CSG: Game Dev

For the last sprint before we start playtesting one of the things we needed was icons for the in-game HUD. the challenge with making icon like this is that not trying to be so complex with it where people don't know which is which, it can get confusing. some of the icons came from the cards itself the challenge with that was trying to scale the small image up. 

  After researching lighting in unity it was time to test out what I knew in the game. I used a directional light at 90 degrees put it anywhere, it didn't matter. Increased the ambient intensity 50%. I also deleted some light spot lights that was place in the level before because they wasn't effecting anything.

Directional lights represent large, distant sources that come from a position outside the range of the game world. In a realistic scene, they can be used to simulate the sun or moon. In an abstract game world, they can be a useful way to add convincing shading to objects without exactly specifying where the light is coming from. When checking an object in the scene view a directional light is often the quickest way to get an impression of how its shading will appear. For such a test, you are generally not interested in where the light is coming from but simply want to see the object look “solid” and look for glitches in the model.An Area Light is defined by a rectangle in space. Light is emitted in all directions, but only from one side of the rectangle. The light falls off over a specified range. Since the lighting calculation is quite processor-intensive, area lights are not available at runtime and can only be baked into lightmaps.

Video game animation offers a plethora of exciting opportunities and hurtles. For those involved, this digital playground offers a rich and rewarding experience, creating animation that connects to the audience on a more personal level then ever before. As part of the basic movement for my character, strafing was the most difficult for me. what couldve did was storyboarded out the strafing part before animating.

A game jam is a gathering of game developers for the purpose of planning, designing, and creating one or more games within a short span of time, usually ranging between 24 and 72 hours. Game developers are generally made up of programmers, game designers, artists, and others in game development-related fields. So spring is here and some of the guys the wanted to work on the game before we show it off at midwest gaming classic. Our main concern was getting the player models and animations working and the build. one of the good things about this game jam was not taking an hour with ceremony like standups which usually happens every class time. another good thing was the use of technology for communication even though most the team did not attend this jam I was able to communicate with them real time with Google Hangouts. using the screen share component of Hangouts I was able to see what my peers was working on and vice versa.getting that real time feedback from your peers even if ...

For this sprint I join up with level team who just lost an artist, he resigned. one of the design guys had a level terrain made before the sprint started. all that was needed was to be imported in unity, easy right? I'm afraid not, not only I had trouble importing it in unity but it kept crashing on me.  I had came to a conclusion that his terrain was too high of polys. so I had to import into 3ds max to reduce some polys. two million, yes two million was the number of polygons on his mesh. i had a few solutions to reduce count. first one was to manually remove edges and verts that was a no go. another  way was to use the pro optimizer modifier which works.

Before spring break our instructor introduce us to shaders. so during the spring break i've playing around with shaders looking at other shaders. one in particular that caught my attention is  no GPU tessellation, displacement in the vertex modifier and shaders with DX11 and or OpenGL core tessellation.

Animating basic movements for a melee player can seem simple because it no complex parts. Technological limitations further challenge this process, such as an engine's frame-rate. The anticipations in video game animations could be just a few frames, if the frame rate is low and those few frames are skipped, then the player will not see the anticipation at all, which lessens the impact and believability of the animation. This can be overcome by creative planning, and the abbreviation of movements. a preview of the ready idle animation

After the characters were finalized it was time to plan out the animations. I was tasked with doing the the basic movements for the rocketman in addition most of the art guys took reference pics and videos of some idle poses and attack for the spear weapon.

The process of rigging is we take that digital sculpture, and we start building the skeleton, the muscles, and we attach the skin to the character, and we also create a set of animation controls, which our animators use to push and pull the body around. There two ways of rigging a character Custom Rig system and Bipedal system for our project we decided to use the bipedal system mainly because it saved on time and it had less doubt than the custom rig option. the challenge we may have to face when doing biped is that simplifying the animations because biped has limitations on way it can do. 

Final composite render (Not In Engine) This is the mesh that I plan on using in the game. for the short amount of time doing one of the characters I learned a lot, from different modeling technique and the importance of concepts.

After modeling the armor, in order to have color and detail I would have to uv unwrap the mesh in 3ds max. Unwrapping a mesh is pretty much what it says, its splits and peel seems on a mesh to make them flat so it would be easier to texture on. Depending on how elaborate the texture is on the concept many either use photoshop or mudbox. due to my lack of experience using mudbox I decided to use photoshop i just used regular paint tool to color bock the shapes than used the flame shape for some style.

the next step is 3d modeling with the base mesh already completed the only thing is to model the armor around it. using the hard surface the one of my peers introduce to me made it easy to model in 3ds max instead of sculpt the details in mudbox which are my weaker skills.What was hard about doing this technique is that it creates many vertices with are difficult to keep track of. After setting up my the model sheets as reference I just start with pulling out faces so that there separate elements.  

like my last post concepting is very important to the art pipeline in my opinion. what we have here is orthographic model sheets. These usually are the final reference items that a 3d modeler model after. in these images I have the model is in a t pose some other model sheets may have characters that are in a "m" pose or "A" pose. that is when the arms are down at a 45 degrees angle. 

In the current attempt in capstone  the art weakness was getting assets in the build, we had go back to the drawing board. So during the break I came up with some pipeline ideas. The art pipeline is the process of creating and implementing art for a particular project, most commonly associated with the creative process for game development. using an article from a school showing a pipeline and what it consist of. Concept is the basic idea of the game to be made, be it an original game or an addition to a pre-existing franchise. This is where developers do the brainstorming. Design is the stage where the look, flow, story, etc. is created. storyline, story boards, dialogue, character design, plot, and the like. This is where a coherent game is created. Characters are designed, developed, and completed, storyline is dictated with a distinct plot flow and (where the game warrants such treatment) CG Cut away scenes are conceptualized for the forward momentum of the ga...

Two more days until demo day and our game is looking pretty good. doing this game has been tough but with anything you do in life will be tough. at the beginning of the semester we kind of struggled with sprint 0 it was instances that communication was lacking in the pipeline causing slow down in velocity and not planing well for mocap which prove a lot of doubt and hopefully we don't do until we get the pipeline issues solved. my main fixes for next semester is that we fix pipeline things so over the break I am going to look over different art pipelines to make better suggestions to leads and or PO. Have a Great winter break.

So the end is coming for the semester and demo day is around the corner. At this pint the team is trying to polish up aspects of the game. besides waiting to get textures, getting all the animations into the build that is the only thing I had to do. I did run into problems with the animations the programmer working on the animation in engine came across some problems with bone hierarchy issues. Which in the future should get straightened out in the art team next time.

This actually happen couple weeks ago but due to putting everything being put in the wiki the art lead had to transfer the pipeline documents onto the wiki. We added some new things to the pipeline like mocap requirements, reworked some of the requirements that was already in the document. Also we added guidelines for concept. Because we did it in short time a lot of things we wanted to add did not get implemented in. I think in the next sprint 0 we should start adding those things in.

With the animations completed I have to next get them the game engine through the art pipeline. this was my first time dealing with mocap animations and I learned a lot about the biped system that I didn't know before. what I could've done differently was worked with the designers and programmers more for input on what animations was needed in detail.

After I figured that motionbuilder wasn't going to work I asked a couple of my animation instructor for help. He showed me an easier way to put the mocap data on models with effecting the structure and the skinning of the model. All I had to do was save the raw mocap data as a BIP file and import the saved Bip file into the model biped. That save a whole lot of time. After that i was about 60% done with the preferred mocap files.