This week I focused on getting assets ready for our presentation to faculty in the two upcoming weeks. I also spent some time working on code for the demo version of the game, so that it will play a movie clip in the center of the stage when a card is placed. This is very rough at the moment and will make more sense once Jason and I map out what the entire game will look like.

I also worked on getting my current card effects not only into the library file, but also into Maya 2010 (from Maya 2008 – most things transferred well). I did have to do some resizing of some of my effects in the library file and this caused flames to not be potent enough, and other issues. Below are images of the Graveyard Daemon card plugged into the barebones library. The fluid effect emits from an invisible object below the card and I set it up so that the fluid collides with the card. I also gave in and used some flame paint effects to create the animated circle of fire around the card. This was less expensive than regular fluid fire and I found it still looked pretty decent. I originally did have some fluid fire there, but with the resizing it just seemed silly to keep this.

I spent a good amount of my time trying to finesse the Frankenstein’s lightning card into the library file. The tesla coil effect that Jason worked on doesn’t seem to want to import properly, but that could possibly be operator error. I’m going to check with him this week and see if he can help me import it. For the moment it’s just showing the base lightning strike that starts the rest of the chain reaction. This is toned down from the previous lightning I had (in terms of glow and thickness – so that it’s a bit more jagged and unpredictable) and Jason’s lightning is much smaller and very erratic.

I am still working on rerouting the particle effects for the Deux Ex Machina effect as the resizing made them look pretty bad. I may have to rebuild their curves from scratch, but it shouldn’t be too awful to replicate. I just wanted to focus this week on getting some nice renders for the presentation.

This week we have been working on finalizing the character development. All the characters moved or are moving into the animation phase. We have been working the presentation for the faculty and breaking down the production for next term. You will notice that our gantt chart for the remaining development period is becoming more defined.

MIKE – Tweaked King Arthur’s shoulder armor, finalized King Arthur’s textured, recorded the announcer V/O, worked on King Arthur’s rig. Next week I will begin animation on King Arthur and work on the announcer V/O in pro tools.

JASON – Completed sculpting of foam for fiberglass playing station. Improved upon existing cardboard prototype of playing station.

LAUREN – Started animating for Tiny Tim, also began putting together the look of the main menu and fixed the design of the main cards.

TRACY-Worked on some coding for the demo version of the game and reconfigured/rebuilt the existing card effects to be added into the library file.

Hours:

Total hours worked by the Biblionuts: 159.5

Hessam: 43 hours, 27%

Jason 27.5 hours, 17%

Ben: 25 hours, 15%

Lauren: 24 hours, 15%

Mike: 20 hours, 13%

Tracy: 20 hours, 13%

This week I began the animation process for Tiny Tim. His hair needed fixing, though, so I adjusted it so that it looked more like it was coming out from beneath his hat. I think some of the intersection might have caused Maya to crash, but I was able to finally get it looking better than before. There was also mention that the leg braces looked alittle strange, they are placed right under where his knees are, but I went back through the sketches I had, and in one there was a foot element to the brace.  That was quick to do, and I feel like they’re alittle more complete.

Hat Hair

New Leg Braces

I also did a test on what settings I needed to have Tim and his hair show up in a render. Eventually, I found that just having a useBackground dummy head under the hat and haircap let me render the two together and his body separate.

Time- 2.5 hrs

Complete- 100%

I had listed on the Gantt chart that I had planned to work on the “attack” and the “taking damage” animations- I realized as I sat down to do them that he couldn’t do either without a starting position and a a basic idle animation first, so I had to rearrange my chart a bit.

As far as the animation goes, I enjoyed my first attempt at character animation. It took a little longer than I thought, though. Setting up Tim’s start pose and animating his idle state took about 5 hours between animating, playblasting, etc. I’m 1hr into the process of creating a shorter, brisker idle animation for him after comparing the current one to the Tin Woodsman’s.

Idle Animation

The damage animation was…interesting, I was alittle apprehensive about animating a character getting hit when he already has a crutch and leg braces to deal with. I decided to make him alittle more agile than he would probably be realistically, given that he is a game character capable of dealing damage with magic pudding.

Taking Damage Animation

Time: 9.5 hrs

Complete: 90%

As far with the model -> sculpt -> unwrap ->uv workflow I had tried to use with the Robin Hood assets, I couldn’t figure out what had caused the history to disappear from the models. They are now all resculpted and mapped. (the setting I had issues with last time was the tangent-space setting for the normals) Here are some examples:

new glove

new shirt

new knife

Time: 5.5 hrs

Complete: 100%

I also worked on developing the interface design, particularly the load screen. I spent a good hour looking for some examples of game interfaces (particularly of the fantasy MMO genre) that I thought would be good inspiration. Here are a couple example links:

Example #1

Example#2

Example#3

And I’ve spent about 3hours testing out some looks for the load screen so far-

title screen (in progress)

Time: 5hrs

Complete: 50%

Since we’re moving into the area of getting renders for our completed cards, I found that I would need to shift around the design to accommodate the image size. That only took an hour, and here are the new layouts for the character card and the other device/lexicon cards. The info will be filled in accordingly.

new character card

new general card layout

Time: 1.5hr

Complete: 100%

Total time: 24 hrs

This week I focused on fine tuning King Arthur and rigging him. The rig is going well, that said I want a few more hours with it so I can get the weights right.  Below is a shot of King Arthur fully textured. I also spent some time this week recording our announcer. Again think Smash Brothers. Our announcer will introduce the game and characters. We need our announcer to sound super epic, so far so good. The voice still needs some work but I have a good base to start with, look forward to hearing samples in the coming weeks.

What a pink week it has been. Lots of sanding of foam has left me covered from head to toe. While I am holding off on the unveiling of the ‘pink box’ until the presentation on Tuesday for maximum effect you can see a revised 3D model of the playing station as well as renderings of what the glass will look like once screen printed. In the final version of the playing station the glyph tracking camera has been moved to the side. This is to help reduce the possible miss-identifications of cards already in play. I Think the curves of that support structure for the camera really flows much better than the previous design. Aside from sculpting the foam for the final playing station I also made some revisions and improvements to the cardboard working version that helps with the motion tracking portion of the project. After some better calibration both to the physical camera and the software calibration the touch input is working much better and is also no longer reversed. Everything is much more permanent in this cardboard version as everything has been caulked in place so it will not need to be re-calibrated once brought in on Tuesday.

Time Spent on Playing station: 25 hours

Aside from the play station work, I spent some time putting together a composited render of the tripod.

Time spent on tripod: 2.5 hours

Over the past week I spent all my time on the website, and developing the theme. A portion of the work is done in the core of the website and the database and there’s nothing to show except explaining the process. But before going into the details, I need to explain the work flow of a drupal website, and I do apologies if there was any confusion last week. However, if this is not necessary, and last week explanation was enough, you can skip this part of my post, and continue after the first heading.

First I need to explain why we are using a content management system with all its complexity and difficulties. We could simply build a HTML/CSS website in a very short period of time, but we needed all the team members to be able to add content to the site. But why Drupal? My answer is because it’s one of the most advanced and powerful CMSs out there, so powerful that whithouse.gov is powered by Drupal. Why not Wordpress? I love wordpress, and its usability, but I consider it as a blog web platform, and it’s great for blogging, managing posts and archives. They are basically two different thing. Drupal can be compared to the other CMSs such as Joomla, Movabletype, Symphony, etc. One of the huge advantages of Drupal is called blocks, and the developers are able to add any  type of information as a block to any “region” in their theme. Defining regions in a theme involves PHP coding, and requires a lot of time while developing the theme.  The other huge advantage of Drupal over Wordpress is its full control over navigations. If someday the project grows (who knows!!) we can add stuff to it (such as forums or maybe even new pages) easily. Second, I need to explain the process of making a theme for drupal. Basically it is the same procedures as themeing wordpress, but it requires a lot more PHP coding. First we need to make a HTML template for the site, and then we have to convert that template to a PHP page, and finally the template will be break down into different PHP codes that define the Drupal theme. This is why we have two different sites. The first one is the HTML template, and it’s a preview of the future website, and the other one is the actual Drupal site. Once the theme is done, the HTML template is useless.

Below are the brakdowns of previous week:

Template

First thing I did was I converted the template to PHP, and broke it down into static and dynamic elements and replaced the static elements with PHP include command. I also tweaked the theme a little bit more, and added to Hover state to all the navigations on the site. The Architecture of the site is added to the template and you can now navigate through the site. I also introduced the “quick facts” call out that replaces the side nav in every page except the characters page. This call out will provide facts about characters randomly on every page. At the first glance it’s a very simple HTML div, but the height of the call out will vary based on it’s content. It took me a while to come up with a mark up that stretches with the content. the simple solution is to break it down in to top, middle and bottom, but this won’t work properly as I got gaps between each div.  The way it is constructed right now, it consists of two DIVs, one for the top with the top ornament background, and the other is the bottom div with a very long background picture that contains both the middle lines and the bottom ornament. Now if the text in the call out is short, the background picture for the bottom DIV starts from the bottom, and you see only the bottom ornament and the portion of middle lines that is necessary. Also when the text is pretty long it will expand up ward and you see the rest of the middle lines. These are all being controlled by CSS. I also redesigned the cycle image gallery and its border and now both the callout and the cycle image gallery matches the template better. You can preview all these changes at:

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

Time: 13 hours Percentage: 98% (of the template)

Drupal

I spent some time to activate the “Clean URL” in Drupal (This is pretty easy in Wordpress!) By default, Drupal adds extra characters to the URLs, and if you want to define custom and clean URL, you need to prepare the server for this feature, and add a module call “Path.” Long story to short, in order to turn this feature off, you need to add re-write rules to the .htacess file on the server. After spending some time searching on the net, I found the below code that enables the Clean URL function, and works for our server and BlueHost servers:

# Various rewrite rules.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on

# If your site can be accessed both with and without the ‘www.’ prefix, you
# can use one of the following settings to redirect users to your preferred
# URL, either WITH or WITHOUT the ‘www.’ prefix. Choose ONLY one option:
#
# To redirect all users to access the site WITH the ‘www.’ prefix,
# (http://example.com/… will be redirected to http://www.example.com/…)
# adapt and uncomment the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
#
# To redirect all users to access the site WITHOUT the ‘www.’ prefix,
# (http://www.example.com/… will be redirected to http://example.com/…)
# uncomment and adapt the following:
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

# Modify the RewriteBase if you are using Drupal in a subdirectory or in a
# VirtualDocumentRoot and the rewrite rules are not working properly.
# For example if your site is at http://example.com/drupal uncomment and
# modify the following line:
# RewriteBase /drupal
#
# If your site is running in a VirtualDocumentRoot at http://example.com/,
# uncomment the following line:
RewriteBase /

# Rewrite old-style URLs of the form ‘node.php?id=x’.
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=([^&]+)$
#RewriteRule node.php index.php?q=node/view/%1 [L]

# Rewrite old-style URLs of the form ‘module.php?mod=x’.
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^mod=([^&]+)$
#RewriteRule module.php index.php?q=%1 [L]

# Rewrite current-style URLs of the form ‘index.php?q=x’.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

Now all the URLs are clean and free of any extra characters. Then, I spent most of my time developing the actual Drupal Theme. I set up the the Theme Info file, and page.tpl.php using this useful guide, which are two important files in a theme, and they tell drupal the different parts  of the template such as header, navigations, content, side navs, and footer, through PHP. For example if the design of the site has two columns, we have to define them in these two files. Drupal theme consists of many CSS files, but the most important ones are the CSS for the front of the site and the other is for the administration menus. That means writing CSS for both the front of the site and the admin page. If we don’t write a CSS for administer menu, you won’t see any of the menus available to the admin. So it’s very important to write a CSS for it before changing the theme, otherwise you are going to lock yourself out! You can only notice this when you log in to the site. I believe Ted already has an account with our site and he can kindly preview these after he logs in to the site. It’s not the best admin theme just yet, an there is still more work to be done, and  since it’s not a high priority in designing a theme,  I will work on it later in order to make a more user friendly interface for the editor users. make the admin theme even more user friendly later on. In addition to this, I set up regions for header, body, left sidebar, and the footer of the template, and the blocks now can be added to each region as needed. Again, you can preview that when you log in by going to the Administer>Site Building> Blocks, and there you can see that you can actually drag different blocks (right now we have only pre-built blocks by drupal) into these regions. The yellow area in the below pictures show these regions:

The theme is taking it’s basic design, and from this point I need to work on the left side column and the content sections. Lastly I added a new navigation that contains the name of the characters and it is visible only when you go to the characters page. Now we can add the profile pages and parent them to each character within this list. The search function is also added to the, but for now it’s only available when you are logged in as one of the users. When you are logged out the search bar is inaccessible, and I will fix this issue next week.

You can preview all the changes to the theme, clean URL, and the architecture of the site at:

http://lexiconquest.com

Hours: 30 Percentage: 45% (of developing the theme)

Well we are officially leaving my comfort zone. As work completes on modeling and design (and even rigging), that puts us square in the realm of animating. So that has been a large portion of my work for the week, specifically with Tin Woodsman (don’t ask me about Billy Pilgrim, I don’t want to talk about it).

So let’s talk about our metal buddy:

Tin Man will need four animations: Arrival, Default (Idle), Take Damage, and Attack

I’ve worked on Take Damage and Idle toward a reasonable level of completion. Here they are:

Tin Woodsman Idle Animation

Tin Woodsman Take Damage Animation

The biggest endeavor would have to be the attack animation, though. I haven’t gotten too far along with it (R&D Maya Particles, baby!), but you can have a taste for what I’m going for at least. The attack is called “Hearty Chop;” Tin Woodsman calls forth his trusty axe from a vortex and swings it heartily toward the opponent (complete with lovely heart shaped particles…get it? “HEARTY” Chop? BRILLIANT!)

Here’s a few stills to get the idea across as I develop the entire thing:

I feel a bit silly posting a lambert axe but that’s the model he’ll use. The vortex works for a first pass, but I have some more development to do, clearly. Specifically, with the heart particles. They rotate and move as one unit, and they need to not only move with more variation but also fade as they age. Watch for it soon.

As a quick note, there’s one other type of animation that everyone needs to do is the “Arrival” animation. Pokemon has it’s pokeballs; LexiConquest will, of course, use books. A book will be tossed in, will flap open and our characters, growing in size, will step out of the book. I’m handling the development of the book being “tossed in”. I haven’t made too much progress in this endeavor, but I wanted you to know that it was at least happening:

Hours: 20 Percent Complete: 20-30%

As I mentioned, Billy has been largely disregarded this week. I’ve been having so many problems between him and the tralfalmadoran that I think it might be wise for me to start the rig over instead of trying to animate with something that is, for the most part, broken. I did manage to get the tralfalmadoran and billy into the same scene, which is a bit of progress, but nothing too reassuring.I’ll revisit this week and hopefully I’ll have better things to report for next week.

And, finally, I did manage to put together two pieces of card art for use on the physical cards:

Billy is a bit more temporary than Tin Woodsman but I like how they turned out.