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%

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

UPDATE: We have a near-finished version of the Battle Theme done as well, courtesy of fellow Drexel student Shaun Cerborino:

LexiQuestRough2

Things are starting to really come together. We planned on finishing our rendering by this week and moving everyone into compositing, in the coming week. We are also planning to orders the physical cards this week after out meeting with Ted on Tuesday.

MIKE: Finished King Arthur’s arrival animation, finished rendering. No work done on the announcer audio.

Hessam: Finished Robin’s arrival animation, and all the other renders, and composite all the animations. Worked on the functionality of the site, and browser testing. Total Hours: 17.5 Total Percentage: 97%

Ben: Tin Woodsman Compositing and Billy Pilgrim “bang my head on the desk” type technical issues

Jason: Programming ‘one button’, character glyph artwork and programming. 17 hours @ 95%

Tracy: Rendered out last spell effect (personification), implemented the Quiz game, composited the Time Shift spell effect. 16.5 hours @90%

Lauren: Put together playing cards, re-animated and rendered arrival sequence, and rendered library for attack animation. 23 Hrs, 90%

Update: I don’t know how I forgot about this, but I worked on Billy’s Arrival animation, which is the last animation that needs to be done for him. I’m not including this in hour totals because I’m a bone head and forgot about it, but he’s took about 5 hours or so. Here it is:

This week was awful.

Oh, wait, no it wasn’t. But it was Week 5, which is fairly alarming regardless of how well you’re doing. But I think we’re in an ok spot, actually.
Much of this week was spent on compositing Tin Woodsman, looking at the final movies, tweaking in Nuke, and re-rendering various bits as as needed.

Tin Woodsman

I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been staring at them for too long, I’m too hard on myself, they’re actually mediocre, or some combination of all the above, but I don’t love the Tin Woodsman Renders. I think the character himself looks great and I’m pleased with how his design and appearance ended up, so I feel accomplished for that. But if I had more time (a common wish, I’m sure), I would love to go redo some of his animation. Its funny how even playblasting the hell out of things doesn’t completely tell the story.

If I want to put a positive spin on it (and for the sake of my sanity I’ll go ahead and give it a shot), I’ve never been a great animator and I believe I’ve made great strides in terms of improvement in skill, and that does seem to come through in the final renders. Still, I can’t dwell on it; I’m moving onto Billy’s renders next week (more on that in a bit) and calling it a Project for Tin Woodsman…for the most part, anyway.

Well I hope I didn’t put too sour a taste in mouth before you even got to seen them, but here’s the final animations for Tin Woodsman, sans perhaps a bit more Nuke work:

Damage

Attack

Arrival

Final Tin Woodsman Preparation: Aprrox 15 hours

Billy Pilgrim

Billy was a bit more tricky this week. I spent some time setting up the passes that I did for Tin Woodsman, which wasn’t a huge endeavor now that I was fairly confident with what I was doing. The main problem is, of course, Shave. I arranged for a meeting with Chris, Lauren and myself to go over some of the rendering issues we were facing (ie, it wouldn’t render without crashing). After a few back and forth emails, we seem to have at least part of the problem ironed out, and hopefully Billy rendering can begin with more success this week.

Billy Problem Solving and Prep: 5 hours

Total: Approximately 20 hours, and I’ll give myself a hearty 93% in terms of success.

We have one more big group meeting coming next Wednesday in which we hope to nail out some final details and compare renders for consistency as we move toward implementing the movies in the Flash game skeleton. Stay tuned.

Ben

Ben – Designed book opening visual effect, finished Tin Woodsman’s Arrival Animation, Billy Pilgrim’s Attack

Hessam – Finished damage animation for robin, and the left over renders. Worked on the Image cycle gallery, quick facts callout, user profile page, style for the gallery, and generating font for the website. Total hours: 22 Total Percentage for both the site and 3d Stuff: 95% accomplished.

Jason – Tripod renders complete and all ready for compositing. Defending implemented in code. Hours: 19 @ 95%

Mike -Worked King Arthur Arrival animation, finished the final Book animation continued rendering. 17hrs @90%

Lauren – Finished rendering attack animation character layers, reworked particles and attack animation, animated and set up render for arrival. 19.5 hrs, 85%.

Tracy – Finished rendering 4 of the 5 spell effects and their library backgrounds – they are ready for compositing. 17.5hrs @ 80%

I know you’re probably tired of hearing it, but “this was a great week!”

Well, it was…

Tin Woodsman’s Arrival Animation (and new Arrival Particles)

Tin man has been implemented into the book toss, and the book opening particles have been developed, both of which can be seen here:

So, those pages will be used by everyone when the book opens, so I’ve at least started teaching everyone how to properly implement them. I’m aware that there’s some crazy intersection but my attempts to make the papers dynamic (ie, make contact and bounce off of Tin Woodsman) lead to some very bizarre results, such as a page getting caught within the geometry and wriggling around in a bizarre manner. As is, it doesn’t bother me so much and I’m pleased with the look. It’s much better than the other one I made (and lost).

By the way, that above Animation has been rendered, meaning that Tin Woodsman’s rendering is completed. I’m afraid I haven’t gotten to compositing anything yet (a bit too much trouble shooting on the particle front), but I did have the opportunity to move onto completing Billy’s Attack, which is up next.

Tin Woodsman Arrival:Book, particle and character implementation, rendering. 7 Hours, 100%

Book Opening Effect: 3 hours, 100% complete

Billy Pilgrim Attack Animation

Oh, I had some fun with this one. Basically, the gist of the attack is this: Billy’s Tralfalmadoran warps him to 1946 Dresden. Uh, yeah. Very sensitive, I know. Check it out:

So, this involved the modeling and texturing of the missile, explosion R&D, and Billy/Tral animation. Here’s a render of how it all looks: 

Billy Pilgrim Attack: Getting it to “render ready”, 10 Hours, 100%

Additionally, on the non-3D front, I updated the attack descriptions to include the needed maneuvers (the “energy” needed to perform an attack). So basically, the attack boxes from last week’s post now have pretty arrows posted on it. Nothing very exciting, but they’re ready to be implemented into the flash game interface. I’ve been reading both books over the term, so much of the content comes directly from notes I took during these readings.

Attack Description Panels: .5 hours, 100%

Web Content

I also developed the web content for my personal characters. This information will be implemented into the website and the quizzes into the game interface.

Here’s Billy’s, though I did Tin Man’s, too:

Name: Billy Pilgrim and Tralfalmadoran

Origin: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

Age: 42, but varies based on placement in time

Height: 6’3”

Build: Tall and frail

Attack: So it Goes

“There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”

Billy Pilgrim doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t really bother him; he’s content to merely exist, to take things as they come, no matter how dire the circumstance may be at a given moment. While he’s never had an ounce of malice for anything in his life, Billy lives his life as a sort of punching bag for other individuals and even the universe itself.

Billy has become “unstuck in time,” and he finds himself at the mercy of the ages, where one moment he may find himself in the midst of World War II and another places him in a zoo exhibit on the Tralfalmadoran’s home planet, with little warning between each jump. He accepts his fatalist “gift” gracefully.

With new perspectives on what it means to exist, Billy hopes to convey his wisdom on peace and life to anyone who will listen.

Quiz

1. 1. What two colors are repeatedly mentioned throughout the novel?
   1. a. Ivory and Blue
   2. b. Red and Gold
   3. c. Green and Lavender
   4. d. Tan and Black

Answer: A.

1. 2. What thing does the character Paul Lazzaro claim is “the sweetest thing in life?”
   1. a. Money
   2. b. Charity
   3. c. Adultery
   4. d. Revenge

Answer: D, he plans to kill Billy out of revenge for “killing” Ronald Weary.

1. 3. Which event serves as the main climax for the novel?
   1. a. Billy’s abduction by the Tralfalmadorans
   2. b. The bombing of Dresden
   3. c. Billy’s death at the hand of Paul Lazzaro
   4. d. When the Billy’s battalion is liberated by the British forces

Answer: B. This is the most significant event in the novel, even if Billy doesn’t come to understand its weight until years later.

1. 4. What is the name of the fictional Science Fiction author that inspires Billy Pilgrim?
   1. a. Kilgore Trout
   2. b. Kurt Vonnegut
   3. c. Eliot Rosewater
   4. d. Edgar Derby

Answer: A. Eliot Rosewater introduces him to the author, whom he eventually meets, while Billy is recovering from PTS after the war

1. 5. Which of one of the following quotes does not reflect on the novel’s overall theme of fatalism?
   1. a. “If it has been a dog in a city, a policeman would have shot him and sent his head to a laboratory to see if he had rabies. So it goes.”
   2. b. “Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”
   3. c. “Somebody Laughed. Billy Wondered what the joke was.”
   4. d. “Why me?” he asked the guard… “Vy you? Vy anybody?” he said.

Answer: C. While this is a testament to a lack of cheer or happiness, it is more a comment on Billy’s naïve and somewhat oblivious nature.

Web Content Development: 1.5 hours, 100% complete

Total Hours: 22.

Personal Assesment: 94. Got nearly everything done that I wanted to, though I’m sorry about not being able to composite yet.

Rend-O-Rama one went well!

Ben- Finalizing scene for render, organizational steps for rendering, Tin Woodsman Rendering, Attack UI

Jason- Tripod re-animation, Tripod rendering, Maneuver programming. — 21 hours 90% of goal

Mike – Finalizing Book Animation/Integration, Finish King Arthur’s Attack, King Arthur Rendering

Hessam – Render preparations, tweaking animations, and fixing new issues. Working on the navigation of the site and image galleries. Hours 29.5 – 90% of the goals total. 80% for the 3D stuff and rendering, and 100% for the website.

Lauren – Edited scenes for render, created new shave hair setup, began rendering, finished card art and finalized UI screens.

Tracy – Preparations for rendering, rendered most of Graveyard Daemon (the rest should be complete and on campus waiting for me!) and rendered Time Shift.  The rest are still in the works.  Basic coding tweaks while I wait for final artwork for the in game menus.   Hours – 16.5 – 80% of my overall goal (100% of my programming goal since I didn’t set out to complete a lot this week and about 75% of my 3D goal due to long render times).

This was a pretty productive week.

The start of the week had me preparing for the Rend-O-Rama, setting up organizational documents, figuring out the right way to set up shadow passes, tweaking and establishing various render settings, etc. This is hard to really show progress for but preparation took a bit of time. Additionally, I tweaked the lighting and finally got some nice shadows, and populated the book shelves:

Rend-O-Rama Set Up 5 hours, 100% Task Completed

The Rend-O-Rama went pretty well, with the bulk of Tin Man getting completed, though not quite all, as I had hoped. As per usual, a small host of problems arose. The most curious of which was a problem where one Tin Man frame, which took about 3 minutes within Maya, would take at least tin minutes to do in batch or command line. It’s still an issue now, but I’ve contacted Chris and he’s teaching me a work around. I’ll be sure to keep you posted. But overall, it was good time. We utilized a shared spreadsheet Google doc to keep communication open about progress. The best aspect, though, was being able to simply turn to one side and ask for help when we need it. I would like to make this a weekly thing, personally, and whoever wants to show up can.

Anyway, here is what has been accomplished in terms of rendering for me:

• Tin Woodsman Attack Animation Character Pass
• Tin Woodsman Attack Animation Shadow Pass
• Tin Woodsman Attack Animation Library Pass
• Tin Woodsman Default Animation Character Pass
• Tin Woodsman Default Animation Shadow Pass
• Tin Woodsman Default Animation Library Pass
• Tin Woodsman Damage Animation Character Pass
• Tin Woodsman Damage Animation Shadow Pass
• Tin Woodsman Damage Animation Library Pass

So that leaves Tin Woodsman Arrival rendering, which I hope to have finished early this week. Nothing is compositied together yet, though I have set up a sample Nuke file that everyone will be able to utilize when we’re ready for that. Ideally, by the end of this week, I’ll have something finished and ready to not only show you but also get into the Flash programming by Jason and Tracy.

Rend-O-Rama 8 hours+ Tin Woodsman Rendering, 85% complete.

Also, while I was rendering, I worked on a particle animation for when the Arrival books open up. Look for that soon, after I refine it a bit more.

Update: Nevermind, apparently this work has completely disappeared…

Book Opening Visual Effects 0%

By the day after, I had my fill of working on 3D stuff, so I took a quick break and developed some of the in-battle UI, specifically the Attack Banners (labels that rest on the top of the screen while a character uses its attack) and Attack Descriptions, little panels that will come up on the screen when a player goes to use his or her attack. They use assets created by Lauren, so the look is consistent. Here are two samples:

Attack UI: 3 Hours, 95% done (some fact checking might change the details of the attacks).

So, yeah, good week. Expect Tin Man to be done fo-realz this week, with more work on Billy to follow.

Total Hours: 28

Self Evaluation: 95%

We have a lot planned in the coming weeks, highest on the list being finishing the project of course.

This Wednesday, the Biblionauts have scheduled an “ALL NIGHTER” (dun dun dun!) in which we hope to complete a large percentage of our rendering. Because most of our animation occurs over a relatively low number of frames, there’s shouldn’t be any issue completing most of what we need done. By being in one room over a set period, we will be able to ensure the most consistency in terms of lighting, camera angle, etc. And if any problems occur, there’s a large support group ready and willing to troubleshoot issues. Hopefully, when all is said and done early Thursday morning, we will have made amazing progress and will be able to move into paying attention into the next step of the project, namely the printing of the physical cards and the game programming.

But enough of that and onto what we did this week:

Mike: This week I worked on more of King Arthur’s animations and the Book for the intro animations.

Ben: Library Arena completion, Tin Woodsman attack and render passes, beginning of Billy Pilgrim animation

Jason: Defeat and arrival animations for Tripod. Attack button programming to check maneuver requirements. Hours:14  % complete vs. anticipated: 90%

Hessam: Attack animation, and working on the site (cleaning up the codes and add the accordion effect to Drupal) Hours: 18 hours % complete vs. anticipated: 80%

Lauren: Attack spell and animations, arrival animation, card render and finalizing interface. Hrs: 22.5, 90% of weekly goal complete.

Tracy: Main menu coding, reading PDFs into flash, card navigation, fixing Time Shift animation and editing Frankenstein’s Lightning animation. Hours: 17   % complete vs. anticipated: 88%

This was a busy week, and for some reason it ended up being a bit more stressful than usual. Work has been split, as per usual, across three endeavors: The Library Arena, Billy Pilgrim and Tin Woodsman. I’ll discuss the Library first.

Library Arena

This week more attention was paid to achieving interesting lighting within the arena. I like the appearance of what we’ve got going on, with the space age melded with the dusty distinctiveness of an attic space. Here’s a few samples, representative of the two general camera perspectives we’ll need:

Arena Lighting: 5 hours, 100% Task Completed

The Library was also a big part of my week in terms of organization. It’s tough to explain but I’ll do my best.

As we have said, each Character that we have will be in their own version of the scene, and will be rendered separately from one another. In scenes where they should appear together (which is only true for the “Overview” scene; in the others, creative camera cuts will be used to focus exclusively on one character to highlight the visual quality of the characters while downplaying the fact that other characters cannot be seen within one angle), they will be composited together in post-production.

To maintain visual consistency, we will all be using the same library, split into two different versions for each animation that we need. So, to illustrate this example, I will use “Tin Woodsman Damage.” For this, I will be importing the completed Tin Woodsman Damage animation into the Library Arena. In one version of the file, I will render out only the Arena from the camera angle that has been established for Tin Woodsman, with the Tin Woodsman model hidden. In another version, I have set up the scene so that the scene does not render, but Tin Man does. However, the light from the Arena are still present, meaning that Tin Man will look just as he should. Additionally, for this version of the file, I have made sure that the most significant models are “Visible in Reflections,” meaning that Tin’s shiny metals will reflect back the environment without rendering everything. I set up a version of the Library for everyone (well, those who have to deal with Reflections… Tracy, Mike and Jason) to use.

Because almost all of of Tin Man’s actions are seen through one camera (except his Attack animation, but I’ll discuss that later), this means that only one high-quality frame need be rendered for all of his animations, and each of the other animations I render of him can simply be placed on top. For any animated camera that is required, this may simply be imported into the Library and rendered from with adjusted quality.

Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about:

This will be the backdrop for this animation:

It should be noted that, because of a generally low number of total frames, we are hoping to use as many high-level render settings as well can.Such a set up will exist for each required Tin Man animation (as well as for every other character).

Coming up this week, Team LexiConquest is going to pull a Rend-A-thon on Wednesday night. It’ll be an all-nighter in which we hope to complete a large amount of our rendering in order to begin the other aspects of our project, including the printing of the physical cards and the programming organization. I dedicated a few hours organizing a list of things to be mindful of as they complete the renders, and how to follow the workflow that I did in the above example.

Rendering Preperation: 10 Hours  75% Complete

Tin Woodsman Animation

The bulk of my attention to Tin Woodsman in terms of animation was spent on his attack animation. I won’t spend a lot talking about this, but the main bulk meant I was doing a lot of particle research. Here’s my result:

Unfortunately this sucker didn’t scale as well as I wanted it to, so I have to address that as I put it in the Library Arena. In addition, I have to animate the camera, but this isn’t a huge concern. I’m pleased with how it looks. Sample render for the brilliantly titled, Hearty Chop.

Tin Woodsman Animations: 8 Hours, 90% complete.

It should also be noted that the rest of his animations got a bit of attention as well, with quality tweaking.

Billy Pilgrim

You’ll like this. At long last, Billy’s animation has begun. Here are two animations, Default and Damage:

There’s not too much to say here (I’ve probably been verbose enough already at this point). I’ll probably take another break from him again this week in order to finalize Tin Woodsman for rendering. The idea is to be completely done with that guy when I walk into the sun on Thursday morning after our All Nighter, and be ready to focus on Billy full time.

Billy Pilgrim Animations: 8 Hours, 40% done

Ben’s Week: 30 Hours (approximate), with roughly 90% of ambitions addressed (not counting new ones that came out of nowhere )