This week I primarily focused on fixing my spell effect animations. Some of them required complete re-rendering so it was a bit time consuming. No More Vimeo this week!!! I thought you would be relieved:

Adding glow & motion blur to the Deus Ex Machina effect
Deus Ex Machina

Adding additional flame layers to the ring around Graveyard Daemon. I’m still waiting on the last portion of these frames to render, but this is generally what it will look like. The additional flames are comped in through frame 92 (of 180). You’ll notice that that layer of flames stops moving after frame 92.
Graveyard Daemon

Adding more tendrils of lightning and shaking the sphere that conducts the electricity in Frankenstein’s Lightning
Frankenstein’s Lightning

Fortunately Ben was able to help me out with my spell card art and I really love the changes he made. They are no longer exactly dependent on my renders, but still get the point across. I’m very excited for the physical cards.

In regards to the comments you made last week about the Time Shift spell effect – the card art does match the render. We used an actual rendered frame for that image. The cards flying around have always been in a bit of a circular stream, it just takes a few moments for them to complete the loop and completely surround the time machine.

I’m still receiving quiz questions and finalized artwork for the UI, but I anticipate having this completed on time, especially now since the spells are nearing completion.

This week I worked about 14.5 hours and completed 90% of my goal. Timeshift is finished as long as the group agrees it looks fine. Graveyard Daemon, Deus Ex Machina, and Frankenstein’s Lightning were cleaned up this week and are finished pending approval. I am just going to work on fixing the lighting in Personification so that the logo is more easily read for next week & spend the rest of my time coding and cleaning up the interface.

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 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.

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%

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.

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%

Rend-O-Rama one went well!

Ben- Finalizing scene for render, organizational steps for rendering, Tin Woodsman Rendering, Attack UI

Jason- Tripod re-animation, Tripod rendering, Maneuver programming. — 21 hours 90% of goal

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).

This week I spent mostly all of my time working on getting my renders started for all of the spell effects. Unfortunately it took a bit longer to render than originally anticipated, but I was still able to complete most of the Graveyard Daemon effect and all of the Time Shift effect. When I tried to render Deus Ex Machina with a foggier shader on the orbs that wipe across the screen, it just didn’t look right, so I don’t have the final render for that yet. As for Personification and Frankenstein’s Lightning, I’m going to be completing them this week because they require reflections and I had enough issues trying to tweak Graveyard Daemon so it didn’t have 10 minute renders per frame.

Here is what I have so far of Graveyard Daemon (up to frame 66) the rest SHOULD be rendered in the labs and I will check when I’m on campus tomorrow (up to frame 180).

I was also able to render out all of the Time Shift spell effect since those frames didn’t take nearly as long

Also, in case you didn’t see it from earlier this week, here is a link to the corrected main game menus. Once I get the finalized artwork from Lauren broken into the proper layers I’ll layout a more finalized design.
Menu

This week I worked 16.5 hours (most of it in the labs prepping for renders during our render party). I accomplished about 75% of what I wanted to finish since I did manage to render these and my other scenes are nearly set up and ready to go for this week. The rest of my time was spent tweaking the game menu functionality earlier this week.

For next week I’d like to finish the rest of my renders and begin compositing them together with the library background. Again, I’d like to spend some more time on coding but it depends on how the renders go because I know that is high priority for us right now.

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

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%