This week I focused more time on getting some basic code up and running that will house the game menus and quiz game. I know it doesn’t look like much yet, but it took a little while for me to separate the artwork into the proper layers and bring it in, as well as setting up all of the buttons and frame navigation. I also don’t have the final artwork in all of its separate layers (I think most of this will be finished soon) so for those pages I just used a placeholder brown color.
menu
Currently the main page uses Lauren’s menu artwork. Since I’m not sure of the layout of the other pages just yet I kept the “login” button on the other pages in order to take you back to the home page. I spent a good amount of time working on converting PDFs in order to read them into Flash for the library page. I was able to convert War of the Worlds and read it in this file, so I think we should be set for all of the other books. I do need to play around with the setting some more and figure out how to close out of the PDF once done, but for now you have to manually close the .swf and reopen it.

The cards menu will display all of the available in game cards and will allow you to pick one and see more detailed information. I have the card navigation working almost entirely, I just need to play around with the movement settings a bit more. Right now the scroll right function is working properly, but the scroll left function is off a bit. This should be an easy fix.

For next week in terms of coding I’d like to fix my PDF problem and card navigation problem, incorporate more final assets instead of placeholders, and begin production of the quiz game. It would be great to get the quiz game done for next week, but we’re going to be focusing on final renders this week, so I don’t want to promise that it will be entirely finished.

In terms of spell effects this week, I worked with Jason to change the settings on my lightning for Frankenstein’s Lightning so that it doesn’t look so flat. Now it uses a ramp instead of a solid color. I also randomized the rotation of the cards flowing around the time machine in the Time Shift effect (images below). I’m still working on beauty shot renders for the cards, but expect to have them finished by Monday so Lauren can start incorporating those into the final designs.

My goals for this week were more programming based, and I feel I completed about 85% to 90% of what I expected to finished. I would have liked to have used more final artwork, and plan on incorporating the changes I mentioned above for next week. I completed 100% of what I expected to finish graphically this week (it was a light week) and for next week I plan on having the final renders done for all of the spell effects baring any unforeseen circumstances. I spent between 15 – 20 hours working this week combined between getting the kinks out of my 3d work and coding.

***EDIT***
I realized that the flash file I uploaded wasn’t working properly. I uploaded it to my Drexel space instead, and this one works.
Menu

Another week of animating and coding. My goal was this week was to finish my last piece of animation, and adding some functionality to the site, as well as cleaning up the codes. Let’s get to breakdowns:
Animation:

The last animation for Robin Hood was his attack animation, and the only reason that I left this for this week, was its complexity compare to the other ones. In this animation I had to make some hard poses with my character that relied heavily on the motion of his shoulder (the weakest part of my rig.) For this animation I had to change the weight as I was moving along, and sometimes I had to go back and fix the earlier part of the animation. Also the movement of his bow and the arrow took me some time. It’s about 9 seconds and roughly took me 10 hours of work. Here is the result:

Robin’s Attack from SeemVision on Vimeo.

Hours: 9.5 hours Percentage: 100%
Website:

As I stated last week, I had to change the page.tpl.php file for  our theme to a more standard format, and just as I expected it didn’t take that much time, about 1 hour. Second, our navigation needed some improvement in the css. Drupal comes with lots of default css files known as system.css files, and they set the style for its complex menu system. That means they override my css file, and add extra padding to the style.css. Drupal menu system has lots of list elements nested inside of each other. You can simply run the firebug on Firefox and you will know what I mean. M job was to hunt those styles and reset them. This took me 3 hours to find those styles for the menus that were causing the extra padding and default styles.  This piece of code that I added to our CSS resets all the default styles in Drupal:

ul.menu {
list-style: none;
border: none;
text-align:left;
}
ul.menu li {
margin: 0 0 0 0em;
}
li.expanded {
list-style-type: circle;
list-style-image: url(../../misc/menu-expanded.png);
padding: 0em 0em 0 0;
margin: 0;
}
li.collapsed {
list-style-type: disc;
list-style-image: url(../../misc/menu-collapsed.png);
padding: 0em 0em 0 0;
margin: 0;
}
li.leaf {
list-style-type: square;
list-style-image: url(../../misc/menu-leaf.png);
padding: 0em 0em 0 0;
margin: 0;
}
li a.active {
color: #000;
}
td.menu-disabled {
background: #ccc;
}
ul.links {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
ul.links.inline {
display: inline;
}
ul.links li {
display: inline;
list-style-type: none;
padding: 0 0em;
}
.block ul {
margin: 0;
padding: 0 0 0em 0em;
}

and the result:

And lastly, I was planing to write a Javascript in order to add accordion effect to the menu. Before that I tried two modules that I mentioned last week, but they both failed, and that’s why I had to wrote my own jQuery script. My first attempt was to first hide the expanded items inside the UL parent initially, and then add a function to make them visible when the user hover over them, and add another function to hide them when the mouse is over, after spending some time I came up with the following:

if(Drupal.jsEnabled) {
$(document).ready(function() {

$(‘#block-menu-menu-characters-list ul.menu li.expanded ul.menu’) .hide();

$(‘#block-menu-menu-characters-list ul.menu li.expanded’) .hover(function () {
$(‘#block-menu-menu-characters-list ul.menu li.expanded ul.menu’) .show(’slow’);
}, function() {
$(‘#block-menu-menu-characters-list ul.menu li.expanded ul.menu’) .hide(’slow’);
});

})

}

However, this didn’t work, and every time I hover over the navs they keep expanding and collapsing, Then I did some research on jQuery website in their useful Event page, and after some attempts I came up with the following:

if(Drupal.jsEnabled) {
$(document).ready(function(){
$(‘#block-menu-menu-characters-list ul.menu li.expanded .menu’) .hide();
$(‘#block-menu-menu-characters-list ul.menu li.expanded’).click(function() {
$(‘#block-menu-menu-characters-list ul.menu li.expanded .menu’) .toggle(’slow’);
return false;
},function() {
$(‘#block-menu-menu-characters-list ul.menu li.expanded .menu’) .hide(’slow’);
});
});
}

This one actually works, but the problem is when you click on the first character in the list, they all expand! you can try it here. The problem is all the UL and LI elements in the nav has the class name if you have noticed in my code, and the effect applies to all of them. I am not a Javascript person, and maybe I should approach this with  a different method. I will try to set up an appointment with Jervis and ask him about it. Another solution is to add custom class to each UL, which I don’t know how to do it in Drupal. I already tried this method and it didn’t work, and I also tried this module for custom classes, and yet no luck. I spent about 4 hours trying all the above. So I will try to meet with Jervis to get some advise, or spend some times to find a way to add custom classes. I know it’s doable, I just need some times to do some research. Unfortunately, the 3D part of this project took most of my time last two weeks, and I couldn’t really focus on this. Hopefully this week we will start rendering and then I can focus only on the site, just too much things going on.

Hours: 8.5 Percentages: 80% (The script is not fully functioning)

Goals for next week:

As I mentioned we will start rendering (Wednesday night,) and we need some preparation for our scenes, so I guess I have to spend some times for that, and then I can start working on the sites. My goals for the sites are to get the accordion effect to work properly, and then start working on the Content Construction Kit in order to add custom galleries for each character. I think this requires around 10 hours by itself.

I was pretty happy with this week’s work. I started by finishing the animations for Tiny Tim’s character. All his animations are finished as of now.

Tiny Tim casting spell

Tiny Tim arrival

Time: 7 hrs

Complete: 100%

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.

snowburst test

spell playblast

icicle for Tim's snow attack

Time: 12 hrs

Complete: 100%

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%

This week I have been working on more animation loops for King Arthur and the book toss in animation. Below you will find a sample playblast from King Arthur’s attack which is still a work in progress. I have also included a playblast of King Arthur’s damage loop. I have also included a playblast of the book, more on that later though.

King Arthur Damage from Michael Ambrozaitis on Vimeo.

King Arthur Attack WIP from Michael Ambrozaitis on Vimeo.

Book Toss In and Refined Pages from Michael Ambrozaitis on Vimeo.

So the book, lots to say about the book. The first being that after watching this you should disregard most of it. There have been some integration issues cropping up and though I’ve been working to fix them I think it is time to bite the bullet and attack this from a different angle. Which of course will have me redoing the toss in. I should be able to salvage the book opening animation. Which is where you should direct your attention in this video. The pages have been redone. The new toss in animation Will be slightly different from the current one. The angle the book comes from and the angle at which it lands will be changed. I also plan to speed up the throw itself.

This week I worked about 20 hours. Regrettably about four of that went to trying to fix the integration today issues today. As you can see I do not have anything up for King Arthur’s intro animation, mostly due to my issues with the book. For this week I would say I accomplished about 85% of what I wanted to.

In the comping week I plan on finishing up King Arthur’s Attack and Intro. I also plan on tweaking King Arthur’s other animations and working on finalizing the book.

As promised, here are the tripod animations.

Arrive:

Hours spent: 2 hours

http://vimeo.com/10856993

Idle:

http://vimeo.com/10857113

Attack:

http://vimeo.com/10858007

Defend:

http://vimeo.com/10856986

Defeat:

Hours spent: 6 hours

http://vimeo.com/10856975

Total % completed vs. what was proposed for this week: 90%. I think I could have spent some more time on programming, but a lot of outside factors have inhibited this week.

As far as programming is concerned, there is added functionality for the Attack button. It now verifies that the correct maneuver cards have been activated for the character. Below are two videos showing this working. First shows when correct maneuver cards have not been activated for character and second shows when correct maneuver cards have been activated for character.

Hours programming: 6 hours

http://vimeo.com/10856630

http://vimeo.com/10856933

Next week, granting I am still in senior project, will consist of rendering everything for Tripod. Programming wise, defend and assign maneuver buttons will be implemented and working and maneuver cards will be scanned in as glyphs.

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 )