This week I worked on getting together playblasts for each of the spell effect cards as well as beauty shots for most of the effects. Overall the effects are still in various final stages, but are almost complete and should be ready to render on time. I plan on using motion blur in most of them for the final renders, and editing them in Nuke in order to smooth their entrance and exits.
Graveyard Daemon
Deus Ex Machina
Frankenstein’s Lightning
Timeshift
Personification
This isn’t the final beauty shot but I wanted to include it in order to show the transparency of the protective bubble around the card. This object has a light rotating around it to show off the transparency, and in game it works like a damage absorption marker.
So, for this week, I spent a large amount of time looking for some inspiration as far as game interfaces go, and trying to troubleshoot some issues with Tim I’ve been having.
First, I worked on correcting the neck joint in Tim’s skeleton. The guide I followed had me create two heads, one of which would keep his head in the y direction no matter how he bent. In messing with his hat/hair and head in general, I decided to change some of the controls to make it easier for me to animate these final two animations.
the animation for Tiny Tim’s intro (the beginning of the game where the characters emerge from an open book). I have a couple iterations of this and his attack, but here’s what I ended up with by the time the week was through. Needless to say, these aren’t complete- I intend to have them finished by the end of next week.
The most frustrating part of the week was trying to manipulate shave (again) in order to get a nice shot for the character cards. Simply put- when I render, half of Tim’s hair disappears. The only time it shows up is when I zoom out too far for a decent quality render. I spent hours rendering, tweaking (settings, cameras, hair) and re-rendering and the result was just another variation of awful. I’ve decided to set it aside for now to get more pressing tasks completed.
I also worked on the snowy attack that will swirl out from his palm in the attack and the card render, as well as the lighting for the shot.
Hrs: 8
Finally, I spent some more time on the Hp, Menu screen and game screen borders (used in the menu screen) I didn’t mention that when I was making the largest box on the menu screen, I made it with the intention of incorporating the border into other parts of the game.I like the second variation the best, personally.
Menu 1
Menu 2
I did a couple versions of the Hp bar as well, in all of them there is a designated indicator for the Player/NPC Hp and whatever character card the Player/NPC has selected.
Hp Bars
Hrs: 6.5
Goals for the upcoming week include finalizing character animations and continue work on the spell element of the attack. Also, texture must be applied to the sculpted heads for the beauty shot, and the Hp designs must be finalized.
Alright, the goal for this week was to finish 3 animations. Some of our characters have 4 animations, Arrival, Idle, attack, and defeat animation. My character happens to have all four. This week I only worked on these animations since they are high priority, and took a break from the website. The idle, defeat and arrival animations for Robin Hood are done and can be seen here:
I also modeled this bag for Robin in half an hour:
And finally, I added some facial animation for all of the animations. The only animation left for Robin Hood is the Attack animation which I will tackle it next week.
Hours: 17.5 Percentage : 75% (3 out of 4 animations)
Goals for next Week:
For next week, as I mentioned above, I will be working on the last animation for robin hood which is the Attack animation, and for me I guess it’s the hardest one because he has to do some hard poses. Also, I will start working on the wbsite, and to be more specific:
For the website I need to add few more PHP functions to the page.tpl.php. I also found a better way to convert the HTML to Drupal template without changing the name of the divisions in our HTML, and therefor in the CSS. In the first attempt I changed the name of the divisions and match them to the architecture of a standard Drupal template. I guess I’m going to spend 2-3 hours to change everything to what we had in the HTML template, and as a result we will have more control on our theme. Lastly I will work on the navigation system and implement the JavaScript Accordion effect to the Characters list. You might ask but we had the effect on the HTML template here, but that’s a different story. Drupal uses it’s own mark up for the menus, and that makes it hard to implement jQuery plugins with Drupal. Since the character list on the character page is a custom menu, it makes it more difficult to implement a third party script. What we had in the HTML as a demo, was a ready to go plugin, but for the Drupal site that plugin won’t work. Luckily, jQuery is built in in Drupal 6, and I can write my own function (instead of plugins) in JavaScript to get the same effect. There are some modules (like this one) to add accordion effect to the menus, but none of them work the way we want, and most of them don’t work for custom menus at all.
A lot is running through my head right now. Below I will outline what I’ve accomplished this week, what I will do next week and some other random thoughts.
This week has been all animation for me, in accordance with my projected Gantt schedule for the week I completed both King Arthur’s idle and defeat animation loops. This week I also improved the rig on our book that we will use for the into sequences. On top of improving the rig I animated two individual pages turning, building on top of the book opening and pages deforming that Ben had already animated. The first video below is King Arthur’s idle, at the moment it is complete, I might go revisit it after I have finished the rest of the animations for some touch ups and adjustments. At the end of the loop he shows off his pearly whites as he snarls at the player. The second video is Arthur’s defeat, he takes a step back in pain, then raises his sword as if to fight only to drop it a moment later and fall to his knees. You notice he disappears shortly followed by the sword, the idea is that the characters will fade out when defeated. The exact way we are doing that has not been decided at the moment. Finally the third video is the book opening. As I said Ben handled the cover opening and the bulk of the pages deforming after I rigged the book initially. I then added to the rig so it could handle two individual pages, after the the pages were rigged I animated them into the rest of the existing book animation.
In the coming week you will see four things in the Gantt chart for me. The two big ones are King Arthur’s into loop and attack loop, I have planned two weeks for them, so at the end of the week I will have some WIP playblasts for you. The other two items are King Arthur’s damage loop and the book “toss in” animation. The “toss in” animation is the book flying into the playing area as if thrown by an unseen person (player/npc). It’s like our version of the PokeBall.
I also promised you some other thoughts, well here they are, all in regards to music. I saw Ted’s message on base camp, I am interested in pursuing help from the person you notified us about. This weekend I ran into a friend of mine from high school that runs his own recording studio. I have worked with him in the past and I love the music he does. I know you had cautioned us about working with students that had no investment in the project. This is the same situation with the exception that I know him very well. At this juncture I am considering having both parties create music loops for us, that way if one doesn’t come through for us we have a back up ready to go. Having both artists create music for us will also give us some choices.
It was a bit of a struggle getting back into the flow of things but work is underway once again as LexiConquest nears completion. The breakdown goes something like this:
Ben Worked to (very nearly) finish Tin Woodsman’s Animation. Still to do is implement the Book “Toss-In” for the arrival animation, and the particles (already developed) for his attack. Also made huge progress in the look development and texturing of the Library Arena.
Total hours: 29
Jason Worked on Attack, Idle, and Defend animations for Tripod. Particle and light effects were also completed for Tripod Attack. Also got the architecture of data storage programmed.
Total Hours: 22
Mike Worked on King Arthur’s Idle and Defeat. Worked on improving the book rig and finishing the animation of the book opening.
Hessam: Worked on Robin Hood’s arrival, idle and defeat animation, and fixed the minor issues with the rig and the weighting.
Lauren Worked on attack and intro animations for Tim, lighting for card render, and continued work on game interface art.
Tracy: Completed playblasts of all of the spell effect cards and started to get together beauty shots of the effects (3.5 complete out of 5).
For starters, the fiberglass box is taking a bit longer then anticipated. It is getting done, just needs a bit more sanding and layers of work then originally anticipated. The short of it is I covered the pink foam in packaging tape which is covered in a layer of fiberglass which is cured and covered in fiberglass putty which is then sanded and another layer of fiberglass on top of that. This is followed by primer, base coat of color, second coat of color, coat of gloss lacquer. I have been assured of it’s completion at the end of this week.
The architecture for storing all the cards, animations, maneuvers, and positions are completed from a programming standpoint. Next will be integrating this data with GUI elements. Code is here. Basically it’s an Associative array for each card inside another array. The maneuvers are handled as an array inside each card array. Like this card[0][info, info, maneuvers[info,info,info],info,info]. All card data is entered in one location one time, eliminating a lot of the debugging troubles. The glyph tracking code has been mostly rewritten to work with this as well.
I have also redone the programming of the place card buttons so we can pass variables into the placement function on a mouseEvent. This eliminates the need for separate functions for each button on the screen. Instead there will simply be a function for Attack, Defend, Placement, and End Turn buttons. This should really shorten the code and eliminate extra time spent debugging.
Time spent programming Architecture: 8 hours % Complete:60%
To do For next week: All animations completed for Tripod. Attack, Defend buttons programmed to run animations. Program function for checking if correct maneuver cards are activated for character to attack.
Bit of an early post here but like so many others I’m taking a quick foray home (roundabouts Baltimore) for Easter weekend.
Returning to this thing was a bit rough at first but within a few days it was more or less back to the way things should be; that is, frantic dedication and potentially displaced anger toward any and every assignment that WASN’T LexiConquest. My other classes are doomed. But I don’t care. I love this thing.
First and foremost let’s go over Mr. Tin Woodsman, who saw his animations nearly completed this week. We can see the four aspects of his animation are, all together, probably 90% done if not more. Check out the individual breakdown here:
Tin Woodsman’s Attack Animation
First off, here’s a picture of Tin’s new Toy (Pixar Reference!)
Because every game character needs an obnoxiously over-sized weapon. Anyway, this is a vast improvement on the past iteration you saw, with an actual personality and coherence with the character design.
Axe Design, Modeling and Texturing: 1 Hour
100%, Task Completed
Here it is in action:
So, then, what’s left? Well, a bit. The camera is temporary until we can determine as a team what we want to do in terms of animating cameras. But more noticeable is the lack of “flourish.” You’ll remember from a few weeks back the heart vortex I developed using Maya particles. So what’s left, then, is to implement the two together for the whole attack. No problem.
Attack Animation: 10 hours (approximate)
90%, Task nearly completed
Tin Woodsman’s Arrival Animation
This guy is nearly done, too. What’s left is the same for everyone…the book. This game’s “pokeball” equivalent is the ancient looking tome you saw from a few posts back. It is tossed in, and the characters grow and step out of them. This rigging process has been handed to Mike (who traded the bulk of the Library Arena’s texturing for it- more on that soon). Once this animation is done, we will be able to implement it into our character’s animations.
Arrival Animation: 8 hours (approximate)
90%, Task nearly completed
The Library
The next part of my week was the return to the library file. You might know it as our organizational file, but it is also the area in which our characters battle. You may not recall much besides some lambert one walls but oh man did this sucker get a facelift. First, a note on what we’re “going for.” In general, we were going for a “Library of Congress” type feel…if the Library of Congress made it into the year 3000 or so.
Of course, there’s still some tweaking to be done and the lighting is largely placeholder, but I’m incredibly pleased with the look and how I was able to mesh the old with the new. We’ve also begun to bring in some of the characters to ensure scales are correct (so far so good), and the emptiness of the room will be addressed with some basic furniture as well as a scattering of various books which will help us pull us back into the library direction as opposed to a Sci-Fi Dojo (which is, nevertheless, entirely awesome). It should be noted that these models are already modeled and textured, and simply need to be brought in. I had fun with this; I hope you can tell.
Library Texturin: 10 hours (approx)
90%, Nearly Done
What this means is, things are very close to being renderable, and I can finally revisit my old buddy Billy Pilgrim.
