This week I focused on getting the quiz game for the literature working, as well as rendering out my final spell effect (personification).

Menu with Quiz
I’m having a strange issue where for some reason I can’t remove the score text from the screen after the quiz is over, yet I’m able to remove everything else. I plan on fixing this as well as updating ALL of the menu formatting once I get the final PSD files of the menus. At least we now have a working quiz that imports the questions from an easily formatted XML file. It also randomizes the layout of the different answers each time you take the quiz so you can’t memorize their locations. The flash game creation class came in handy with this!

The personification spell effect acts as a marker that stands in one of the blank character spots. It absorbs damage, but cannot attack. Currently my animation for this loops seamlessly – the card rotates inside its protective bubble and a small ball of energy rotates around this. Upon destruction the personification spell effect fades out (which will be accomplished in Nuke).

uploading again due to vimeo issues

I’m still working on compositing my other spells effects in Nuke since most of them require changes in post. My orbs in Deus Ex Machina will glow/leave a trail – I’m rendering out additional layers of flames for Graveyard Daemon – and I’m re-rendering Frankenstein’s Lightning so that the orb is more dynamic/shakes when it’s hit with the initial lightning strikes.

Here is the composite of Time Shift. I darkened the background (this will be happening with all of the spell effects).

Vimeo is having some problems, so just in case here is my 2nd attempt to upload this video.

This week I worked 16.5 hours and accomplished 90% of what I wanted to work on. I would have liked to have spent more time fixing my other spell effects in post, but at least everything is rendered out now.

For next week I’ll be tracking down final assets (menu artwork, quiz questions, etc) and working them into the UI. I also plan to composite at least 3 of my 5 spell effects – of course I’ll try to do all 5 if time permits.

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.

————————————————————-

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?

1. It catches fire
2. It transforms into images of Jacob Marley’s face
3. It opens to reveal the Ghost of Christmas Past
4. 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?

1. She died young; her son Jacob is Scrooge’s only nephew.
2. She has cut off communication with the adult Scrooge; she has no son.
3. She died young; she has no son.
4. 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?

1. Scrooge’s other sister
2. Scrooge’s estranged love
3. Scrooge’s mother
4. Tiny Tim’s mother

-          Answer: B.
4. Which character has a key role in Scrooge’s reform?

1. Tiny Tim
2. Bob Cratchit
3. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
4. 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?

1. “Bah! Humbug!”
2. “God bless us, every one!”
3. “Merry Christmas!”
4. “Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine”

-          Answer: B.

————————————————————————

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.

Alright, interesting week. Kind of. Sort of. Not really at all actually. There was one event of note, the announcer audio files are gone. That was a little bit of a setback this week. I have contacted the talent we used for the first recording and I am able to get him again this Tuesday to re-record. I put some hours into finishing King Arthur’s arrival animation and I also started compositing his idle animation. The rest of the week I spent preparing to all my files for rendering or re-rendering. I started rendering Thursday night and have been all weekend since. The Library pass for King Arthur’s arrival animation is still running as of now. Based on the last time I checked the render time per frame the Library pass should be done around 9:30AM tomorrow. I also would like to re-render two of the shadow passes that I have done. All rendering should be complete by days end tomorrow

Below I have attached some samples of the renders that have been completed.

This is a sample of King Arthur’s Idle (Character Pass)

King Arthur’s attack (Character pass)

King Arthur’s Damage (Character pass)

King Arthur’s Defeat (Character pass)

King Arthur Idle (Shadow pass)

Okay so this week I put about 13 hours into King Arthur’s Arrival animation to finish that up. About 2 hours into compositing his idle and another 4 or 5 hours getting all 15 render passes set up, talk about tedious. Other than that the rest of my week was spent searching for disappearing audio files and rendering. In all I spend about 20 hours this week working on things and many many more rendering. I would say I accomplished 90% percent of what I wanted to get done. I know I did no work on audio but the main focus for the week was rendering and I got a little bit of head start on compositing. Next week I am pushing to finish or almost finish compositing and I want to finish up the announcer voices as well as ordering the cards.

Til next time.

A good majority of this week was spent on programming. Below are two videos demoing what was done programming wise. The first shows all the character glyph artwork I did working in the game and being detected properly. This was a much greater pain than I originally thought it would be. It took a whole heck of a lot of tweaking values in the glyph detection as well as the actual .pat files that FLARTools compares against when detecting if a glyph is present on screen. I also had to tweak the image files a lot to make them each uniquely identifiable from one another. A lot of this hassle could have been remedied by using blocky geometric shapes for the glyph images but these nice looking icons should look miles better on the physical cards as I feel each glyph represents it’s respective character.

http://vimeo.com/11411710

The second video is a demo of the new one button idea I came up with. This was done primarily for simplification of the finger touch tracking. By using one button we should greatly reduce the possibility of mis-pressing multiple buttons from the touch interface.

http://vimeo.com/11412236

Time Spent on Coding: 7 hours

Here is all the glyph artwork for the characters:

Billy Pilgrim

Tripod

Tiny Tim

Tin Man

Robin Hood

King Arthur

Time Spent on Artwork Including Tweaking: 6 hours

Aside from the digital stuff I also went to our shop to work on the fiberglass box. The guy that is doing it for me needed some help sanding it down while he is working on a car fiberglassing project. I spent a good amount of time sanding down the original layers of fiberglass and he helped me put on a final finer fiber glass cloth layer. The only step left is the body filler and then paint. He kind of fell behind on our anticipated completion date of this week due to another project he is getting paid to work on. It will be completed this week with our own matched dark red color. Below are some pictures of it post sanding but before the final layer of fiberglass was installed.

Time spent on fiberglass box: 4 hours

Total Time: 17 hours @ 95%

Next Week:

Animations integrated into game.

Fiberglass box completion.

Integration of electronics into fiberglass box.

Week five was another busy, and successful week for me. As promised on my previous post, I finished all the renderings, and worked on the websites. Let’s get into details:

3D stuff:

First of all I had to finish the arrival animation, and to do that I had to combine the book animation that Mike worked on, with the particles effect from Ben and my animation. It took few hours to set up everything. I finished rendering all the animations, shadow passes and the camera movements. Also there were few problems with  some of the other animations that I rendered last week, and I had to re-render few frames for each. I am done with all the animations, shadow passes and compositing each animation. Below are my final animations:

Robin Arrival from SeemVision on Vimeo.

Robin Attack from SeemVision on Vimeo.

Robin Damage from SeemVision on Vimeo.

Robin Defeat from SeemVision on Vimeo.

Hours: 9 Percentage: 100%

Website

I tweaked our theme a little bit and added a frame that matches our game’s interface to the main container of the website, a quick design, and a quick change to the CSS, and you can see the change in our website: http://www.lexiconquest.com

Then, I worked on the sample quizzes page, and again, the plugin that I used for the template last term didn’t work in Drupal! (due to the version incompatibility of jQuery that comes with Drupal 6.x)  With the knowledge that I gained from making the accordion effect, I quickly wrote this jQuery script for the sample quizzes page

$(document).ready(function(){

$(“.accordion dd”).css ({
“display”: “none”
});

$(“.accordion dt”).hover (
function () {
$(this).addClass(“hover”);
document.body.style.cursor=”pointer”;
},
function () {
$(this).removeClass(“hover”);
document.body.style.cursor=”auto”;
});

$(“.accordion dt”).click (function () {
$(“.accordion dd”).slideUp(“fast”);
$(“.accordion dt”).removeClass(“active”);

if ($(this).next().is(“:hidden”)) {
$(this).addClass(“active”).siblings(“dt”).removeClass(“active”);
$(this).next().slideDown(“fast”);
} else {
$(this).next().slideUp(“fast”);
$(this).removeClass(“active”);
}
});

});

Here is how it works. When the pages loads the scripts hides all the dd tags that contain the answers by setting the display attribute to none. Then it adds a class “hover” to the dt tag (question) that the user hover over. Finally the rest of the script adds the slideDown, and slideUp effects (which are jQuery APIs) to each dd tag that has the class “hover,” and hide whatever that is open. Also, I added the “hand pointer” as a cursor style using one of the jQuery’s  API, so the dd tags look like links. Simple! and you can review it at this location.

After that I spent half an hour to add the remaining galleries for the characters. Last week we have only two, and now we have all the galleries and they are ready to upload images.

Finally, I spent a lot of time browsers testing that I hate the most! Since I don’t own a PC (and no parallels), and the computers in the lab don’t have IE 6 and 7 installed on them, I had to use Adobe Browser Lab. Unfortunately over the last week, the Adobe team was upgrading the system to their new CS5 browser testing system, and the service was down till Friday. (and sad news, they offer the free service for one more year from now ) The other problem was that the conditional statements for IE provided by Microsoft do not work with Drupal! First I tried to add the conditional statement for IE6 and 7 to the page.tpl.php, but that didn’t work. I spent some time to get it to work, but after doing some research I found that there’s a module that does the job nice and easy, and with this module I was able to target any version of IE that I want. Now we have two different CSS files for IE6 and older, and IE 7.

Here is how the site looked like in IE6 :

As you can see IE6 does not support transparency, and I had to use IE PNG FIX that I always use for any website, but here’s how it works in Drupal:

For some reason, the script is not able to locate the blank.gif file (this file is necessary in order to fake the transparency), and as a result, some of the PNG images do not show up. Again, I tried different modules, and finally I found a module called PNG Behave, that works perfectly. Lastly, as you can see in the first screenshot, the primary navigation buttons were broken i E6, IE7 and Safari 3 (windows version,) and the reason for that was, in order to line them up perfectly I had to use “display: inline;” on the li tags, and this attribute cancel out “display:block;” for for the a tags inside the li tags. For IE 6 and 7 I could just over write the CSS, but for Safari there is no way to target that specific browser (or maybe there’s a way?) It took me a few hours to come up with another approach. The solution was to change the structure of the primary nav in the main CSS, and instead of using inline attribute, I used “float: left” for the li tags in order to line them up in one line. Finally I fixed the problem with the banner background picture (the books in the header above the nave) in IE6, and the site looks the same in most of the major browsers as follow:

IE6+, Safari 3+, FF 2+ and Google Chrome

Hours: 8.5 Percentage: 95%

Total Hours: 17.5 Total Percentage: 97%

Goal for next week:

I am pretty much done with the animations, but just to be on the safe side, I will reserve some few hours in my schedule for any potential improvements in the animations. I will also spend the entire next week to finish up the final touches on the site, the Library section (which still I have no idea what we’re going to do with that section) and finally will write the content for Robin’s profile page.

UPDATE: We have a near-finished version of the Battle Theme done as well, courtesy of fellow Drexel student Shaun Cerborino:

LexiQuestRough2

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%

Update: I don’t know how I forgot about this, but I worked on Billy’s Arrival animation, which is the last animation that needs to be done for him. I’m not including this in hour totals because I’m a bone head and forgot about it, but he’s took about 5 hours or so. Here it is:

This week was awful.

Oh, wait, no it wasn’t. But it was Week 5, which is fairly alarming regardless of how well you’re doing. But I think we’re in an ok spot, actually.
Much of this week was spent on compositing Tin Woodsman, looking at the final movies, tweaking in Nuke, and re-rendering various bits as as needed.

Tin Woodsman

I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been staring at them for too long, I’m too hard on myself, they’re actually mediocre, or some combination of all the above, but I don’t love the Tin Woodsman Renders. I think the character himself looks great and I’m pleased with how his design and appearance ended up, so I feel accomplished for that. But if I had more time (a common wish, I’m sure), I would love to go redo some of his animation. Its funny how even playblasting the hell out of things doesn’t completely tell the story.

If I want to put a positive spin on it (and for the sake of my sanity I’ll go ahead and give it a shot), I’ve never been a great animator and I believe I’ve made great strides in terms of improvement in skill, and that does seem to come through in the final renders. Still, I can’t dwell on it; I’m moving onto Billy’s renders next week (more on that in a bit) and calling it a Project for Tin Woodsman…for the most part, anyway.

Well I hope I didn’t put too sour a taste in mouth before you even got to seen them, but here’s the final animations for Tin Woodsman, sans perhaps a bit more Nuke work:

Damage

Attack

Arrival

Final Tin Woodsman Preparation: Aprrox 15 hours

Billy Pilgrim

Billy was a bit more tricky this week. I spent some time setting up the passes that I did for Tin Woodsman, which wasn’t a huge endeavor now that I was fairly confident with what I was doing. The main problem is, of course, Shave. I arranged for a meeting with Chris, Lauren and myself to go over some of the rendering issues we were facing (ie, it wouldn’t render without crashing). After a few back and forth emails, we seem to have at least part of the problem ironed out, and hopefully Billy rendering can begin with more success this week.

Billy Problem Solving and Prep: 5 hours

Total: Approximately 20 hours, and I’ll give myself a hearty 93% in terms of success.

We have one more big group meeting coming next Wednesday in which we hope to nail out some final details and compare renders for consistency as we move toward implementing the movies in the Flash game skeleton. Stay tuned.

Ben