Final 3D1 Assignment part 1

Back again, and now I'm going to make a short introduction of the current assignment. We are modelling characters, and I'm modelling this quirky creature created by Charlie Eliasson.

Her name is Askanderiya. A former librarian of library of Alexandria.
I'm sadly going to be brief about this too, since I finished the model a week ago or so.

This is the model so far. The model itself is finished, and I finished the UV map today. Our budget for this model was 3 000 tris (+10% due to details). Because of this I had to cut down on some of her details. She got lots of rings, bracelets and other jewelry I just couldn't include on the model. Along with that she is also missing her belt and the scrolls. I thought the kitty backpack was more important to her character and silhouette so I decided to prioritize it. But, as for the jewelry I'm going to include it as much as possible on the texture.

Coming to the texture I can tell you that I had a real fight with the UV map. Errors started to show up here and there. Planes disappearing and edges that didn't want to disappear even if they were all surrounded by planes etc. I fought with this and managed to get all the parts except the face as a finished UV. Though, the day after it hadn't seemed to be saved, plus planes had disappeared again. So I decided to solve that problem once and for all. I managed to solve this by exporting the model as an obj, import it and mend it, and then export it and import it AGAIN. Then, finally, it all acted as it should. And after a few hours, and intense manual tweaking and fiddling I created the UV. It was tedious but I kinda enjoyed it anyway oddly enough. Most of all I'm proud over that I actually managed to get all the parts so tightly together. For assignment 2 I actually forgot to think about how the parts was placed on the UV. I just let the software do it for me and didn't think much of it. This time I only used the software to give me something to begin with. Then a session of puzzle pieces meets Tetris! I might have gained a understanding why people likes Tetris. It is so satisfying when everything fits together.

 Now off to painting the texture~! Been looking forward to this since Charlie showed me Askanderiya!

Year 2

Long time no writing. I have neglected this blog a great deal. I'm bad at blogging. In short. Anyhow. It is my second year at Campus Gotland now, and I've finally started with what brought me to Gotland. The 3D course! I've been looking forward to this moment a lot. I've loved every minute so far, even the ones when I'm having so many software issues and errors I don't even know how to describe.

Now, we are actually at the end of this specific course. This course consisted of three assignments being done individually. The first assignment was to create two kinds of crates. No texture. The second one was to model a object from real life using photo textures. This one was going to have diffuse map, specular map, roughness map, and normal map. I found this especially fun as this brought the model to life.

Here is a reference of the object I choose.

And here is my finished model.

It is a bit different, yes. I had to cut down on the details. But I learned a lot from experimenting with the combined effect of the specular map and roughness map in the unreal engine. I don't have much to say since this was a couple of weeks ago. I'll talk about our final assignment in my next post!

Night of the Piñata Week 9

Week 9, one week left until final week. Time moves fast when having fun, or just drowning in work. This is the last mandatory blog post I need to make about this project. There are a possibility that this will indeed be the last, but I might write a post about the finished game just to show how our efforts paid off.

One of my final tasks on this project was to animate the parade that is going to be in the game. To make the children and the adults correlate to each other we decided that the one that drew the children also should draw the adults. Though, the children was animated frame by frame in photoshop, and we simply didn’t have time to make an animation that way. So, it was decided Matilda, who drew the children, drew the adults and I animated them in flash.

Matilda drew all the parts independently, as I explained in an earlier blog that all parts for a bone animation must be able to move around without leaving empty spaces behind them. I then imported the parts into flash and made a bone skeleton to each adult in the parade. Then I started animating.

I discovered the challenge with animating multiple walk cycles in one animation is to make them all loop together. All the cycles need to be of equal length, otherwise the one with a shorter walk cycle will stop until the longer cycles end. So I needed to work in an equal length for all of them, but still make them seem rather differently so they don’t all move their feet at the same time. It is a flock of folks having fun, not military trained cadets.

Anyhow, the process moved on rather quick after I got a hang of it, and I managed to animate six people within just a few hours. A process which would have taken lots of hours if animated frame-by frame. It doesn’t become as alive as the animation of the children, but there is a give or take in this situation.

As the final week of our project is next week we are pretty much finished. Most of the art that is needed to the game is done, it is just some coding left to be worked on. This project has been highly demanding, and it almost surprise me how well we have done. See you in the future perhaps!

Night of the Piñata Week 8

Greetings once again! Yes, the name of our project game has been changed from “Day of the Piñata” as the original concept called it to “Night of the Piñata”. The reason was that the only level we are going to be able to finish for the game will be at night. It is logic like that!

This week, aside from putting together sprite sheets and text documents, I have been working on a confetti effect for our game. We decided, that confetti will be used to indicate special events and effects in our game. For example, when the score meter reach the point when a power up will spawn confetti will pop around it. As well as when the piñata shrink or grow. Even when the piñata shoot candy there will be a small confetti burst by its head. It will simply be there to give feed-back to the player.

I worked on the most general confetti burst, using flash once again. As I did before I animate high-resolute photoshop images in flash. For this I used motion tween which make is ridiculously fast to animate. But that do not mean its easy. My first try looked like this:



I was not happy with the result at all. I wanted a burst of confetti. It turned out to be something more of a tornado of confetti. The pieces swish around as if they were thrown by several different wind directions. The reason for this was that I curved every line they followed, and didn’t have a solid plan for their movement what so ever. So I decided to start again. This is how it turned.

It will be moving slightly faster in the game. This time I focused on the confetti pieces, thinking about where they should end up if they all start somewhat at the same point and then was forced away from each other all at once. They ought to move in a straight line from the same point, creating a circle around the center. This made the confetti much less messy, but I am afraid it got too uneasy and too coordinated. I am thinking about redo this effect, one more time. But as it seem now with our schedule I will leave it as it is for now. It is not of the highest priority as this time. That is why I will leave it at this stage.

Beta here we come!

Day of the Piñata Week 7

Day of the Piñata Week 7

Greetings once again! Week 7 of our 10 week project is soon to an end and I have started to see the light in the end of the tunnel. We can see the end of this project. This week I am going to explain my unnecessarily problematic procedure in creating sprite sheets.

I’ll use the medium piñata’s walkcycle.

The issue is that every frame is 1952x1306 pixels which are far too huge. The reason why they were animated in such a big size was that when animating with non-vector images in flash, you lose quality when you rotate them. I have an example below.

 

In the second picture notice how jagged in the edges the image gets. It is because when importing images to flash they get converted to bitmaps. Flash is primarily made to animate in vector graphics which can resize and rotate in any manner without losing pixels, which bitmaps can’t. Why I did not use vector graphics in flash was because we could not achieve our game’s somewhat painted look with flash’s tools.

Anyhow, to solve the information loss issue I simply covered it up. I animated huge images. Exported each frame as a PNG without resizing them. Imported them into the same file in Photoshop and there resized them to the accurate size. Viewing every frame at once I cut off left over space as well. (I did this when viewing all the animations for the medium Piñata in the same file to avoid frames being centered incorrectly in comparison to other animations.) By doing that the information loss in the images gets so small they can’t be noticed. Then that problem is solved!

Next issue was that they needed color correction. In the beginning we hadn’t completely decided on the hue of the colors in the game, and I needed to start animating right away. So I did that, deciding I could correct them later, and so I did.

After I exported all the resized frames out of photoshop I used “Glue it” to create them into a sprite sheet. Then I opened it in photoshop and simply put a cut out from our game’s background underneath and from there I adjusted the hue of the piñata until it fitted together with the background and other assets. What I did was to add a blue photo filter, and after that I opened color balance and added more yellow to the high lights. I repeated the exact same procedure for all the sprite sheets to make their colors identical.

Here you can see before (left) and after (right).

Left is far more saturated in the colors compared to the background, and they are too little blue. Right is more calm in the colors, sticking out less making it more part of the world it is placed in. It seem more to be in the same light as the background.

And there we have it. A slightly complicated ride, though necessary. I would have liked to show an animation of the finished sprite but I don’t possess that at this moment. How to make a sprite sheet into a gif that is. See you next week!

Day of the Piñata Week 6

Yet again another week on our Project of Day of the Piñata. We are moving steadily forward to an unknown future. This week I am working on the Piñata’s melee attack animation as well as their idle animations. What I will present to you is the Large piñata’s idle animation. Here it is in a poor quality gif!

The large Piñata differ from the small Piñata in color and design. It is because in our team we decided that we wanted that the largest piñata were going to have a bigger impact. It is bigger, it can destroy larger objects, it is more threatening! It’s appearance should communicate that as well. That is why the large piñata is a bull, because it is associated to be dangerous and trample things in it’s way. Bulls are typically associated with mexico as well as our game is taking place in. Moving on, the bull piñata was given sharp horns jutting forward making it dangerous for anyone in front of it. Overall it has more carper edges than the previous piñatas. And it has glowing eyes to illustrate that the evil spirit possessing the piñata is at it’s strongest.

Even when standing still I wanted the piñata to be threatening. A bull threatening to charge. Yet, I am limited to just be able to move certain parts of the piñata without bending them. It is the huge drawback of animating on a rig. So I did what I could.

Still working with animating with a rig in flash I made the middle folds of the piñata to move as if it was breathing. I added movement to the tail tassel and the trim to increase the “life” of the piñata since stretch and squash can’t be used in this. The head is moving up and down giving slight movement to the tassels on the sides of its head to increase the illusion of breathing. It made the piñata look rather alive and active, but it needed something more. In the group we have already early discussed the large piñata’s aesthetics, and making it have a flame-like inside illustrating the angry spirit within. So embers was added coming out of it’s nostrils when exhaling. It was made very simple in flash using motion tween. I made the ember glows follow a curvy line, growing and shrinking in size.

So there we have it. The idle animation of the Large Piñata.

Day of the Piñata Week 5

For this week I have started working on the animations for the Piñata. I decided to learn how to animate in flash with the bone tool to be able to produce animations faster as we will need three different animations for each action of the player character. How I thought the piñata would move proves to be perfect to this method as well. The Piñata is made of paper hence can’t stretch or morph much as it would break. The loss of animating with the bone tool is that you can either get no stretch or distorted stretches as you stretch the image itself. Therefor this technique is perfect when I don’t want to do any of that!

Starting with, when you are going to build a skeleton for 2D images you need to have every piece by itself. I want to be able to move the head of the Piñata without having a plank space being left behind it in its front part and neck. So I drew every piece as whole. Like this:

It is like a paper doll, which is appropriate since Piñatas are paper made!

Next I had to import my parts into flash. I had big troubles with this because my images either lost quality or became distorted. My solution to that was to have a PSD with all the parts in separate layers. Then I imported one layer at a time from that PSD as a movie clip. If I did not follow this process the layers got confused with each other and got dirty with pixels from other layers.

The next step was simply to link all the pieces together with the bone tool to create a piñata skeleton. When done it was only to get animating. The skeleton makes it able to drag and move the pieces related to each other at once. It can’t be controlled to 100% so I had to go in and rotate and move some parts individually in the essential frames. Still it is a much faster process than moving each part individually for each frame. You just make a new frame and move the skeleton and adjust the parts to your liking, and the program does the rest. It is like a motion tween but much more manipulation friendly. Here is an image of the skeleton and how it keeps all the parts in place when moving them around.

I would say that this method is very cheap, and it is difficult to get life into the animation since there is a loss of squash and stretch which is one of the twelve elements of animation. Yet, it is helpful and fast, and rather realistic to the material as of this case.

Here is a preview of the small piñata’s walkcycle. It needs polishing, but it is a start! See you next week!

Day of the Piñata Week 4

A new year, a ned course, a new project.

Game development is our new course and we are developing a game, from concept to finished product over a ten weeks time. We are in our fourth week in developing “the Day of the Piñata”. The concept for the game is to play a Piñata who got possessed by a vengeful spirit on the day of the dead in mexico. The Piñata want revenge for all of the poor piñatas who get masaccred just because of their sweet insides. So the mission of the players is to play the Piñata and wreck the festival and save a Piñata in the end of the level.

My job in this project is so far mostly on the player character, the Piñata. In the game the Piñata can gather candy, and depending on how much candy it has it have different sizes. There are three of those. Small, medium, and large. To get smaller the player can shoot candy as projectiles. I worked on all three this week, but I’m only going to talk about the small one for now.

We had many different ideas for the Piñata, and here are some of them.

Nr 1 and 2 was the first idéas when following the original concept idea of a rather cute Piñata. Round shapes and not much detail. Yet each size didn’t speak much of its abilities. Like, the bigger you get the bigger objects you can destroy. You get more dangerous, that should have a visual difference.  Also the idéa of the game was going to be a bit darker than the original concept. How we were going to animate the Piñata was the reason of the take of nr 3 and 4. Piñatas are made of paper, hence they would not be able to move their limbs much, or they would rip. Thats why we I cut the Piñata in half and added folds, like with a accordion or paper lantern. It would make the Piñata able to move in a realistic way related to its material.

My favorite of these was nr 3, yet it was too extreme and not the feeling I wanted for the small Piñata. The smallest one was going to be the most “friendly” and normal, and then the bigger it gets the more extreme it gets. So it was made into nr 4. Its accordion spine much smaller and shorter that also makes the Piñata look emptier, since this is the form of the Piñata with the least candy.

When the design was done I made the lineart in photoshop, pretty thick to make the Piñata easier to distinguish from the background. Then colored and shaded. The colors was hard to decide. We ended up with purple, pink and green as the contrast color. The idea is that the color will change slightly by each size, getting darker. Green was decided because of its positive association. Like stop light. Green means go. That’s why the next size will have a yellow contrast color, while the purple and pink will be darker. To keep the sense that it is the same Piñata getting bigger I decided to keep two of the colors, just darkening them for each size, but having a contrast color that changes. It leaves enough trace of the previous size within the colors.

So that is the small Piñata I did this week! There is two more and animations going to be made!

See you next week!