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.

King Arthur Idle (1st go) from Michael Ambrozaitis on Vimeo.

Book with Rig

For this week I plan to finish:

• 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.

Code

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)

Idle Animation Defeat Animation

Total hrs.: 10

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.