This week I continued to familiarize myself with the FLARToolkit and met with Jason on Monday night to go over a great tutorial as well as get some software installed.  He has the coding working for the glyph tracking now, so we are ahead of schedule there (since that was planned for next semester) so hopefully in the coming weeks we can start building out the actual gameplay coding.

I continued to work with the Deus Ex Machina effect in Maya – I changed the orientation of the path and worked with the shader and shape of the particles.  I plan on putting this into Nuke and working with it in there to add some extra trails behind the orbs.

I also started work on the Graveyard Daemon card effect, also in Maya.  I’ve never worked with fluid effects before so this was something completely new for me and took a good amount of time going through tutorials.  I have the flames mostly working now, but right now they’re originating on top of a ring like object.  Once I get the finalized effect card I am pretty sure I can make them erupt around a rendering of the card.

I apologize for the lack of images in my post.  I got snowed in out of town and away from my laptop, but once I get home tomorrow I’ll add some pictures into my PPJ.

It was a pretty productive week overall.  I think I’m 80% done with Deus Ex Machina, 75% done with Graveyard Daemon, and the coding is coming along. All together I think I spent around 15 hours working this week.  I also updated my portion of the gantt chart to reflect weeks going from Sunday to Sunday instead of from Tuesday to Tuesday in order to stop any future confusion.

*edit – here is an image of the engulfing flames for the Graveyard Daemon card.

Things are moving along on all fronts. We are all working on our pieces of the puzzle and we have began to sort out the logistics of how it will all be brought together. We have decided that as models are completed by their respective modelers they will be handed off to Ben or Lauren depending on who did the original concept sketches for final tweaks and  adjustments. We also have a final check set up for the Library, all Library related models will pass through Mike as he puts the scene together. Things have also been shuffled around to compensate for the new work flow, specifically Mike will now be rigging Tin Man while Ben tweaks the  King Arthur model.

BEN – Work has progressed with the character modeling. The modeling is very near total completion and the models are starting to be textured, with rigging to begin shortly after.

MIKE – Work continues with Library assets and the Library itself. King Arthur is getting the costume treatment.

HESSAM – Continue working on character modeling, and finishing up Robin Hood, which will shortly be passed to Lauren. Also refining the design for the website, and coding the template in XHTML and CSS.

JASON- Code for glyph tracking rewritten and is now ready for the prototype proof of concept demo. New version of the ‘box’ is modeled.

TRACY-Spent time with Jason checking out the glyph tracking code and doing some tutorials.  Also continued work on both the “Deus Ex Machina” and “Graveyard Daemon” card effects.

LAUREN- Finished topology on Tiny Tim, began Zbrush-to-Maya process, began design adjustments on mittens and tweaked the design of/fixed the consistency issues with the playing card fronts.

Thank you!

This week was pretty interesting as far as modeling goes, I completed retopologizing the Tiny Tim model, and tested its ability to be imported into Maya. After I had decided to use an actual hair system rather than the sculpted hair, I had to begin the retopo again on a bald version of Tim’s model. That took about 7hrs total.

Finished topology

The model imports fine, but one of the problems with models completed solely in ZBrush is that they don’t have UVs, and obviously I can’t texture or displace anything without them.

So I used a program called Headus UV Layout to take my model and map its geometry so I could work with the model outside ZBrush. It’s incredibly faster than Maya’s unwrapping tools- all I had to do was establish the symmetry and click where I wanted the UV’s to be cut- Headus’s pelting program did the rest. It read where the “cuts” were made and pretty much flattened everything. The program even showed where the UVs were too stretched or too squished.  The time spent on the ZBrush to Maya process was about 6 hours with some trial and error making up a bout 1.5 hours of that time.

Sections to be unwrapped layed out

Unwrapped UVs- done with Headus

I also took another look at the mitten and some images of mittens and decided that what it needed was a big fluffy ridge where the knitting had been started. I’m thinking about painting a custom knit texture for the mitten if I have time, but that will be when everything else’s finished. As I spent most of the time this week finishing the retopologizing and preparing the main part of the model for texture, the added features of the glove model will be refined when I move to retopologizing it for animation.

new mitten

new mitten bottom

Along with the modeling, Ben and I spent about 30 minutes getting the key colors of the card fronts to be consistent with the backs of the cards (color and design wise). I ended up changing the font to the Mael font of the “Lexi” in Lexiconquest and adjusting the shades of gold and red. The total time spent on fixing the card front designs (and experimenting with some new ones) was 3.5 hours.

New card front designs

The plan for this week was to keep working on the Library and King Arthur. Things have progressed. There are a couple more items added to the list of Library assets like floating shelves. I have spent another four or five hours on the Library and it is about 30-40% complete now. Below are several samples of the items going into the Library.

I am debating on the look of the main columns at the moment. We need to decide if we want them to be smooth and round or more square. Right now I am leaning towards the square ones.

The image above is a floating desk chair for the tables that will be throughout the library.

The doorway you have seen before I believe, there will be three in the final Library.

This is a hanging light fixture, there will be several that make up the main lighting system for the Library. There might be some smaller floating or sconce style lights added in as well.

I will also be taking over the Rigging of the Tin Woodsman once Ben is finished the texture, this switch is to compensate for Ben working on tweaking King Arthur.

Below is King Arthur’s body that is getting the costume treatment. The body only took about a half hour or so to beef up from the base Billy Pilgrim body, the body is 100% and the costume is set to be done this week.

Another busy week for me, and things are going along pretty well. This week I almost finished up my character, Robin Hood, and also worked on the website, even though the design is not complete yet. From my experiences at work, making a website is a work in progress. This allows tweaking the design as the template is being developed. Once we have the main structure of the site, the other elements such as imagery and typography can be changed at anytime with the power of CSS.

Modeling

As I said, I finished up my character by attaching the head to the body that Ben modeled for our male characters.  The main challenge was to add enough resolution so it matches to the head that I modeled last week, and keep all the faces as quads. The head of character had more resolution compare to the body, and I didn’t want to add edge loops all along the character, in order to keep it smooth. Here is the snapshot of the work:

I also added his boots, gloves, shirt, belt and some accessories. Below are screenshots of each:

Hour: 7 hours Percentage: 98% (modeling)

Website

Design:

Based on Ted’s comment last week, I tweaked the design of the site a bit, so it has more characteristic. Most of the elements on the design are still place holders, and we can improve those after we have the interface of the game to judge from. My huge concern about the design is the Typography. Right now I’m using Verdana font font for all the contents, headings, and navigations. I was doing some experiment to see whether or not we can use graphic text for our headings (with text behind them for WebText readers) and I found that it’s doable in Drupal. However I’m not too sure about the navigations, because those are being generated by Drupal, and I don’t know how we can add class to them so we can control them with CSS. But I’m pretty sure we can either find a way with more research or find a proper font that matches our game. Below is the screen shot of the template:

The rotating image gallery will change in sequence and will link to each character’s profile page. Ben and I will get together this week and work on a proper frame for it (and also for the buttons in side navs) that matches the design of the card and the game interface.

Hour: 2 hour Percentage: 95%

Coding:

I also spend some few hours developing this design with XHTML and CSS. The design is a bit challenging because we have two backgrounds. One is for the header and main nav (the black and brown bar going across the screen), and the other for the background (paper texture). The problem is we cannot add two pictures to the “body”. The solution is easy: to take the header div out of the “main” division that is inside the “container” div, and add a repeating background to it. But this is against the Meyer’s web standards and other UI’s standards. I was browsing the internet looking for other websites with the same structure, and I found out most of them used the same solution, so I think it’s alright to overlook some of these standards.  Long story to short: it validates!! and that’s all that matters. As for the CSS for the site, again I used Meyer’s reset CSS. that can be found at this location. This piece of code simply reset all the CSS sets by browsers by default (mostly Internet Explorer) and makes our life a lot easier trouble shooting IE issues.

I really wanted to proudly not support Internet Explorer 6 for our website, but unfortunately statistics show that there are still people using IE 6! As a result the website will have 4 CSS for different purposes. The first one is called main.css and is addressing intelligent browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Chrome. There will be two other CSS for IE 6 and IE 7 specifically. I will detect these two browsers with the following code:

[if IE]><link rel=”stylesheet” href=”css/ie.css?version=date” type=”text/css” media=”screen, projection”><![endif]
[if IE 7]><link rel=”stylesheet” href=”css/ie7.css?version=date” type=”text/css” media=”screen, projection”><![endif]

and lastly there will be another CSS named print.css that makes our website printer friendly. This CSS is also useful for any smart phone other than iPhone, Blackberry and HTC (these can render main.css perfectly).

The following link is the “work in progress” template development. Pardon my guidelines, and placeholders:

http://www.lexiconquest.com/template/

Hour: 8 hours Percentage: 25% (coding)

Long post! sorry

Most of my time this week was spent on the glyph tracking code. I started from scratch to rewrite the code based on some example I have found. It is now ready for the proof of concept. At this point it simply displays a message whenever a glyph is seen by the camera. In the end it will pass an ID number to the main game function. The way it is working is flash is importing the .pat files created from the patterns in 32 x 32 pixel files and basically scans each frame for something close to that image. It rates each scan with a confidence level. If the confidence level is above 50% (which can be changed) it executes a function. It works really well, even with small glyphs, I placed one in the top left area of the mock-up card and it recognized it with no problems. The only change I made was to add a white border around the black and white glyph. Unfortunately some of the cards do not have enough contrast in their images to be used a glyphs.

Time spent on Play Station: 9 hours % complete: 50%

A new, better model of the box has been completed for review. The glyph tracking camera has been moved to a pole so the camera is looking down onto the cards. This is done so the camera is not facing the light and the cards will have more contrast with the light coming down on them. This should increase the accuracy of the tracking.

Hours spent on Play Station: 3 hours % done: 50%

Business as usual. Well, mostly. As modeling nears completion (100% on Tin Woodsman, roughly 80% or so on Billy Pilgrim/Tralfamadoran), I have started moving toward texturing. But, still, character development as usual, and its going well. Here’s the specific breakdown:

Tin Woodsman

It’s hard to tell with just looking at the model but a few hours were dedicated this week to geometry clean up. The topology he is a bit smoother, lower poly, and without some of the usual nastiness that becomes apparent when a model nears completion. From there, it was a matter of beginning to texture the model. As you can  see, I didn’t make a tremendous amount of progress with this front, but any unwrapping that was done was done by hand, which can be a bit time consuming. Once its done, though, I go all out with the texture painting, which I tend to enjoy (just look at that glove!) It’ll be a bit speedier once we have the software installed. The other challenge here was getting re-familiar with Mental Ray’s dgs materials. I had some success when I used them back in Animation two for my “Robot Theater”, and figured they’d be appropriate again for Tin Woodsman. A bit more research is needed here to find a visual quality I want but it’ll be smooth sailing from there.

Hours: 8 Progress: Modeling: 100% Texturing: 20%

Billy Pilgrim

Billy Modeling is nearly done as well. The coat took up a large portion of my time and I’m pleased with the result. Attaching the head to the mesh went surprisingly well, though the Shave pipeline was set back a lil bit (as in, I’m going to start over, hence the lack of character that was present in last week’s images). But this will be quick to recover, so I’m not worried (though, something about him reminds me of Charlie Chaplin, but I think its the mustache-esque shadow.) The last thing to model is his shoes, and Billy Pilgrim will be fully modeled (once the Tralfamadoran makes an appearance– I didn’t actually do anything on him this week).

Texturing has also begun here, with the main focus on the facial skin, the coat, and the scarf. There’s a few UV clean-ups on the coat, but no worries. That leaves his hands, courdoroys and shoes, all to be finished within the realm of this week.

Hours: 15 Progress: Modeling: 90& Texturing: 75%

So, next week, finish modeling and begin rigging, in addition to some King Arthur clean up.