Better late than never
Sorry this is so late. We’ve been so busy that blogging has been put on backburner just a bit. Feature Frag 2 is this Wednesday so hopefully we will have more to show you soon.
Feature Frag One
This last week was hectic but very productive. After what can only be described as a lack luster proof of concept, we knew what we needed to do, and we did it. Getting the level and sky box in and textured was the first big step. Then getting Riley animated and textured was next. With each step our game took shape. The most drastic change came from implementing the most simple part. This was attaching the camera to Riley’s shoulder. For six days, the camera had been attached to her feet, and while it demonstrated a working camera it wasnt a great angle for testing, nor did it look very good. Once the Camera was attached to the shoulder and we could aim and move, it felt like we were actually playing our game. Stay tuned for indepth coverage on the camera and animation systems. And photos to come.
The joy of transferring animations
Although it is not a task that is usually foreseen, transferring animation between rigs can be a very significant step to integrating animation into the game build. Usually animation transfers are done due to the fact the animated rig that is either has more capabilities or does not meet the requirements for export. In our case this was the latter, the rig that was animated was constructed before a proper pipeline was created for rigs and animation.
I have a few pictures of the steps that I took in transferring animations to give you, the reader, a glimpse into this tedious task.
there are two rigs and meshs in the scene both in bind pose
As scene in the picture to the right, The are two rigs, each with a mesh attached in the scene. The rig for export will be parent constrained to the animated rig. The parent constrains allow the constrained rig to follow the movements of the other.
The process is broken down to constraining each joint to its counterpart on the opposing rig. A parent constraint allows the ‘child’ to follow all the actions of its ‘parent’ without there being a direct parent-child relationship. I have found that the majority of the work in this process in done in the outline, due to ease of joint selection.
In this picture you can see the outliner, and how joints are selected, Ctrl + selecting the joints that need to be constrained is much easier than attempting to select the joints in 3d space when both rigs are directly on top of each other.
If I were to play the animation midway through this process it would can cause complications that create a difficult work around to fix these complications.
This image shows just that. That the joints that have not been constrained float out on their own. If this happens the constraints involving those joints must be deleted, both rigs set to bind pose, and re-constrained.
All and all, transferring animations between rigs is a tedious process that make take a few times to become experienced with, but the work process speeds up over time. Thanks to this process, it has been possible that animations done by our teams animator did not have to be re-done and can be implemented into our Game Build successfully.
Month 3
Lets Go!
And so it begins. Pre-production is finally over, proof of concept has come and gone, and feature frag one is only a week away. With class now only once a week we will be able to work hard and fast. No more distractions from communications class or having GPA lectures at 9 am 3 times a week. We’ve been working our fingers to the bone for the last two months. But I think we all know that we haven’t even begun to work. Crunch is now, but thats nothing that we working at Full Sail haven’t experienced already. In fact you could make the argument that working at Full Sail, crunch is all we’ve experienced. But this is what we love. Dreams No More looks better everyday, and that keeps us going. We can all sleep when we’re dead.
Modeling for a destroyed world
The past days have been rather insane, we’ve been modeling like crazy. We already have down to our C assets wich is very impressive considering the fact that weve only been in proper production for a week. We have started to UV our assets and texture the. This is the process of laying out the model in 2D space so that a image may be applied to the model.
This is the taxi (model all the way on the left) this was my first car model. As you can see it went threw 2 previous interations before settling on the final taxi look, but as you can see I kept the previous interations of the taxi that way we can use the previous 2 models in our game as random cars.
This model is a cop car, its a hybrid of the Dodge Charger, Dodge Viper, and Ford Mustang. I really had the concept of this car Nailed down in my head prior to starting the model which really helped me model this asset. There are a few more minor tweaks that I would like to apply to this car before it is implemented in the game, those will be done before GDC.
This is one angle of how a destroyed biulding will look like in our game. This is the high res mesh that you are looking at. If we are able to implement normal maps into our game then this is what you’ll see, if not then I have a lo-res version that will be placed, but the high-res mesh will hopefully be the basis for my normal map which will give the illusion of a high-res asset.
These are the destroyed versions of my doorways that will be placed in destroyed sections of our city. I pulled from a lot of games that I hold in high regard when modeling these doorways, namly Gears of War 2 and Half-Life 2.
This is the fire escape. There are two variants you see up here, the destoyed version and the normal version. This is what you’ll see when you look up to the skies in our game, they will litter the sides of our buildings.
Last but not least are the 3 variants of the windows we have, these obviously are the destroyed versions of the windows. I also made 2 other models per window lessening the destruction. so that we can show progression of destruciton threw the city, I did this with the doors as well.
These are just some of the models that I have created for Dreams No More, I focused on the enviroment assests that I have created, in a later post will go over the weapons that I created.
More on Level Design
A major conflict came up a few days ago having to do with level layout. If any of you have looked at our level before in our previous post, its Washington Heights, NYC. So if you would like some idea of what it looks like check out our previous post on level design or just Google map it. But anyways, I digress, last week a major issue had come up about the level. The problem was that some of the streets were angled and formed weird angles on street corners. So we would have to create custom assets to fit into the weird angles. Plus with the way we were putting together our buildings, it made for a lot more asset creation.
Originally our art lead wanted us to grid out the entire map, so that it was easier to lay out and place assets. Which I understood for meeting milestones and meeting deadlines. But a lot of the members of the group had a different opinion. Yes it would make placing and layout easier, but they felt it ruined the whole flow of the level which I kind of agree with. From an overhead view it looked very linear and boring, but, like our art lead stated, I don’t think it would have felt like that from the players point of view (POV). So we spent a lot of time talking, making sure our opinions on the matter were heard. One compromise that was presented, which I liked, was to start by laying out a gridded-out version of the map. If we got ahead and finished that, we then would add the weird angled streets to it. A lot of the members of the team didn’t like this because we weren’t working towards the final goal and on the original idea that was set last month. I liked it because it provided a safety net for us.
We eventually came up with a compromise the next day, after everyone had had a chance to sleep on it. We agreed that the street layout would stay the same, but we would start by placing our square and rectangular buildings to start. The gaps with the angles would be filled with rubble and destroyed building models. Then, after we got all of that in, we would start to make the building models for the weird angles. Below is basically the building layout. In the image are buildings with the following ratios: 1:1, 2:4, and 3:4. The one to one buildings are black. The two to four buildings are red. Finally the three to four buildings are represented in blue. You can kind of see the gaps and weird angles that became the focus of concern.
Help! Theres an Alien in my Brain….
AlienBrain is version control software, and it is giving me a headache. We use it to control and safegaurd our development environment. It allows us to track changes made, and who made them. In addition to giving us the comfort and convienence of being able to roll back to any previous build, if some unforseen unfixable problem befalls us. These are all fantastic features, but they are also features that exist on many other platforms. In our last team project we used SVN, and it was vastly superior experience. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles of AlienBrain, (internal email, super helpful, and not just another thing to have to check! :/ ) SVN made getting new builds and integrating a streamlined process, while AlienBrain is so locked down; making everything read only, and making integration a time consuming and multistep process. POC is 5 days away and these hang-up are adding undue pressure.
Character Design (Grunt)
This is the Grunt enemy in our game. He is the most basic and common enemy the player will encounter. He is one of the many marines who were sent into the city to control the Cthulhu situation from the inside. When Cthulhu woke he turned all of the marines inside of the city into his mutated minions. Using them as his eyes.
This is what the military troops will look like who were sent into the city after Cthulhu mutated them. Cthulhu has branded them with an eye on their chest. This eye serves as his way of seeing what is going on inside the city at all times. He has also given them more sea creature like features, such as a crab claws and tentacles in place of their feet.
The Cthulhu features are, as of now, kind of a rough idea of what I would like them to look like and where they will be on the final model. One thing that I was playing with was the mutations on the head. What you see here is pretty much my original idea. One other idea that has been tossed around is covering his entire face with mutation, since he has an eye on his chest. This will help reinforce the idea that Cthulhu is truly the one who is controlling him. But everyone liked the idea of the mutation over half his helmet with little tendrils penetrating it because the design of the helmet was really cool. This was my original idea. I would like to hear what everyone else thinks, along with other suggestions or comments 
Finally found the time to update my concept. This is showing the side view of the character as well as the change in the right leg. Originally both legs had four tentacles, but because of rigging complications and joint limit we had to cut down on the number of tentacles that the character had on him. You can also see a base idea I had in mind for textures.
Let us dream a little longer
Full Sail University offers a real world education. Never has that been more evident to me than in the last two weeks. Don’t misinterprete this, final project has been a blast; dealing with management has not. We are lucky to have great Ips that do their best to fight for us. But ultimately when your priorities are dictated by a grade and you are forced down a predetermined and ultimately contrived schedule, the artistic process falters. The Eps suffer from a corporate philosophy. I would appreciate a more student centric phlilosphy; inspiring us to experiment with design, fostering creativity. Instead we are met with a maniacal joy seen only in bond villains, they rip the soul from your perfect shining idea, cutting and pasting as they please, until only some bastardized Frankenstein is left.
In production
Its offical, and it feels Great. Our first month of final project is over, our production document is in, and coding has begun. Designing was awesome, and a great experience but compling the document was fairly tedious. Ultimatley it will be essential for design continuity and save us from as much feature creep as possible. Our cross-studio game engine already planned out is still in it’s infancy. Utilizing a scrum methodology to maximize efficiency we are simultaneously working on the Animation System, Maya Exporter Plugin, Camera System, and Rendering Engine. Once these are complete we will have a great basis from which to build Dreams No More.
