Animation Refinement

Smoothing things out

I was late today but in the time I had at class I smoothed out some of the arm movements because they were a bit extreme for an idle animation. It made the swinging of the arms as the NPC looked both ways. I'm currently working on relaxing the hands. 

Jerwin and I tried the legs with IK but with the time we have left it would be too hard to stabilize the feet and we may as well leave the legs be. 

Idle animation

Character Animation

Large NPC looking around

The goal is to have a nice subtle animation of the man looking around vaguely threatening.

I didn't finish the standing animation today but I animated a lot of the core. I'm learning about keeping things small but trying to put as much character into the animation as possible.

Idle Animation - Research

List of thing that need to be animated

Background Character

• walk cycle, 1 for each
• idle animation
• smoking
• drinking
• sitting down
• looking around
• looking frightened

Resource Links

• idle animation tips
• 10 best animation tips and tricks
• 10 killer tips for better character animation

Self Reflection

Today I got my grade for Assessment 2: Environmental Game Asset Summative (20%). I'm disappointed in my final grade being a B- (66%). Whilst I did "good work overall", I feel as though I could've done better. I stand by my decision to use nurbs because I wanted the player to walk around the signs and I don't like it when you see the edge of a sprite in a 3D game, I always find it a bit world breaking personally. The polycount was definitely too high, I completely forgot to reduce the polycount which is something to keep in mind for the next time I model. Always keep things optimized.

The concept art was not polished enough. I'm struggling to find a balance with concept art, a common problem in my portfolio is that it looks too illustrative. Next time I do concept art for a project I should search out concept art of games in a similar vein as the project I'm doing at present so that my standard is what's necessary. A challenge was rendering neon tubes, I was unsure how to show this. I understand that concept art is focused on conveying ideas and materials, I didn't do this effectively because I drew for very low poly and untextured. 

Ultimately, the thing to take away from this is that everything could potentially contribute to your portfolio, so it's worth making something as nice as you can and going that extra mile. 

Game Assets being made

Today I worked on making a simple low poly window based off an image of New York apartments. I also made a grate for the side of roads. The idea was that this would be part of a modelling kit that can be placed around the city to add low level detail to certain areas.

Asset Image Refs

I've spent this morning gathering some relevant photos of balconies, doors, grates, and windows that are all art deco. I made Trello cards for everyone so that we can have all this research in one place to talk about what we're doing easily.

To keep to the low poly style our group has decided on for the game I selected art deco designs that were simple. The idea is to make assets that we can drag and drop into scenes. A modelling kit if you will. I chose to focus on more art deco elements in this city of different designs because I'm interested in the strong shapes that are made with art deco design. I think art deco as an architectural style would translate very well to low poly modelling. We plan to model in maya, assemble the building in another maya file, and then take it into unity after that is all done.

I'd like to see what other images people have to determine if the images I've selected to model would be fitting for the city. I think it will be fine as long as I keep my choices simple.

I'm thinking ahead excitedly to making unique smaller assets for our setting. Making some plant pots and rubbish bags next to bins would be fun.

Planning for Assets

Had a talk with the group about making assets for our game Neon/Noir. We've made a timetable on trello and put up some cards so that we can write some asset ideas down for what we'd be interested in find ref pictures for to model.

Inspirational Artists

• Skottie Young
• Sean Galloway
• Tradd Moore

Chats with Jerwin about art are good

Lady One is Ready!

I used the nurb curve technique to make this. I'm happy with how my drawing translate to the wire form, I think it efficiently conveys what I want in a style than I can call my own. I encountered the problem of having the normals flipped. I've never comes across flipped nurb normals so I googled how to fix the problem. You go into the modelling tab and into Surfaces>Reverse Direction right at the bottom of the popup window. I also discovered that if you don't have a little nurbs circle to do Surfaces> Extrude and/or select multiple curves at once it doesn't create the polygons in the right way. The object/curves also have to be quite big so that the polygons aren't inverse which is why the maya grid seen in the picture above is super tiny. I found this process pretty fun.

Fresnel Effect

A term I learned today was Fresnel effect. It is when the edges of an object are more reflective.

This could be useful to understand not only for illustration but also somewhat for puddles. I'm sure there are more uses granted the fresnel effect indicates how smooth or rough the surface of an object is.

Emission Mapping and Other Notes

Today Regan and Lena sat down and taught me about emission mapping with some pretty interesting results.

Regan left this on my computer:

objects involved with emissive need to be static so that baking works... you need to bake.

emissive map should have an alpha channel, plug in to albedo and emission

standard shader should have transparency options.

BUZZWORDS!!!
PBR - Physically Based Shading (sometimes called Physically Based Shading)
Emission (in the context of unity GI)

In maya I was walked through creation a neon effect by upping the incandescence. The unity equivalent is emmission. From what I can see they work very similarly.

A difference is in Unity a thing called albedo is referred to. Albedo is both the alpha and the diffuse. This means that I can use cutout to have the alpha make work, but also the colour information weill be added through the albedo too.

Lena showed me a really cool thing that involved gridding up photoshop and effectively making an animation on a 3D object in unity.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/StandardShaderMaterialParameterEmission.html This is all very vital information. It's worth reading about other things in here too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW19bguFoHg How to create a neon sign in maya. Very similar to what Lena taught.

Illustration of Perfect Society

The thing is, a "perfect society" isn't really something I believe can exist without really weird personal biases that lead to a variety of -isms that shouldn't be happening unless you're talking in such a vague abstract sense that nothing even matters anymore because what you're saying cannot physically apply to any plane of reality... So I drew what I wanted to draw. My idea of perfection is deeply tied to concepts of freedom. By doing what I wanted, I technically performed society running well. I used my instincts, and skill to create something to add to the world's narrative. But I did not tell anyone else that their ideas were wrong. Sounds ideal right.

Look at this

I rendered out the bubble guy at better quality to look at! I'm quite proud of him and I want to play around with Krita~

bubble guy arbitrary tasks thanks

This is what I animated in Krita when I thought about the water stock footage. It's a little bubble character slooshing his way up. I am uploading it as a gif captured with gyazo because Krita keeps giving me an error when I try export...

Dane's Journal Exercises that I did

I abstracted the idea of roman column building and fused it with the fluidity of animation. The abstraction resulted in a spirit that eats colour and light by deconstructing organics and items.

I modelled a still image by painting in photoshop. I believe that when the artist hands over a piece of art to be viewed, the interpretation is up to the viewer. Whilst I believe that this image represent past, present and future, one may interpret it as a struggle, or as a harmony. I think this variation in interpretation is what makes the piece capture all aspects of past, present and future.

column - animation

Lots of room for exploration!

Asset ideas

After class I went away and thought about what kind of assets I could make for our game. These are some scans from my sketchbook that detail my thought process.

Discussing Brief

Today our group had a meeting to go over the brief and discuss heavily.

Discussing mechanic - We think there should be a fusebox type object around the level that we can interact with by placing a mechanic hand on it. This allows either neon to go through a path from the fusebox. You can cancel out neon with noir.

Having lamps on the street, with fusebox on it. You can blow the lamp with neon.

Turn the elevator on with neon by touching the fusebox with your mechanical hand. One hand is neon, one hand is noir. Both of these resources are stored in the mechanical arms.

Jerwin was thinking of the captains gate being the objective. To get past the guy blocking the path you might have to burst a lamp above the guy to scare him. Jerwin also suggests collecting neon from people.

The puzzles could be wiring. Trying to get throught the Captains Gate into the Captains Club where there's starting to be shading dealing. Junkie rooms. This is where noir trade.

Junkie room earlier is to play with noir.

The captains gate opens an eye slot. You get noir from the final encounter guy underneathe the light. To get into the club, you must pump noir into the door to block a path and you are let in. Sort of like an entry fee. Paying off the guy to let you in.

Run through the level, collect neon and noir, use it to get past dudes and open doors.

Time Management

Welp, I've learned the hard way by letting down my team. The submission folder shuts at the date mentioned. I'm gonna have to be more vigilant about time. This is because late submissions are not accepted in studio, so it's for our benefit.

Neon Noir - Dystopian Cyberpunk

Working on this project has been interesting due to the sheer amount of ideation happening. It's been exciting so far.

General Feel for the streets

My protag concept. I wanted to fuse robocop from Jerwin's suggestion and some typical noir elements

First Landscape concept with very sheer vertical drops, the idea of a tall city

Art Deco Posters for inspiration

Some Gatsby to look at for patterns

Punks for the lowerclass

more mood stuff

art deco stuff

alexander mcqueen for high class

avante garde for the high class

Colour palette and feel as well 

architecture/environment ideas

I really think Blade Running fits what we're doing so well

Noir lighting is beautiful, minimal, and effective

I thought xcom and saints row would be good games to pull look and inspiration ideas from

The Manner of Organics

In my discussion with Dane last week, I realised that what I'm more leaning towards is the social aspect of production in terms of flow. There is a process through both mediums of column production in roman times and animation in the present day. Both have workers gathering and transporting the resources which were formed chemically in nature. The training of people to craft this beautiful objects. The bringing of them together in waves of productivity. Each craft mostly performed in the same place during daylight hours, planned to function over a course of time. Each part of the craft being made in little seperate parts with a central core. Timing is animations core, and the metal rod and central holy is the columns core. A time chart in this regard is comparable to the central core and therefore pure idea of a column. The position in space, the dimensions, and the feel is dictated by a gestural line representing both space and time for both animation and column building.

As advised I need to really start refining on what process I exactly intend to craft out of these two. It's bizarre because in my head I feel these two to be absolutely tied in a way that is unmovable. But to put it into words, that's another task. I would love to explore the nature between space and time but perhaps I should leave the social gathering aspect by the roadside to keep the assignment doable.

I really adore the idea of comparing the segmented process held by a literally pole of planning. In the form of a metal pipe. In the form a line to plot movement path with timing notes. It'll be interesting to represent this in a physical sculpture next term.

Spacial Time

I've been looking into an artist called Daniel Ramos Obregon, I love his work and I really like how he is sculptural exploring extensions of the body. I think it really goes with ideas of space, especially how organics fill space in different moments of time. I feel as though, whilst it deviates from the column idea, I could employ the process of both column and straight ahead animation together in my understanding of spacial awareness.