This week I wound up focusing most of my time on 3D rather than coding. I finished the background library renders for 4 out of the 5 spell effects as well as 4 of the 5 actual spells. Since the Personification card acts as a marker that protects the player and takes damage for them, I need to figure out if it should be adjusted in the library scene so that it sits in one of the character slots as opposed to the center of the library. Once we figure out the best location I should be able to render this rather quickly since it doesn’t move, only light moves around it. It is highly reflective, but all of my other spells that use reflections have had decent render times thus far.

I tried to composite my effects with the library background, but was getting some errors. I think it’s because I use Nuke 5.2v3 at home instead of the newer one on campus, but regardless I should be able to get everything together when we have our Wednesday night (semi) all nighter.

Here are the library renders:
Graveyard Daemon

Frankenstein’s Lightning

Time Shift

Deus Ex Machina

Here is the complete Graveyard Daemon spells effect since I got the rest of the frames rendered.

This is the Frankenstein’s lightning effect. I changed it a bit so that I wouldn’t have to use a moving camera, now the smaller bolts of lightning hit the top of the orb and the stronger electric shock happens afterwards. There is some strange bleed through of the lightning happening at the bottom, but I can probably mask this out in Nuke if it’s distracting.

Here is the Deus Ex Machina spell effect. The effect of the card is that it returns the selected creature card to the respective owner’s hand. It’s supposed to “wipe away” the character it effects, but since we don’t have any of the spell effects actually interacting with the characters this happens in the middle of the library.

I spent 17.5 hours working this week and accomplished about 80% of my goal. I did want to get more coding done, but I made considerable progress with my renders and will be wrapping all of that up shortly.

For next week I want to render my last spell effect and composite all of them in Nuke so they’re placed in the actually library, then I want to jump back into coding and focus the rest of my time on that. We need to figure out how the PDF viewer is going to work in the end. Right now I have the menu opening up another window that shows the PDF that was converted into an SWF. I don’t know if it’s really feasible to somehow parse all of these books into the game the way Lauren’s menu currently shows. There are a few other technical decisions that need to be made, but it’s all coming together as we delve more into how everything will actually fit in the end.

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.

Total: 19.5 hrs

Week Four.

It seems like things are starting to come together. Renders are being completed and we are moving to compositing. Below I will show you the newest book playblast and a playblast of King Arthur’s arrival animation. This week I also worked on tweaking King Arthur’s card art which you will see below as well as his revised quiz. I have also worked on more rendering this week, samples below as well.

Here is the newest book animation. We have changed the dynamic simulation to something more pleasing to watch. I have also increased the speed at which the book enters the scene.

Final Book Animation from Michael Ambrozaitis on Vimeo.

We feel the book landing on the spine and falling over is much more interesting to watch than the original spinning toss.

Below is a sample of King Arthur’s Arrival. In the Gantt chart I have planned another week for this. In reality it will be done within the next day or two.

King Arthur Arrival from Michael Ambrozaitis on Vimeo.

The following images are sample renders.

This is the revised version of Arthur’s card art.

And lastly are Arthur’s quiz questions.

1 Who cares for Arthur when he is born?

A. Merlin
B. King Uther Pendragon
C. Sir Ector
D. Druids

Answer: C. This establishes Arthur’s childhood for the reader, allowing Malory to skip most of the mundane details a move on to the important parts of Arthur’s adolescent years.

2 Why did Arthur first remove the sword from the stone?

A. To give to Sir Ector’s son Sir Kay
B. To become King of all Britain
C. To steal it
D. To use it as a weapon

Answer: A. This gives the reader insight into Arthur’s respect for his “older brother” and his want to help others. Later we will see Arthur become a benevolent leader loved by all.

3 How many times did Arthur remove the sword from the stone?

A. 1 time
B. 3 times
C. 6 times
D. 8 times

Answer: C. This might have been an attempt at humor on Malory’s part. It does however illustrate his point that Arthur is the true King of all Britain very well.

4 Arthur’s first battle at Caerleon was against who?

A. The Duke of Tinagil
B. Merlin
C. Sir Badouin
D. The Six Kings

Answer: D. This will show us Arthur’s true character in battle and illustrate why he is so successful. This is the first true test of his abilities and power.

5 When does Arthur meet Gwynevere?

A. After the Battle of Gaul
B. After the Siege of Wandesborow
C. After the Battle of Bedgrayne
D. After the Battle of Camylarde

Answer: D. This will be one event that becomes a major centerpiece of the Arthur saga. This also illustrates the power of the King to take what he wants, much like his father before him.

This week I plan on finishing all my rendering and beginning the process of compositing all the renders. I also will begin the process of getting our cards printed. I plan on setting up a meeting with Ted to discuss the and get me head around his suggestion for prototyping cards. I will also start working on our announcer audio clips.

Week 4 was a very successful week for me despite all the problems that I have due to my accident. I’m going to keep this post short and go directly into breakdowns:

3d Stuff

My goal for this week was to finish the damage animation, and also finish up all the renderings. Both tasks are done, and in addition to the damage animation, I rendered all my 3 animations and their shadow passes (except the arrival which I need to double check with group before rendering.) Below is the render of my last animation, and PLEASE pardon the arrow falling out of nowhere That was a mistake and I need to mask that out.

Damage Animation from SeemVision on Vimeo.

And this is my attack animation with the fire effect:

Attack Animation from SeemVision on Vimeo.

They are all ready for composting, and each animation will take few minutes to render in the nuke file that Ben provided us. Apparently I have a problem with the quality of the shadow passes, and as you can see in the screenshot below, Nuke render the shadows with very low quality. The problem could be the version of Nuke that I am using or one of the settings for shadow passes, because when I open up any of the shadow files in Photoshop, the quality is very good. I am going to test it on Monday at school, and see what the problem is. Once I figured this out, then it is just a matter of few minutes to composite all the animations.

And this a screen shot of the quality of the shadow passes in Photoshop:

As for the arrival animation, I set up the file, and I am going to render it Tuesday after I make sure that I have everything set up correctly with the team.

Hours: 7  Percentage: 95%

Website

My goal for the website was to work on the image cycle gallery for the home page, and if I get extra time work on the Quick Facts callous. I have accomplished even more than that. First of all I changed the frames for the images in the cycle image gallery, as well as the small thumbnails so they match the interface of the game. For the cycle gallery, Instead of dealing with the blocks and custom field, I just decided to use HTML, and add them all  into the home page as list items, and then I loaded a plugin for jQuery called Cycle into the Drupal, Then with the few codes that I wrote before for the template of the site, I re-created the image gallery in Drupal site. For the Quick Facts callout, I had to use a different approach. If you look at the markup of that piece with FireBug, you can see that each Fact is a div with a P tag inside it, and all the graphics (the borders) are the background property of the P tag. This way the border expand with the text. What I did was, I created a block, and in the settings of that block I set a list of the pages that I want this block to be shown. For instance, on any of the character pages, you don’t see this block. Then I added a custom field that will allow us to add our text to the markup of this callout as Paragraph tags. Pretty straight forward, but it took me few hours to figure out how to set it up.

The next thing that I did was, I used a font generator in order to add the font that we are using for the game interface to the site, and now we are able to use that file with CSS, and any computer will be able to render this font with Javascript. I think IE6 does not support this method, but all the IE 6 users need to be punished for using this awful browser. So, no fancy font for them! Now the question is, does that font work for the site? Honestly, I think it does not work for the navigation and readability is an issue here, but for the heading tags it seems fine. This is my personal opinion, and we can discuss this in the group meeting on Tuesday.

Then I added some style to our gallery page. As you can see in the screenshot below, the original CSS for the gallery was pretty simple and it was inheriting its style from a CSS files that came with the module that I used for the image gallery. This was pretty easy, but time consuming, and I had to hunt all the properties and override  all the default CSS in my own CSS files.

And here is the link to the gallery with placeholder images: http://lexiconquest.com/image

Lastly, I worked on a profile page for all of us on the website. This website is a place to present our self to the potential employers, so I thought we definitely need a profile page for each member on About us page. As you can see on this page, I added the name of the team members in alphabetic order, with their positions in the project. When you click on each name, it will take you to the profile page for that person (Currently only I added my info): http://lexiconquest.com/user/1

After doing some research, I added a module called Profile, and this module allows us to add custom fields such as single line text field, multiple line text field, radio buttons, URL, etc. For each user I created a Personal Information block, and inside that I added, name, Website and Twitter. I am going to add a text field so we can add few lines as our biography.

If you recall from my last week post, I had to change the CSS for the navigation and other parts since I changed the class names with Javascript. Those are all done, and I added few more CSS, and the template of the site is almost done.

Hours: 15 Percentage: 100%

Total Hours: 22 Total Percentage: 95%

Goals for next week

I am pretty much done with the 3d stuff, except the arrival animation that I am going to render this week. For the website, I will work on the Sample quizzes page, and finish that up, and do the browser testing in IE 6+, FireFox 3+ and Safari 3+. This alone can take so much time trying to address the issues on each browser. If I get extra time I will work on the contact page. As for now, I have no idea how I can accomplish a contact form in Drupal and I need some research on that as well.

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.

3D Stuff:

Rendering completed for all animations. Some test renders are below. Final compositions will be completed in the coming days in Nuke.

Defend: http://vimeo.com/11221647

Attack: http://vimeo.com/11221599

Defeat: http://vimeo.com/11221603

Idle: http://vimeo.com/11221615

Time: 15 hours

Programming:

Defend implemented and working with HP from arrays: http://vimeo.com/11221114

Overview of code which will be helpful for people that will be coding in the near future: http://vimeo.com/11221378

Time: 4 hours

Total hours: 19 hours % completed based on assigned from last week: 95%

Next week will be spent making all the artwork for the glyphs to be printed on the cards. I will also be implementing the one button to rule them all system for the game. This will be a single button that will control Attack, Defend, Assign Position, and Assign Maneuver. This will be done to simplify the interface both on screen and on the physical game device. This is possible since no two events can occur at the same time ( ex. you can only defend if attacked, can only assign maneuver if maneuver card has been scanned, can only assign position if character card has been scanned in).