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:
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.
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.
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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?
It catches fire
It transforms into images of Jacob Marley’s face
It opens to reveal the Ghost of Christmas Past
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?
She died young; her son Jacob is Scrooge’s only nephew.
She has cut off communication with the adult Scrooge; she has no son.
She died young; she has no son.
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?
Scrooge’s other sister
Scrooge’s estranged love
Scrooge’s mother
Tiny Tim’s mother
- Answer: B. 4. Which character has a key role in Scrooge’s reform?
Tiny Tim
Bob Cratchit
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
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?
“Bah! Humbug!”
“God bless us, every one!”
“Merry Christmas!”
“Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine”
- Answer: B.
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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.
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%
This week I pretty much spent the whole time troubleshooting renders, setting up scenes and reanimating/fixing the particle snow and ice effects for Tim’s attack animation.
I had said last week I wanted to have Tim’s attack animation layers rendered and I got that accomplished. I had to rethink the icicles, so instead of shooting from his palm, I have them coming up from the floor around his feet. I also spent a good amount of time fixing the particles for his spell effect. I added some expressions so that the snowchunks that fly out of his palm are randomly rotated and use more than one piece of geometry. Here are the renders, I just need to decide which I want to use.
(snow swirl)
(snow chunks)
(snow blast)
Hrs: 12
Tint Tim’s arrival animation is the last one I have to render. I set it up to render on Wednesday and came back to a crashed render and a corrupted file.
Since I still plan on using hair with him, I animated him scaling out of the book with his arm and head angled so that I wouldn’t have to worry about scaling his hair on top of everything else. He’ll be rendered in 2 parts – scaling and scaled. The scaled will have Tim normal sized on the book with the intro animation I had earlier. Here’s what I have so far, the fluttering pages and book texture need to be redone.
Hrs: 7
I also fixed the scale issues with the interface and re-sized the glyph box for the cards.
Hrs: .5
This coming week, I plan on having the intro animation rendered and at least the shadow pass for the attack finished. I also plan on having Tim’s info for the website done by Monday.
Overall I’m happy with the work done with the animation- the particle renders set me back a bit and I was happy to get them fixed and out of the way. The intro animation is all fixed and ready to render, and will be done this week. I’d say I’m about 85%, the messed up intro render threw me off this week.
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%
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).
So, this week we had our render session and as far as Tiny Tim went, I think it was a great start. I went down to start setting up the scenes for the renders around 5:30pm on Wednesday. It basically involved importing all of the lights for the library scene and adding in the extra lights necessary for our individual characters.
Tiny Tim is the smallest character in the game, so I gave him a few extra lights. For him I needed to set up 3 passes: the character, shadow and hair pass. For the attack, I spend a couple hours setting it up into different layers and lighting them. I set them up to render over the weekend.
Another chunk of time was spent on re-creating Tim’s hair (due to the clipping and scaling issues I had earlier) and inserting the hair mounted on a dummy head and hat textured with a shadow-receiving UseBackground material. That head was then added to all the animated scenes so that his new hair could move with the rest of the body.
Here are a couple of the renders completed – taking damage and the idle. (I had to re-render the Take Damage after rendering from the wrong camera)
Percent done: 35-40%
Hrs: 16
This week I got some new card-art renders from my teammates and I adapted the type on each card for the characters so we can continue to move forward with getting the physical cards printed. The card’s design had to be shifted around only slightly to accommodate the 1/2″ section for the glyphs that will help bring the physical and digital aspect of the game together.
Percent done: 95% (just need a few more renders)
New Cards:
In order to get an idea of how the other menus will look with the borders and buttons, I mocked up some examples of the library menu and the card info menu.
Percent done: 100%
Opening
Library
Quizzes
Cards
Hrs: 4
On the whole, I got two out four layers of two animations rendered, which is more than I had hoped to have started. I had passed the design of the attack interfaces back to Ben, and I finally got Tiny Tim’s card art finished, which is something I had meant to have done a while ago. Overall, I’d say about90% of what I wanted to get done, I would have been happier with less setbacks in the rendering department, mainly.
This coming week, I’d like to have the attack rendered out (all 9 layers) as well as the library and hair passes for the two animations above.
Also on my to-do list this week was to get the visual aspect of the attack spell nailed down. For the spell, I have snow spiraling out from Tim’s outstretched palm and ending in a burst of snow, hail and ice. As he casts the spell, I wanted to have a patch of snow spread from his feet outwards.
I spent time working on the texture for the snow and creating the particle effects- I plan on rendering this in layers (snow, dust, icicles) to try and minimize the chance of any more epic crashes.
I spent a brief amount of time tweaking the texture for Tiny Tim’s second facial expression this week as well.
Time: .5 hrs
Complete: 100%
Finally, I worked on fixing the overall look of the interface. I fixed the borders, and worked on getting everything to flow style-wise and color-wise.
Time: 2 hrs
Complete: 100%
The only thing that I didn’t complete that I wanted to was the final card art render for Tiny Tim. I pushed that back a day in order to give myself time to fix the hair; the lighting and everything is already set up, but in order to complete the render I need his hair to work.
Time spent 1 hr
Complete: 80%
Total: 22.5 hrs
Overall, I’d say I got around 90% of what I wanted to get done this week- the hair being a big part of that 10%. This coming week, I want to get at least all layers of one animation completely rendered, have the attack interfaces/text treatment started as well as have the cards all ready for print.
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%
