Another week of nose-to-the-grindstone progress! The characters continue to come along, with many making their way to either 1. rigging 2. the artsy people for their consistency passing. The breakdown is as follows:

Ben- Tin Man has been completed as is being passed to Mike for rigging. That leaves a touch up of King Arthur and the rigging of Billy Pilgrim and Tralfalmadoran.
Hessam- Facial rigging of Robin hood, and texturing his face. I will pas the model to Lauren to add more details to his costume, and then I can continue texturing his body. Also I added some JavaScript library to the website for the functioning of navigation, and cleaned up the code.

Jason – Glyph tracking now working with multiple cards and identifies them each uniquely. Glyph tracking integrated with card placement code done by Tracy. Complete prototype complete and enough code finished for live demo Tuesday morning. Foam core sculpture started for fiberglass.

Mike – King Arthur’s costume is complete and will be reviewed by Ben for any changes. Texturing can then begin on the body and the head once they are reviewed. Have began rigging Tin Man, his rig is slightly more simple than the more fleshy characters due to his more mechanical joints and movement.

Lauren- The texturing and bump-mapping for Tiny Tim’s body and eyes was completed along with some additional modeling/texturing of his scarf and crutch. He is now ready to be rigged in the coming week.

Tracy – Finished card placement coding to work with Jason’s glyph tracking coding.  Also made further updates to the Deus Ex Machina effect so that it ignites a card rather than a torus.

This week was all about working on Tiny Tim for me. The first thing I did this week was export the displacement maps for the model so that I could use them as a texturing reference as well as a bump map for the lower-resolution model. At first I tried to use a typical displacement map, but the .map file is so huge that Maya continuously crashed before a proper render could be produced. Instead, I decided to just use a bump map; the screenshots below indicate that the bump is just as effective. I am considering exporting a normal map to get some of the small fabric details, but my main focus this week was painting the textures.

working bump map 1

working bump map 2

working bump map 3

I used my smaller laptop to export the displacement maps, ZBrush took about 1.5 hours to create the 50MB file- thankfully it worked the first time.

After that had finished, I brought the displacement and UV maps into Photoshop to begin the texturing process. The technique I used for most of the texturing was a combination of altering texture images, painting over them to create a custom look and painting several elements of the costume by hand. The textures for all the laces, grommets, and the skin were hand-painted. All other overlayed textures were from CGTextures.com. The process is 100% complete and took 10.5 hrs. The additional scarf modeling/unwrapping/texturing as well as painting the eyes took 2 hrs.

face texture

pants texture

boots texture

sweater texture

I also took the opportunity to retopologize Tim’s mitten and unwrap it in Headus UV layout. The process was obviously much quicker, but for some reason exporting the displacement map has been giving me some trouble. That will be tackled this week as well so I can lay down the texture for it. Total Time: 3 hrs

retopology for the mitten

The crutch from the artwork needed to be created too, so I put an hour aside to model that. This is his most important accessory as it is the only constant in the character across all versions I’ve seen of him.

crutch

This week I focused mainly on King Arthur’s armor. His armor is 90% percent done, I would say I spent about 20 hours on it. I have redone the boots and the thigh plates several times. I feel that I have not gotten the proper feel of the thigh plates based on Ben’s concept art I plan on putting some more work into them tonight and tomorrow to finish them up. I spent about 10 hours rigging Tin man as well this week, He still needs some more work but I think things should go a little quick as I brush up on my rigging knowledge. He is about 25% rigged. I expect to focus more attention on Tin Man once King Arthur is fully textured. On that note I have started working with Heddus.

UPDATE:

King Arthur’s armor is now 100% complete after another six or seven hours of playing around. I finally got the boots the way I like them, I changed the knee guards slightly and I have come up with thigh plates that are more true to Ben’s concept art.

Production has officially begun on the foam plug for the fiberglass case. The plug is made of a high density polyurethane foam that I have cut and glued together in 5 layers since the largest it comes in is 2 inch thick boards. After a lot of sanding and a ton of foam up my nose and basicly everywhere, I have the sculptures basic dimensions smooth and level on all sides. Two sides have the curving profile sanded out of them. The other two sides will be completed next week as well as the ‘pole’ for the glyph tracking camera which will be mounted prior to fiberglassing. The card tray probably will not be completed until around 2 weeks from now. Below you can see the materials I used and what is completed thus far.

The prototype box now has the added glyph camera attached to a piece of cardboard to simulate the location of the fiberglass pole. There are some squares on the touch glass drawn in with dry erase markers for testing purposes with the flash interface.

Time Spent on Playing Station Foam Core Mold : 6 hours (sanding is the worst mess ever) Playing Station Foam Core Mold Completion : 30%  Playing Station Prototype Completion: 100%

I also spent a good amount of time this week on the programming for the glyph tracking and it’s integration with the card location placement. I have made a lot of changes and additions to the code to set up multiple card tracking. We can now uniquely track  and identify multiple cards and pass their unique ID’s to the location management portion of the program only once which required a bit of rigging as glyph tracking was originally intended to update every frame the glyph is detected by the camera. Also, each card has an availability variable assigned to it. Once it is correctly tracked and location assigned the glyph tracking portion no longer scans each frame for the card. This should cut down on the resources the game will require and in theory should run faster as the game progresses and less cards become available.

We are ready for a proof of concept live demo for the meeting on Tuesday where we will demonstrate a card being tracked and identified using the glyph tracking camera and will be placed in one of four locations using the touch sensing camera.

Time Spent on Prototype Demo: 5 hours   Game Design Prototype Demo Completion: 100%

It has been another busy week shoveling snow, finishing up modeling, texturing, rigging and coding. The Robin Hood is going along pretty well, and I started rigging his head and adding blend shape over the past week. I also worked on texturing his head. Lastly, I spent some time on the website to make the CSS more organized for future reference, and installed jQuery for the template. The followings are specific breakdowns:

Rigging:

As I mentioned I started rigging Robin’s face. I also sculpted some basic expression for the blend shape. I still need to add more few shapes for the eyebrows and his eyes. I’m expecting to finish this procedure in two days, and then I can start rigging his body. Here is a snapshot of what I have so far:

And here’s a smile for testing:

Hours: 15 Percentage: 25% of rigging

At the same time I was working on UV mapping his head and making a texture for his skin. UV mapping took me some time since I don’t have enough experience, but it’s getting along pretty well. There are some minor adjustments need to be done, specially around his ears. Below are screenshots of the process:

Hours: 4 Percentage: 25% of texturing

Website

As for the website, I finished up the print.css which makes our website more printer friendly. You can kindly preview it here. I also cleaned up the CSS and it’s very well organized right now. Based on the standards that I mentioned last week, our CSS starts with the Meyer’s reset code, and then typography in EM unit followed by the grids, forms (if there’s any,) navigations, footer, and then page specifics. With this organization, it’s a lot easier in future to edit the CSS, and based on Meyer’s notes it loads and renders faster in most of the browsers.

Lastly I installed (or better say added) jQuery JavaScript Library to the template in order to get the accordion navigation done. As you know, jQuery comes with its main core, and millions of plugins written by developers. I spent some time to find the right plugin for the accordion effect, and I found a very good plugin called UI Accordion which is highly customizable and gives us great control over the navigation. I’m pretty sure there are many modules in drupal for different kind of navigations, but it’s always the best way to use or own. After making the theme for the site, I should be able to load this JavaScript to the header of the template and use it instead of other modules with limited functionality. You can test the navigation at:
www.LexiConQuest.com/template

Hours: 7 Percentage: 40% coding the template

My goal for next week is to fix the header. Right now if we have so many content so you have to scroll the page, you would see a black background underneath the header. That is because the paper texture is fixed and the brown bar is scrollable. I cannot simply set the position of the header to fixed because it will break the subnavigation on the header. I’ll spend some time trouble shooting this.

This week I primarily devoted my time to coding so that Jason and I can have a working demo/proof of concept in terms of technology and glyph placement.  I worked on a function that will receive a 4 digit glyph number (since that is what Jason’s program provides) and lets the user place the card in one of the 4 card locations available to them by clicking a button.  After a mouse click has occurred on one of the buttons the glyph number is shown on screen above that button, the event listeners are removed so that the user can’t select more than once location, and the glyph number is stored in a variable specific to that card location so we can always keep track of what card is where.

I also updated the Deus Ex Machina effect so that the fire surrounds a card instead of a random placeholder torus.

I had strep throat this week so it limited the amount of work I could get done, but I updated the gantt chart to reflect these changes.  I didn’t start work on a new card effect this week because of being sick, but since I spent more time than was expected working on coding, it all evens out.  I probably spent about 10 hours total working, with most of that on coding.  I finished 100% of my assigned task coding wise, and am probably around 85% done with Deus Ex Machina.

This week was largely about finishing up the texturing for my characters. This was done through a variety of means, including some fun new toys I got to play with, namely Mudbox and UV Layout. First up, Tin Man

Tin Man

Tin Man’s look was achieved through the use of several of Mental Ray’s architectural metal shaders, DGS and MIA. The nice aspect of these is how quickly you’re able to achieve some pretty metals, and how well they they reflect surroundings. Unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to utilize Real Time for our project, so obviously the canned renders aren’t going to observe how the character models will interact (ie, we’re not going to see Tripod reflected in Tin Man’s armor). Still, I thought it would be nice to reflect at least the environment, so, when the Library Battleground is finished being modeled, I’ll be able to stitch together a 360 shot to surround Tin Man when we do his final renders, which will allow for some nice visual quality that syncs him a little better with the environment.

The rest of Tin Man was textured through hand-painted maps (provided by UV Layout! Woo!) and painted in Photoshop.

Time: 10 Hours % Complete: Modeling: 100% Texturing: 100%

Next, Tin Man goes to Mike for rigging.

Billy Pilgrim

Billy Pilgrim has gotten the brunt of my attention this week, but mostly because of I’m using him for Character Animation II. The result (will be) a fully rigged face ready for pretty much any animation I need of it. Of course, this won’t be true of all the characters here so the use of facial animation in LexiConquest will probably kept on a more subtle scale as to maintain some consistency.

The procedural textures were tweaked and the rest of Billy, including Tralfamadoran, was done with Mudbox, where I painted directly onto the 3D model. It was a fun workflow. His hair still works fine, but these test renders were done from a computer without Shave license. I’ll update the post with them soon.

Time: 20 Hours % Complete: Modeling: 100% Texturing: 100%

I maintain rigging rights to Billy, so that will be my main focus for this week. Oh, and one final note: here’s the first quick pass of “Ben-ifying” Mike’s King Arthur Head Model. I’ll be working on that this week as well.