but I went back through the sketches I had, and in one there was a foot element to the brace. That was quick to do, and I feel like they’re alittle more complete.
Hat Hair
New Leg Braces
I also did a test on what settings I needed to have Tim and his hair show up in a render. Eventually, I found that just having a useBackground dummy head under the hat and haircap let me render the two together and his body separate.
Time- 2.5 hrs
Complete- 100%
I had listed on the Gantt chart that I had planned to work on the “attack” and the “taking damage” animations- I realized as I sat down to do them that he couldn’t do either without a starting position and a a basic idle animation first, so I had to rearrange my chart a bit.
As far as the animation goes, I enjoyed my first attempt at character animation. It took a little longer than I thought, though. Setting up Tim’s start pose and animating his idle state took about 5 hours between animating, playblasting, etc. I’m 1hr into the process of creating a shorter, brisker idle animation for him after comparing the current one to the Tin Woodsman’s.
Idle Animation
The damage animation was…interesting, I was alittle apprehensive about animating a character getting hit when he already has a crutch and leg braces to deal with. I decided to make him alittle more agile than he would probably be realistically, given that he is a game character capable of dealing damage with magic pudding.
Taking Damage Animation
Time: 9.5 hrs
Complete: 90%
As far with the model -> sculpt -> unwrap ->uv workflow I had tried to use with the Robin Hood assets, I couldn’t figure out what had caused the history to disappear from the models. They are now all resculpted and mapped. (the setting I had issues with last time was the tangent-space setting for the normals) Here are some examples:
new glove
new shirt
new knife
Time: 5.5 hrs
Complete: 100%
I also worked on developing the interface design, particularly the load screen. I spent a good hour looking for some examples of game interfaces (particularly of the fantasy MMO genre) that I thought would be good inspiration. Here are a couple example links:
And I’ve spent about 3hours testing out some looks for the load screen so far-
title screen (in progress)
Time: 5hrs
Complete: 50%
Since we’re moving into the area of getting renders for our completed cards, I found that I would need to shift around the design to accommodate the image size. That only took an hour, and here are the new layouts for the character card and the other device/lexicon cards. The info will be filled in accordingly.
This week I focused on fine tuning King Arthur and rigging him. The rig is going well, that said I want a few more hours with it so I can get the weights right. Below is a shot of King Arthur fully textured. I also spent some time this week recording our announcer. Again think Smash Brothers. Our announcer will introduce the game and characters. We need our announcer to sound super epic, so far so good. The voice still needs some work but I have a good base to start with, look forward to hearing samples in the coming weeks.
