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.

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.

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

Tower Homework

I made a tower for the homework and I need to light it, but I need to keep making it. Classroom is being taken over. Gotta go
. 

Horror Game Ideation

I needed to make a controversial item, so I chose to draw a steampunk leg that people remove their legs so they can have because in some aspects it is viewed as superior to organics.

I also had to design a cursed weapon so I made a melee range nuke called Baby Barbara.

There was the environment challenge of making a horror environment with sunflower and baby rattle. I wanted to emphasize dramatic lighting.

Previous Exercise about Writing for Games

Tuesday May 1526, New Courtauld, the Quiet Isle, Atlantic

This is Governor Angus Dovebloom, I need to write about the issues our colony is having your Majesty. I have written before to many officers and merchants but to no avail. There is never a response, so I feel as Governor of New Courtauld I must assure the safety of my people for I fear that there is not much time to fix what has been done.

There is a small team assigned to dealing with this minor but growing problem of cannibalism on the island. Increasingly the “wraiths” have been talked about more by locals, and apparently cannibalism is the only way to do this. You’d think these people weren’t British with the way they leap to this… I feel food should be sent, and the resources/trained people to construct a prison of sorts.

I strongly advise you do not visit New Courtauld. I am doing my best to keep people here from returning to England.

-          Governor Angus Dovebloom

FLAVOUR TEXT EXERCISE

Animignus

The Animignus was constructed from demon material. It was first made to slay demons, the silver bullet for their kind if you will. Unfortunately the minor effect of summoning a demon was at first troubling, the summoned demon seems to aid those who summoned it. This has sparked controversy in what being a demon means in some circles, especially as to whether or not they can only be malevolent. 

Welcome to Unity!

Today I've been working on making a little room with a sphere in it to learn about materials.

I was trying to copy notes to my notebook but quite frankly I got more confused. I really need to look at Unity tutorials on the website.

I made a procedural sky box. I should also experiment with using a sky box that I've downloaded from No Emotion HDRs.