Ideal Animation

Once Jerome had finished his ideal animation it was then my job to export the file as an FBX but ensuring that both the bake animation and EmbeddMedia checkboxes were ticked otherwise the animation won't play and the textures won't appear with the mesh in Unity.

So once imported to Unity the first course of action was to apply a scale of 1 to the mesh, this converts the mesh to the correct scale you were modelling to in Maya. Once dragged and dropped into the scene all thats left is to go to the 'Idle animation' import settings, click on 'Animation' and change 'Wrap Mode' to 'Loop'. Finally, still in the 'Idle animation' import settings, click on 'Rig' and change 'Animation Type' to 'Legacy'. Now the animation will play and loop while the character controller is venturing through the level.

Unity/Maya self feedback

I found using maya relatively easy. However, I haven’t really conducted a lot of research into making the textures as impressive as possible. In regards to modelling the assets this was simple, due to the use of my concept art I was able to replicate the drawing to near perfect accuracy with my 3D model. In regards to unity, once I had gone through the necessary tutorials I found unity very much ‘user friendly’. The interface was clear to understand and I found unity enjoyable. Using my own creativity to develop terrains.

Particles

Focusing on tutorials that provide the fundamentals to developing an efficient level. I wanted to insure I implemented aspects such as, sound and particles to generate a much more believable level design.

I found this fairly easy to apply to are level design and would highly recommend it as sound is one of the fundamental elements of any game.

Good Watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq8sJqfnoWU 

The result?

After a stressful ordeal trying to get my work back I got a working game app with my animations. Unfortunately many of the cycles where not included and problems identified over a month before hand where not corrected. T.J’s targets where also not included although we have all seen a working game application with them in and exploding. A very disappointing end to the project but I can not complain as people within the group, mainly the coders had very different priorities with other projects as there main focus. For 5% of marks given to a working game app I am amazed I heard any thing at all from the coders when there marks where given six weeks before our Team Outlaws submission.
All in all a lot of work was put into this piece to get very little out.

Screencaps

Figure1: Screenshot of the 'perspective view', this shot presents an overview of all the assets within the level. I wanted to create a fairly open space for the character to pass through while firing at target boards.

Figure 2: I used the tank to block the path as I wanted the player to feel as though they weren't stuck in the condiments of a game however, still aware that there was no accessing the area past this point. The rocks were used to block the players view of the empty space beyond the level. 

Figure 3: The architecture was heavily influenced by turkish ruins. I like the sandy, granite textures and feel its blends well with the terrain and overall theme of the level.

Figure 4: Rock assets were placed across the level to compliment the theme and feel of the level. I personally feel as though I need to throw several more in.

Figure 5: Many of the ruin walls were designed like this, gaps and erosion. This was use to create openings for the player to travel through and for targets to appear out of.

Figure 6: I felt this shot showed where the shadows are coming from however, I feel I may have to tweak the light intensity and create a rim light to compliment the existing sunlight.

Figure 7: 'Top down view' once again provides a nice perspective of the level and shows the scale of the terrain. Some individuals felt as if the terrain was perhaps to large however, the location of this target range was once an ancient city and i wanted to emphasise that.

Camera trouble.

After some time working along side our coder/scripter Danius we got the animations running smoothly and effectively. Danius did have some trouble with how the camera would work but managed to create a great camera that would move a little as the ogre ran. Further through the project we found a fault that would obscure the positioning of the camera when certain movements took place.
Danius tried to resolve these issues but could not be successful. After some experimentation in exporting FBX files in different ways and changing the pivot point on each of my animation cycles we found that the camera in unity would rotate on the zeroed co-ordinates of Maya.
In Maya I often move objects that are completed off of the zero co-ordinate in order to work on something new. The animation was than animated in which ever position I had placed my model.
As we had found the solution to our problem, although it may not have been the only way to remedy it I went ahead and created a null for each of my animation scenes then moved them all to the centre of Maya’s work space.
As of yet I have not seen the results but I have been assured they all work correctly.

Animation

I then went on to animate key cycles and the transition between and from those cycles.
This included :
Run, idle to run, stop left foot, stop right foot, strafe left, idle to strafe left, strafe right, idle to strafe right, rotate left, rotate right.

I soon found out that my blend shapes will not work as an FBX file and as you may see from the rig, there is no jaw bone. This meant that the mouth and facial expression would stay the same thought the game. This was not to much of a problem however as you’ll be controlling the character from the back.

Finalising rig

After some discussion we agreed that instead of my character being the NPC he should become the playable third person controller. This was largely due to the majority of the riging being done as well as the  weight painting. The idle could still also be used.

Blend shapes

At first my roll was to make an interactable NPC. You would have to speak to him in order to start the training exercise that is are game level.
I started off by making some blend shapes to imply speech coming from the NPC. This would not have been lip synced and the speach would have been simple text. The blend shapes where created to show movement of both the mouth and tongue.

I then went about creating an idle pose that would of been cycled when the NPC is not being spoken too.

Terrain Toolkit

Throughout the duration of the video one of the links talked about an expansion pack called 'Terrain Toolkit' this package is used to generate the fundamental structure of your terrain. It also comes with a selection of pre-set landscape types, which you can then adjust using the tools already provided within unity. The terrain toolkit also provides a texturing option. This is useful as it detects the different depths of your terrain and matches the textures to those depths. For example, our level is a rocky mountain wasteland so there was always going to be two contrasting textures from the start. One being the textures of the ground and the other the mountains surrounding the enclosed area. By just adjusting the texture contrast I can match it up perfectly that the ground textures covers only the area of the ground and the mountain texture to the mountains in my level however, the transition between the two at the mountains summit is seamless providing more believability.
I personally found this extremely helpful because it provided my terrain with depths that I myself might not have been able to convey through making the terrain from scratch and also produced high accuracy in terms of the texturing.

To download Unity and the Terrain Toolkit:
http://unity3d.com

3D BUZZIN!!!

As I was searching youtube for tutorials on unity I stumbled across a particular playlist from '3D BUZZ' a youtube channel owned by a collective of individuals that provided support on a variety of different computer softwares. The unity tutorials 'Unity : The Fundamentals' is a well constructed playlist on the fundamentals of setting up your scene in unity. I posted this link on the Mdx 3D games and animation group page on Facebook, I felt it was an extremely helpful guide and felt anyone else looking to construct their terrain through unity should use it.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL30A9ABDDB2E58F63

Unity: Whats Good Whats Not?

When we first came together as a collective we conducted several tests exporting our maya assets and importing them into the unity game engine. We found difficulty however in doing so, some of the assets we had created appeared transparent when imported from maya to unity. So we had to search through are assets and find A, which ones were essential to the visual aspects of our game and B, which assets would actually translate from maya to unity.

I also began conducting my own experiments with the unity interface, getting a better sense of what everything was and wither or not it could be implemented into our game level. After briefly looking at a couple of youtube videos on game level design in unity. I discovered that it is actually possible to design a terrain within the game engine itself. Discussing this with the rest of the group I decided it would be more successful to create a new terrain within unity but still importing the necessary assets from maya. The group agreed and I was appointed with the additional responsibility of developing the terrain.

Research/Reference Images

 I wanted to develop the game level as much as possible so I began to conduct research, developing a mood board helped to narrow down on the design. I also focused my research on different reference images. I found a lot of visual support from a variety of different medias, in particular; Borderlands 1&2, Book of Eli and Valkyria Chronicles.

I found the openings in the buildings interesting and feel its definitely something I will experiment with.

A screenshot from the playstation 2 game 'Valkayrie Chronicles'. A close depiction to what I had in mind for our level design. The crumbling remains of an ancient civilisation engulfed by sand and uneven terrain.  

The two previous screenshots are from playstation 3 game 'Borderlands 2', I feel are character design shares many relations too Borderlands characters. So I had a look at the aesthetic of there level designs. If i have the time I would like to develop the textures to resemble those of 'Borderlands 2'

Playstation 2 'Valkayrie Chronicles' I found the surrounding dust clouds inspiring and will look to incorporate a particle effect to our own level, if I know how.... 

Simple yet affective, the use of several duplicated rocks rescaled and slightly tweaked from one another to generate this look. Something I'll dabble into. 

I was attracted to the shape of the ruins but not only that, the scale is an important aspect to the ruins.

Introduction

Are first plan of action was to develop a general plan of what game we wanted to create and as a result what personal outcomes as well. We elected on creating a third person shooting tutorial level with Anthony S character as the protagonist. The player will have to shot target boards as they pop up and out of different locations, before the targets time out and drop back down.

We developed a showreal to present are work to groups of coders from the different class. This was almost like an interview to get an understanding of what both parties wanted from our art and their scripts. We had a good reception from several groups and we recorded their details and small notes to remind us of who they were and what they wanted from their personal out comes.

Once we decided on the group we wanted to collaborate with (Danius). Everyone within the group was appointed a designated role he had to accomplish in order to develop a practical game. I was appointed the role of level designer. This includes mapping out the level the using unity, modelling assets for the level with maya and then finally importing all the created assets from maya into unity.

Ogre Run cycle

Keyframed Character Idle

Here is the idle animation for the NPC character that will be imported into the scene, for the time being, this animation still needs more inbetweens.

Depending on the projects progression, I might continue in creating inbetweens for this character, or even use another, but again that is just a possible route to take.

Initial referencing

To begin with I made a video reference of the idle (using myself) just to make the creation of the idle a fluid process.

However, I did find that due to the length of the initial video the idle would end up looking rather stiff, so I broke down the video so as to make the character movement look more natural.

Using stills converted from the video reference I began animating TJ's character,

Introduction

For the creation of the game level, my role within the team was to create an idle animation for TJ's game character. Due to my role being focused mainly on character animation, I found working through it rather simple. As with most game levels, there won't be a large amount of focus on NPC's and their movements, however it does add to the entire scene - so my aim was to create a 60 second clip.

Troll Animation pt. 3

The reloading animation was the most challenging of the three assigned. As the Troll was holding both revolvers in its hands I had to come up with an idea that made the gamer assume that the guns were being reloaded in one motion. As it was a pair of revolvers that the Troll was using, I animated the barrels flip outwards as he quickly brought his hands to his waist and gave the impression of some sort of reloading motion before bringing back up his arms and re-flipping the barrels into the guns. Just like “the draw” animation, synchronisation was key because the gamer would want the reloading motion to be as fast as possible but not so fast as to loose its detail.

Troll Animation pt. 2

The gunshots for each arm weren’t that difficult. The main area that I tried to emphasise on was the recoil caused each time the Troll fired its guns. Movement in the elbow and shoulder joints were imperative in gaining the desired look, therefore they were the areas I put the most effort into. In regards to each arms animation, I tried my best to synchronise the movements with one another to avoid any suspicious errors but at the same time not mimic the two animations exactly identically.

Troll Animation pt. 1

Working alongside the sketches I had done, I started animating the Trolls first motion, (the Draw). As the model had the trolls revolver holsters on its back the animation would have to be it reaching behind in order to draw it guns. As a group we had also discussed on changing the camera angle within Unity to an over the shoulder shot once the Troll drew his guns, the gamer than controlled the aim and shoot through an eye level view. With the draw animation I tried to keep it as fluent as possible, which came through animating with the Troll already holding his guns. This way I could specifically concentrate on how his hands and arms would naturally move. Danius (coding group leader) assured me that he could make certain objects disappear while working in Unity so having the guns attached to the hands was easily amendable.

 

Troll Animation Prep

As the project developed the group decided on switching from first person camera view to a third person shooter. This way the gamer would see all of the characters movements from moving in all directions to aiming and shooting his twin revolvers. This being the case it involved far more animation time and therefore we split some of the animations between two people and worked are way from there.

I took on the responsibility of animating the trolls gun draw, shooting both guns and reloading both guns. As the Troll was not my own model, it required me taking the time to get use to the mesh and all the individual joints that it had applied to its features (guns, sword, brackets ect).

I find that having reference images always helps when animating and therefore I drew out rough movement sketches to help give me an idea of the sort of motions the Troll would use. 

Target Development

The next step was to test how my outcome would work within the games engine, so I exported the target from Maya as a FBX and brought it into Unity. As an FBX file the target should have taken all the animations along with the model however I encountered my first setback were Unity didn’t read the shatter effect that I worked so hard to create in Maya.

To resolve this problem I was to revert back to Maya and rebuild a new board, without any N Dynamic animations this time. To build the new board I mimicked the shape of the previous version however this time I used the cut face tool to split the board into however many pieces I thought seemed appropriate (these being the amount of times the board will beak apart each time it is shot at). With this model now imported into Unity as a separate object to the rest of the target, I could monitor its animation using physics within Unity to create a similar shatter effect, which was how I resolved the shatter effect problem.      

 

First Target

Without wasting any time I got cracking on strait away starting with a design.  

Once I had confirmed on the look I was going for, I started to create the mesh in Maya bearing in mind the animations that I would have to apply to it later. When I was happy with the outcome of the model I had built I combined the relevant pieces together and gave the base a joint so I would be able to easily tilt the target board up and down as if it was running on a pivot. When it came to animating the shatter effect that would be caused each time the player shot the board, I wasn’t quite sure on how to go about getting the desired look. I than researched the idea online and found a Maya N Dynamics tutorial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vUmUReuPTU), which I followed to produce the flow I wanted which I think, worked quite well.      

Introduction

After meeting our coding group leader (Danius) and discussing what he’s specific area of talent was, we than proceeded to show him the Team Outlaws game designs (characters and scenes). With the distinctive look that our assets had, it did not take long before deciding what sort of game we would like to create. Following a brief discussion we had all agreed on creating a first person beta testing shooter, keeping in mind the workload we had, and the Unity side coding capabilities.   

We than proceeded to delegate our individual job roles with each other, were I took on the responsibility of building and animating the target range boards that the player will be shooting at in the game.