This week I primarily focused on fixing my spell effect animations. Some of them required complete re-rendering so it was a bit time consuming. No More Vimeo this week!!! I thought you would be relieved:

Adding glow & motion blur to the Deus Ex Machina effect
Deus Ex Machina

Adding additional flame layers to the ring around Graveyard Daemon. I’m still waiting on the last portion of these frames to render, but this is generally what it will look like. The additional flames are comped in through frame 92 (of 180). You’ll notice that that layer of flames stops moving after frame 92.
Graveyard Daemon

Adding more tendrils of lightning and shaking the sphere that conducts the electricity in Frankenstein’s Lightning
Frankenstein’s Lightning

Fortunately Ben was able to help me out with my spell card art and I really love the changes he made. They are no longer exactly dependent on my renders, but still get the point across. I’m very excited for the physical cards.

In regards to the comments you made last week about the Time Shift spell effect – the card art does match the render. We used an actual rendered frame for that image. The cards flying around have always been in a bit of a circular stream, it just takes a few moments for them to complete the loop and completely surround the time machine.

I’m still receiving quiz questions and finalized artwork for the UI, but I anticipate having this completed on time, especially now since the spells are nearing completion.

This week I worked about 14.5 hours and completed 90% of my goal. Timeshift is finished as long as the group agrees it looks fine. Graveyard Daemon, Deus Ex Machina, and Frankenstein’s Lightning were cleaned up this week and are finished pending approval. I am just going to work on fixing the lighting in Personification so that the logo is more easily read for next week & spend the rest of my time coding and cleaning up the interface.

Time is short as LexiConquest nears completion. Major things to look forward to at this point are the Library Node and the Cards which were ordered last week.

Mike – Worked on Composites, Announcer V/O, Game progression outline

Ben – Went to War with Shave (and survived!), Rendered Billy, Spell card art

Hessam- Worked on the library, and contact forms of the site

Jason – Game outline, LIBRARY NODE, animations programming, attack Desc programming

Lauren – Re-rendered Tiny Tim’s animations with hair, did final edits on cards, adjusted Hp bar design

Tracy – Re-rendered Frankenstein’s Lightning, Rendered more flames for Graveyard Daemon, worked on fixing Deus Ex Machina in post & composited all of these. Minimally worked on coding while rendering was happening. 14.5 hours @ 90%

This week was pretty productive as far as rendering goes- I got the taking damage, attack, and arrival hair rendered. Getting to that point was more frustrating than I had anticipated. (Ben pretty much said it all!) The problems were similar to the ones I had when I had first begun to figure out shave (as far as rendering goes), but more than anything I struggled with just not having enough memory to render past a single frame/having files with duplicated or malfunctioning shave nodes crash everything.

I also searched everywhere for a video hosting website besides Vimeo that doesn’t butcher the quality without success. Vimeo was my go-to site, but I did upload them on MegaUpload- hopefully that will make things easier:

Arrival

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NB7FEPCC

Attack

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=J2ESKWWM

Idle

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3YH4EKEW

Taking Damage

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=L9KUL6BW

Hrs: 13

I also spent a great deal of time prepping the cards for delivery, which took alittle longer than expected. I made an “About Us” card, redid the Time Shift and King Arthur card art using Tracy and Mike’s renders, then went through all the cards to fix some major consistency issued I had overlooked (text color, size, spacing). The last step was adding Jason’s glyphs and making sure they all fit the template for printing. The Hp bar also needed to be cleaned up a bit, so I reworked that as well.

"About Us" Card

King Arthur card art

Time Shift card art

Updated Hp

Hrs: 7

Total: 20

I’d put myself at 95% this week, I hadn’t expected to render out all the hair for Tim, but what I DID forget were the text boxes for the “Battle Start”, etc. portions of the game. I ran a bit over, and that, along with the Tim render for the team poster are what I have planned to finish next week.

Big week for lexiconquest. Cards were ordered, fiberglass finished, animations beginning to get implemented into game. The end is in sight and we are still cruisin along.

To start off Mike and I have reworked the game outline turn by turn. We now have each turn broken down on a spreadsheet so we can easily implement the turn restrictions  in the game. It took a lot of time to make all the changes from the old game outline one of the spells was cut from the game since that point, as well as some attacks being changed. We now have a much more coherent and accurate turn-by-turn outline.

Time spent on game outline: 3 hours

FIBERGLASS FINISHED >>> The fiberglass box is finally complete. I have had time to install the bottom camera but it has yet to be properly calibrated. This will be finally unveiled properly at Tuesday’s meeting. After a lot of sanding (with a respirator this time, Ted!) it is smooth and shiny. Painted in a gorgeous red, it is Library Node!!

Time spent on Library Node: 6 hours

Programming of animations and attack descriptions are complete. At this point attack descriptions will come up if the button is pressed when a character is unable to attack (meaning there have not been enough maneuver cards placed on the character). It will disappear once any other action takes place. Animations now play based on the character ID at the given location of the button being pressed and the function being called. The idle programming still needs to be taken care of, but that’s a bit more complex. Animations are easily updated by simply placing them in an ‘animations’ folder inside the game directory. This makes for super easy updates as the other members don’t have to manipulate the code or game file at all. Just re-compile and it’s all set. Also had to ‘touch-up’ some of the current code to free up resources. Seems that I had the webcam recording near HD video to detect the glyphs!! What a hog! Also had some of the glyph detection code constantly running which is not necessary for our project. Either way video playback is much much smoother now.

Programming Attack Desc and Animations from Jason Miraglia on Vimeo.

Time spent programming: 8 hours

Total Hours: 17 hours @ 90%

Next Week: Library Node properly calibrated and touch interface working from Library Node in game. Idle screen properly coded with animations. Attack title’s implemented. HP bar implemented.

Time is getting short and LexiConquest is getting finished. This week I spend time compositing and working on the announcer voice over. I feel like I have done very little this week. I have in fact finished the tasks I set out finish and I have made substantial progress on the other tasks that I have planned to make progress on. I guess just the fact that the project is wrapping up and as I finish things and get them off my plate they are no longer immediately being replaced by new tasks feels kind of strange to me. Below I have included three of Arthur’s six animations.

Arthur Damage from Mike Ambro on Vimeo.

Arthur Arrival from Michael Ambrozaitis on Vimeo.

Arthur Attack from Michael Ambrozaitis on Vimeo.

I need to go back into King Arthur’s attack and add some blur in Nuke.

I have the compositing listed as being 50 percent complete, really I think it is a little over that, I marked it at fifty because I want to go back and tweak Arthur’s attack and only three videos are in movie form, I plan to have the compositing done early in the week, Tuesday at the latest.

Below are the samples of the Announcer voice over. They have had slight reverberation added to them to give an arena feel.

Battle_Begin

Billy Pilgrim

Deus Ex Machina

Frank’s Lightning

Graveyard Daemon

King Arthur

LexiConquest

Personification

Robin Hood

Time Shift

Tin Woodsman

Tiny Tim

Tipod

Victory

On Wednesday night we had another work night. Jason and I spent what seemed like forever going over the game play. This has not been done since last term and we wanted to make sure everything was good. We soon discovered it wasn’t. We revamped the way the player would play through the game.

Game Outline

In all this week I spent about four hours on audio, somewhere between one and a half and two of that was spent recording. I spend somewhere in the ballpark of six or seven hours compositing and I think Jason and I spent something on the order of three hours reworking the game play.  In all this week I spent about 13 hours working, completing 90% of what I wanted too. I wish some more compositing had gotten finished on the other hand the way I have been working has gotten all the animations near completion. This coming week I have listed to finish compositing the animations, like I said earlier I want this to be done by Tuesday at the latest. I need to print the playing surface, which I should get final dimensions and design for tomorrow. Other than that I am providing my bit of content for the website and some renders for our poster.

This week I spent all my time on the websites only. The goals were to complete the Library section, and work on the Contact forms. Both tasks are done plus some few more things. Let’s get into details:

As I mentioned last week, I had no idea how to deal with the Library section, and finally I came up with a very awesome idea for the Library. First I wanted to create a thumbnail for each book, and provide a link to Amazon.com for each book. After playing around with Google Books I decided to link to Google Books for each book, and then with the help of Javascript, and the mighty jQuery, I came up with a nice interface for the library section. Now, we have  thumbnails for each book in the library section, and when you click on them,  the embedded Google Book will pops up in a window, using jQuery, This is a very nice feature from Google that allows developers to embed the books into web pages without any logos or distracting elements on the  page. In our case, I am using an iFrame and Drupal Lightbox 2 in order to add the book to a pop up window. This way, the users will not leave the website in order to read the book, and they can close the book anytime they want, and come back to it later. I am very please with the overall look of the library, and especially with its usability. The library took almost 11 hours including designing thumbnails for each book, development, and coding, and the reult can be seen here:

http://lexiconquest.com/library

Second, I had to work on the contact form for the site. Making a simple contact form is quite easy in Drupal, but I wanted to create a contact form in a way that the audiences will be able to send message to any of us that they wish. The solution was easy after finding a module that allows making multiple contact forms. The rest of it was done through some PHP coding that I found in Drupal documentations. the code below, generates a list of the contact list in the main contact form of the site:

<p>Who would you like to contact?</p>
<?php
$result = db_query('SELECT * FROM {contact} ORDER BY weight, category');
print '<div id="contact-list">';
print '<div class="item-list"><ul>';
while ($contact = db_fetch_object($result)) {
$cleanurl = str_replace(' ', '_' ,$contact->category);
print '<li>'. l($contact->category , 'contact/'. $cleanurl) .'</li>';
}
print '</div>';
print '</div>';
?>

All the forms are fully functioning, and the result can be seen at: http://lexiconquest.com/contact

It’s also nice to have a link to contact form for each person. That is done using a simple “print” command in PHP as follow:

<?php print l('Contact Ben', 'contact/Ben');?>

Goals for next week:

The site is done! My goal for next week is to collect the materials needed for the site from other members and start populating the content. Then I to install a spam filter for the forms, since they are open to public now. Also, for the character page I decided to use a banner image, and have our character poses in front of camera, and we can use this as a poster for the project (of course with more design elements) So, I will spend some time next week on designing this banner.

Week 6, aka wrasslin’ with Billy, that hairy little bastard. Nearly the entire week was dedicated to some deep  file diving, getting things to render properly and quickly. That is to say, I went to war with Shave.

Billy Pilgrim Rendering

I spent what felt like an eternity getting this guy to work right. I pulled two back to back all-nighters with varying levels of success. Allow me to chronicle the events leading up to getting Billy’s renders to be (mostly successful:

Shave won’t Render. Like, at all

This was the most worrying issue, naturally, the sort that sends you in an “Oh God, we’re gonna fail Drexel” sort of tizzy.  I arranged for a sit down with Chris late last week, where we attempted to do a rudimentary pass at getting the correct settings so this guy (and Lauren’s Tiny Tim) would actually render. Initial attempts awarded us with reliable FATAL CRASHES. Further development into this week finally paid off, however.

Basically, Shave, is a tricky little program with a mind of its own, and it commonly doesn’t mesh very well with Maya’s own settings. What this means is that it has its own settings for pretty much everything, including rendering. The quick and dirty version, Buffer, is the quickest of the bunch, but it reads shaders in an entirely different way than Maya does, meaning that in a scene with lights, the hair looks entirely wrong (in Billy’s case, neon blue). So that means we needed to use another variety of rendering, either Geometry (intense crashes!) or Hair Primitives (Bingo!). The result isn’t perfect, and Shave doesn’t get along very well with Maya lights it seems (more on that in a bit), but we have renders, people.

Side note, this problem was augmented by the fact that a lot of the computers in the labs are sending up white flags all over the place. Full C drives were a common ailment and made finding a few  computers to successfully render on particularly tricky. I notified d&i.

The Renders are taking an absurd amount of time!

And not the “I’m just being impatient and want to be doing anything else!” kind of long. We’re talking 1.5 hrs+ per frame. I’m pretty sure goes beyond even Ted “There’s nothing wrong with Half Hour Renders” Artz’s Godly rendering patience and into the territory of “well, something is obviously wrong here”.

One of the biggest reasons here is the heavy use of Ray Tracing shadows. Raytracing looks great, and especially so with Shave, but its just not feasible to work with in terms of the scope of this project, so for Billy and Tiny Tim we’ve had to shift to depth map shadows. There was a bit of a sacrifice here in terms of appearance, but I’m afraid its reached the point of “It is what it is.” I’ve done my best to make sure that it looks good overall, to minimize that “dead animal” look he was sporting.

For what it’s worth, though, I love how the Tralfalmadoran turned out.

Billy is Dye Fiend

Not on purpose maybe, but I had a hell of a time making sure his hair color remained consistent. As I mentioned earlier, Shave is ultra-affected by lights, meaning that getting the hair colors right between scenes was absurdly difficult. The best example came from Billy’s Attack render (the most devilish of the scenes to render…its still going as we speak. Almost there!) Billy decided he wanted to be blond. Seriously. So a bit of time was dedicated here getting it back to that wonderful brown tone we’ve come to know and love (lament?). It’s not perfect, and getting the hair to be the right color meant turning off quite a few lights, which it turn meant that Billy tends to be a bit dark. Still, I’ve managed to compensate a bit with Nuke ( a notable exception, of course, is the attack render, in which Billy’s hair is a lovely Caramel color. It’s better than the blond I had at one point, but I couldn’t get closer than the result I have now, unfortunately).

Here’s a few shots from the renders, so you can see my final result with Billy. Mind, there are tweaks I am making in Nuke to address the dark quality. I’m having a tough time with the nuke file at the moment, but I can update you when I have success. Also note that all three facets of Billy (Shadow, Character, Scene) have been rendered or are nearly done, despite the black bg nature of these images:

“Billy, why is your hair suddenly different? Oh who cares, look at how amazing that green hand thing looks.”

-Actual audience quote. Probably.

Also, while I was rendering, in addition to File combat, I also took the time to work with Lauren to create some new card art for the Spell cards. Not to discredit Tracy at all, but the spell renders didn’t lend themselves particularly well to a card image (aside from Deus Ex Machina, which needed a bit of artistic help as well), so I made a few of my own. My favorite is Graveyard Daemon.

Personification

Graveyard Daemon

Frankenstein’s Lightning

Deus Ex Machina

Billy Crucible Shave R&D, File Set-Up, Rendering, Compositing, etc 15+ Hours, 90% Completed.

Card Art: 2 Hours, 100% Task Completed

Still to do: Finish rendering Attack (almost there), Finalize composites (also almost there), maybe some Renders for Senior Show stuff, but that’s about it.

Also, super excited to get the finalized cards and the Library Node this week. We’re almost there, baby!

Total hours: (Approximate) 25

Self Evaluation: 95%

-Ben

This week I focused on getting the quiz game for the literature working, as well as rendering out my final spell effect (personification).

Menu with Quiz
I’m having a strange issue where for some reason I can’t remove the score text from the screen after the quiz is over, yet I’m able to remove everything else. I plan on fixing this as well as updating ALL of the menu formatting once I get the final PSD files of the menus. At least we now have a working quiz that imports the questions from an easily formatted XML file. It also randomizes the layout of the different answers each time you take the quiz so you can’t memorize their locations. The flash game creation class came in handy with this!

The personification spell effect acts as a marker that stands in one of the blank character spots. It absorbs damage, but cannot attack. Currently my animation for this loops seamlessly – the card rotates inside its protective bubble and a small ball of energy rotates around this. Upon destruction the personification spell effect fades out (which will be accomplished in Nuke).

uploading again due to vimeo issues

I’m still working on compositing my other spells effects in Nuke since most of them require changes in post. My orbs in Deus Ex Machina will glow/leave a trail – I’m rendering out additional layers of flames for Graveyard Daemon – and I’m re-rendering Frankenstein’s Lightning so that the orb is more dynamic/shakes when it’s hit with the initial lightning strikes.

Here is the composite of Time Shift. I darkened the background (this will be happening with all of the spell effects).

Vimeo is having some problems, so just in case here is my 2nd attempt to upload this video.

This week I worked 16.5 hours and accomplished 90% of what I wanted to work on. I would have liked to have spent more time fixing my other spell effects in post, but at least everything is rendered out now.

For next week I’ll be tracking down final assets (menu artwork, quiz questions, etc) and working them into the UI. I also plan to composite at least 3 of my 5 spell effects – of course I’ll try to do all 5 if time permits.

This week, we met with professor Redmann to try and figure out some shave issues. The hair hasn’t been self-shadowing and ( for me) renders hair in the right colors, but as a single shape rather than a mass of strands. It appears that if worst comes to worst, all of Tim’s character renders will have to be re-rendered with the hair.

That being said, I continued rendering this week- and it was definitely the most time-consuming task I completed all week. As it stands, the only thing I have left to render is the shadow pass for the attack animation. I opted to render out the attack’s library scene instead of the shadow pass for this week, since the library renders always take the longest at 5min/frame.

I ended up re-animating the arrival; in previous versions of Tim appearing in the book, Tiny Tim only hobbles forward and waves. At last week’s meeting it hit me that I never really have him leaving the book’s surface. I tried to have him “jumping” off a book as best as a kid with leg braces and a wooden crutch can, this week.

The main problem with this week’s arrival rendering were the separate character and shadow passes. For some reason the instanced particles weren’t caching; I wasted more time than I would have liked waiting for renders to complete, only to find they weren’t in sync. In the end I just rendered Tim, the book and the particles on a useBackground, and did the library separate.

[note: In response to the playback issues for the Vimeo videos, the animations play well on the lab computers. But at home, I noticed the frustrating skipping issue- turning off the HD settings fixed the issue for me, other than that, I'm not sure what to else to change in my export settings.]

Time: 20 hrs

I also finished the web content for Tiny Tim.

————————————————————-

Name: “Tiny” Tim Cratchit

Origin: Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

Age: Unknown, although where the game is concerned, he’s roughly 8 years old.

Height: 3’5”

Build: Malnourished build, disguised by layers of heavy winter clothing

Attack: Humbug

“God bless us, every one.”

Though wracked with illness in a time when proper treatment was a distant hope for a poor English boy, Tiny Tim Crachit’s innocence and optimism remain a focal point of his character. A child with every reason to feel sorry for himself manages to lift the spirits of those who surround him, and even crack the icy heart of old Ebenezer Scrooge.

Quiz

1. What first happens to the mantelpiece carvings in Scrooge’s room?

1. It catches fire
2. It transforms into images of Jacob Marley’s face
3. It opens to reveal the Ghost of Christmas Past
4. Nothing

-          Answer: A. Ebenezer’s “hallucinations” begin as soon as he leaves work. Being the stubborn man he is, he is insistent upon dismissing them.

2. In Stave Two of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge sees a vision of his younger sister Fannie. What has become of her, and who is her son?

1. She died young; her son Jacob is Scrooge’s only nephew.
2. She has cut off communication with the adult Scrooge; she has no son.
3. She died young; she has no son.
4. She died young; her son Fred is Scrooge’s only nephew.

-          Answer: D. In Stave Two, the Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge his youth; in those visions he admits his beloved sister died young, and is Fred’s mother.

3. Who is Belle?

1. Scrooge’s other sister
2. Scrooge’s estranged love
3. Scrooge’s mother
4. Tiny Tim’s mother

-          Answer: B.
4. Which character has a key role in Scrooge’s reform?

1. Tiny Tim
2. Bob Cratchit
3. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
4. Young Scrooge

-          Answer: C. In Stave Four, Scrooge truly comes to realize how his cruel, isolated, penny-pinching life will end, as well as a number of other unpleasant events. He pleads with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, promising that he will change.

5. What phrase does Tiny Tim Cratchit utter at the end of the story?

1. “Bah! Humbug!”
2. “God bless us, every one!”
3. “Merry Christmas!”
4. “Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine”

-          Answer: B.

————————————————————————

Hrs: 1

The remainder of my week I spent putting together the remainder of the spell cards and breaking down the UI artwork in preparation to give to Tracy for implementation.

Hrs: 2

Total: 23 hrs

This week, I feel I got much more done than I had planned to, I’d put my completion at 90%. The last thing I need to complete is the hair and spell shadow. The hair is being finicky and I’m not sure where we stand with it quite yet, but I plan on having the last shadow pass rendered. After that I’ll do an After Effects run-through and refine all of the Tiny Tim renders.

Alright, interesting week. Kind of. Sort of. Not really at all actually. There was one event of note, the announcer audio files are gone. That was a little bit of a setback this week. I have contacted the talent we used for the first recording and I am able to get him again this Tuesday to re-record. I put some hours into finishing King Arthur’s arrival animation and I also started compositing his idle animation. The rest of the week I spent preparing to all my files for rendering or re-rendering. I started rendering Thursday night and have been all weekend since. The Library pass for King Arthur’s arrival animation is still running as of now. Based on the last time I checked the render time per frame the Library pass should be done around 9:30AM tomorrow. I also would like to re-render two of the shadow passes that I have done. All rendering should be complete by days end tomorrow

Below I have attached some samples of the renders that have been completed.

This is a sample of King Arthur’s Idle (Character Pass)

King Arthur’s attack (Character pass)

King Arthur’s Damage (Character pass)

King Arthur’s Defeat (Character pass)

King Arthur Idle (Shadow pass)

Okay so this week I put about 13 hours into King Arthur’s Arrival animation to finish that up. About 2 hours into compositing his idle and another 4 or 5 hours getting all 15 render passes set up, talk about tedious. Other than that the rest of my week was spent searching for disappearing audio files and rendering. In all I spend about 20 hours this week working on things and many many more rendering. I would say I accomplished 90% percent of what I wanted to get done. I know I did no work on audio but the main focus for the week was rendering and I got a little bit of head start on compositing. Next week I am pushing to finish or almost finish compositing and I want to finish up the announcer voices as well as ordering the cards.

Til next time.