BGP – Scrap Pirates – Week 8

Today is the final day on our project before GGC.

We’re all working on finishing some final things and fixes before the day ends. Some final effects have to be implemented, our poster for the show-floor must be finished and printed, a final score-screen is being fixed and some main-menu animation is being edited, among other things.

During the last few days I’ve finished a short introduction sequence that will play at the beginning of the game when the players press the start-button. For the intro, as well as for the trailer shown in my last post, I wasn’t able to convey the feeling of communication between the characters with only the animations that we had in-game already (run, jump, shoot, etc). In order to make it feel as if the characters are actually communicating with each other, and trying to make them seem more excited than what they would have seemed if I had only used their still idle-poses, I created a few quick images with poses and some short 3-5 frame animations. For the animations I moved only the characters hands, as making any more complex animations would have taken too long to finish on time.

This is a short part of the intro sequence, where the characters are interacting (our game-logo was added for this gif, and isn’t there in-game). I’d like to create a better high-five animation in the future, that looks a bit less stiff, but due to lack of time it will look like this for GGC. I’m also hoping to animate the excited poses, so that they aren’t just still images, but again, due to lack of time I won’t be able to do that before GGC tomorrow.

And that’s it for now. GGC starts tomorrow, and then we’ll be writing our reports before we’re finished. I’ll probably write one final post here before, or after, graduation, but I have a couple of other things to finish as well these last days before summer, so it might take a little while before I do that. Thank you for reading and sticking around!

Cheers!

/MPh

BGP – Scrap Pirates – Week 7

This past week I’ve been working on the trailer for Scrap Pirates, and finished it yesterday. We wanted to keep the trailer simple, using the in-game assets and gameplay footage, as we didn’t have the time to create a lot of new animations. The only “new” character animation in the trailer is a short pointing-animation consisting of three frames, where I just changed the arm on the idle-pose.

I began working on the trailer without the music, as we didn’t have the final music for the game yet. As soon as we got the music file though I went on with timing and editing what I’d already created to match the music. Everything was put together in Adobe After Effects CS5.

Now it’s just one week left before GGC (Gotland Game Conference). We’ve mostly got polishing left on the game, though there are a few things we still need to finish these last few days. What we show on GGC won’t be an entirely finished game though, it’s more of a demo, as that would have been impossible for us to finish in just 8 weeks.

Wish us luck!

Cheers!

/MPh

BGP – Scrap Pirates – Week 6

Last week I got a decent amount of work done, though I’m a bit late with this update. My bad.

After finishing the run cycle and jump animation, I could finally work on the run-shoot and jump-shoot animations. Both animations took, as expected, a lot less time than the previous ones, as I didn’t have to animate the whole body, but rather just change one of the characters’ arms. For the run cycle, I tried adding the straight shoot-arm from the shoot-animation to the run cycle, but with the rest of the body moving smoothly in the run, the arm felt too stiff and looked dislocated when the character moved.

Enjoy the moustache.

It was quickly decided that the arm had to be animated to match the rest of the animation.

When the run-shoot animation was finished, I moved onto the jump-shoot animation. I was able to re-use the arms I’d just made for the run to match it with the jump animation, so that it wouldn’t look stiff or dislocated.

Other than the shoot animations I’ve also been creating a “hit” or “hurt” frame to be used when the player takes damage in game. I created a couple of quick sketches, and discussed the poses with the rest of the group. After a little editing (opening the hands and putting of the balance slightly by moving the legs to make the character look less in control) we decided to go with the third of the sketches shown below.

That’s it for now. I’ll be updating again soon.

Cheers!

/MPh

BGP – Scrap Pirates – Week 5

The Beta and Final deadlines are closing in, and we’re working on getting things done before this weeks’ playtesting session. I finished shading the run cycle, but due to lack of time we’ve decided in the group that we won’t be adding highlights to it. If we get the time before the end of the project, I’ll add the highlights, but should we not get the time, it’s quicker and easier to remove the highlights from the idle-pose and the shoot-animation than adding it to all of the other animations.

I’ve finished the jump animation as well, also without adding the highlights as time won’t allow it at the moment. I’m quite happy with how it turned out. There are a few things I’d like to fix, but that will have to wait until, or if, I get the time before the final deadline. I suspect that I won’t get the time though, as there are a lot of things that needs finishing.

Now that the run cycle and the jump animations are done, I’m able to begin working on the rest of the shoot-animations, one for shooting whilst running, and one for shooting and jumping. Hopefully it won’t take as long as I’m just editing one of the arms on the existing run and jump animations.

Have a great week guys!

Cheers!

/MPh

BGP – Scrap Pirates – Week 4

This will be just a short update. I’ve been working on linearting, colouring and shading the run cycle of the player character, which took far longer than I’d hoped. The lineart and flat colours are done though, and I hope to be able to finish the shading soon, though I suspect that it’s going to take longer than I’d like it to. Due to a bit of sickness and accidentally cutting my own thumb I didn’t get as much work done as I’d like this week, but I’ll be sure to fight to get back on track with the work as soon as possible.

BGP – Scrap Pirates – Week 3

For the third week of the Big Game Project, I’ve been finishing and saving the main rough animations for the first player character as sprite sheets, as well as begun cleaning some of the animation. I spent a bit longer than expected with the shoot-animation, though it turned out very simple in the end (only being two frames long). I did a couple of different tests with the character holding his arms in different positions to see what felt and looked best, and discussed it with the other graphical artists. After some thinking and testing, for example with the character holding his shoot-arm with the other hand, we decided that we wanted the character to lift only one arm, keeping the other relaxed by his side in the same way as in the idle-stance. This kept the silhouette of the character clear and easy to read, compared to him covering his chest with one of the arm. I wish that I’d saved some of the other tests of the shoot-animation, but I accidentaly saved over the file. I need to remember not to save when I shouldn’t (and to save often when I should. I keep forgetting to save for long spells of time. Never forget to save your project!)

Other than working on the character animations, I also made a test animation for the magnetic fields that the characters will be using in the game to move around and solve puzzles. We haven’t had a completely clear view of exactly how we want the magnetic fields to look, so at first I was considering trying to make some sort of particle animation for this. After looking at a couple of different inspirations for the fields however, I decided to try another approach, which would, if we feel that it works with the rest of the game when we implement and test it, save a lot of time. Instead of creating a frame by frame animation from scratch, this method uses a tiling texture (that I created with Adobe Photoshop’s “Difference Clouds” effect) that I then used to make this moving shimmer on the surface of the fields.

More updates to come!

Cheers!

/MPh

BGP – Scrap Pirates – Week 1-2

Here we go again. After a long spell of burnt out silence I’m dusting of my blog and going back to writing. This time it’s for our last course of the year, and I’ll be writing a weekly post for about 8 to 9 weeks. As the title suggests this post will cover the first two weeks of what’s been going on with our Big Game Project (or BGP for short).

During these weeks we’ll be creating a slice of a bigger game concept, which will be presented at GGC (Gotland Game Conference) in May. I’m part of “Sprocket”, a group of seven people working on a project called “Scrap Pirates”. It’s a 2D metroidvania styled exploration/platformer game with focus on 2-player cooperative gameplay. The players take on the role of two space pirates that, with the use of magnetic abilities, solve puzzles and explore the insides of an old terraforming vessel in search for scraps and valuables.

The first two weeks were mainly spent with Pre-Production work, finishing the Design Document, dividing roles and tasks among the group members and starting working on the basics. I’ll be working as a graphical/animation artist, focusing mainly on character animation for the player-characters, as well as some effect animation.

We’ve chosen to go with a classic frame by frame style of animation for the player-characters, as we feel that it will give more charm to the characters that would have been harder to achieve through bone based animation, though it might require more time to finish.

So far I’ve managed to finish the rough test-animations for the character run cycle, as well as the jump-animation. The most difficult part with getting everything to look right was the perspective of the character. Though the game will be a 2D side-view game, the characters will be viewed slightly from the front instead of in profile.

To get the perspective and movement right, I started with very rough sketch-animations. When the movement and weight of the character felt right, I went onto creating slightly cleaner roughs, to make sure that the character proportions were better, and added in-betweens.

I’ll be continuing work on the animations, creating roughs for idle- and shoot animations, as well as creating a rough magnetic-field effect animation. From there I’ll have to start cleaning some of the roughs before the Alpha stage of our production.

Wish me luck!

Cheers!

/MPh

3D Week 9-10 – Assignment 3 Final

Here’s a visual update of my final assignment 3 model.

My 3D-model of the character Vinda in UDK.

It wasn’t easy to model an organic character, though it wasn’t as crazily hard as I expected it to be. I’ve made some mistakes, but I’m still learning, and each mistake that I make and acknowledge is a step towards making it right. I had some trouble with distortion in my textures and though I know how it works I’m still having a hard time getting my Specular and Normal maps right. But I’m practicing, and I’m learning.

The model and UV map in 3Ds Max.

My texture set. Diffuse – Specular – Normal.

And that’s it for the 3D1 course! It’s been a hectic period, with a lot of work in the course as well as in the Advanced Game Design course that’s been running parallel to this one. I’ve learned a lot more than I thought I would, and I’m looking forward to beginning on the 3D2 and Motion Capture courses next!

Cheers!

/MPh

3D Week 8 – Assignment 3 update

Here’s a visual update on how my character model of Vinda is coming along. You can read more about my work with the character in my previous Assignment 3 related posts, and read more about the character herself in my post “About Vinda”.

I was supposed to have made this visual update last week, but due to a large amount of other work I hadn’t been able to finish the model by then.

3D Week 8 – 3D scan, Retopo and Photogrammetry

During our eighth week in the 3D1 course we learned about modelling faces. One of the weeks’ exercises was to make a retopo of a 3D scanned head, meaning that we were to clean up the topography of the model, making it simpler whilst still maintaining the same shape. Those of us who wanted to got to try and make facial scans of our own heads to work with. In order to make a 3D scanned object you need to take pictures of it from several angles, preferably as many angles as possible. The more photos you have of the object you want to scan, the more information the program will have to match the images together, and the more information the program has the better the scan will become. Sometimes the program won’t be able to read all of the photos correctly, and you might need to go in and manually move photos and correct the model to get it right.

When we had the photos we were to add them to a program called “123D catch”, which would let us create a model from the photos. I had trouble signing in to the program however, as I couldn’t remember my password, so I wasn’t able to create a model from my own face, and instead went with a finished scan of another head so that I could follow in the exercise.

When the 3D-scan was finished, or we had gotten our hands on the already finished scan, we were to use our trial version of “3D coat” to build a model on top of the scan. We were to mainly focus on modelling around the eyes and mouth, those areas being some of the most important edge flows in the face, especially if you want to be able to animate the face later on.

Another thing we were asked to do this week was to read this article on “Photogrammetry” in the game “The Vanishing of Ethan Carter”. I’d already watched some footage of the game, and found the game world beautiful beyond any other game world that I’ve looked at up to date, and reading through the article I understood why that was. Creating believable, living environments is a very hard thing to do, and none does it better than nature itself. An artist can think that he knows how wear and tear on objects should look, but not even the best artists can compete with the real thing, and using photogrammetry this game added just that believable-ness that many other games tend to lack. I can’t say that I’m anything but utterly impressed by how they’ve created the environment of this game. Photogrammetry is basically the same technique as what we used to scan our faces – taking a multitude of photos of an object in order to create a 3D scan of it, but used in a much larger scale in order to recreate environments, from rocks to entire hillsides.

The technique isn’t perfect however, and it’s very time-consuming. There are many factors to consider when taking the photos, such as how sunny it was, the light and contrast, and making sure that none of the images where shaky. The article linked above describes the process in detail, and I’d warmly recommend reading it.

Cheers!

/MPh