SSS – Project

Starting this project I needed to seek out reference images and create a moldboard to influence my own shield/sword design.

I then needed to create some hand drawn concepts which could be used as reference images within an image plane on Maya when modelling.

Unfortunately I have had an issue with my had drawings being scanned in and they were all formatted as pdf files. This means I will have to link them all instead of being able to have images in place here as i uploaded them to word press without realising and I am currently blogging from home.

Shield concept 1 

Shield Concept 3 

Shield Concept 4 

Shield Concept2

Shield Concept 5 

Weapon Concept 1

Weapon Concept 2

Weapon Concept 3

Weapon Concept 4

After picking my final design I needed to model them withing Maya, at first I started with my shield as I thought this would have been the easier one of the two and once the models were finished I then needed to export them as an fbx file so they could be imported into substance painter to be textured.

Animation Walk Cycle

 

Today I looked over my animation walk cycle for anything that I may have missed and with not being sure exactly as what to do with my hands I decided to curl them into fists.

This is the easiest solution to my problem as it means I don;’t have to worry about animating separate fingers whereas I can treat a fist as a singular object.

Even though I have amended my fists and and a few other values with wrists/hand to help keep everything together and ensure that they suddenly don’t move out of place during a frame.

Watching over the video above I can still see a few things that I would like to amend, the main issue is his right shoulder is further forward than it should be throughout most frames an I would also like to reduce the gap between stepping distance as his legs currently stretch a bit far out as though he is taking as big a step as possible every time.

The most part of this will be altering values per frame to ensure that all the movement per frame is equal distance, this can also help me restrict movement if I start with the first and last frames then work within the boundaries provided. Once I have altered these values and cleaned up the walk a little I will then render my animation from multiple viewpoints.

Modelling my weapon

The issue with my weapon is that I picked a combination of two, a battle axe and a scythe.

The battle axe side of the weapon was easily made by creating an orb and flattening it down a bit. Not entirely flat as this forms the sharp edge of the blade.

The next thing I done was create a smaller sized cylinder and lined it up using top view/wire frames to align the outer edges of the cylinder with the second most inner circle of my flattened ball, once that has been done I then copied the cylinder and done the same on the opposite side.

I then used booleans to selecting the flattened orb and then one of the cylinders and using difference booleans to remover the overlapping parts of the objects and then repeated this on the other side.

This left me with a double sided battle axe but as this isn’t what I was going for.

I picked one side and revoked the top half, this then gave me the freedom to stretch out and curve what was remaining to try and form a scythe blade.

Currently I am still trying to perfect the scythe blade, what I need to do for this is add some more vertices which will give me greater manipulation of the shape as the current model has some faces larger than others which means when altering it doesn’t bend perfectly.

(Some pictures to be added when back home)

Bumper game (concept)

I have a concept for a home project which is to create a bumper cars style game in which the player must knock of enemy Boer cars to succeed.

I thought of this while considering option based minigames withing larger games, this was inspired by a level on Crash Bash inparticular, specifically the mini game/level where the slope was a block of ice and you had to knock of your opponents while keeping yourself on the platform.

This is my current model for a bumper car which is yet to be improved as the seat needs to be smoothed out and the bottom of the car make it look more like a hovercraft type of vehicle.

I have yet to compile a scene for testing as I consider my modeling skills to be a weaker point in my skillset so I wanted to try and improve upon that first.

Shield Renders

When I firt put my shield into Substance painter I was looking for more metalic colors to use although the majority of these ended up showing up more as a gold skin on the shield and had to becaome change.

When I changed them I wanted to try add a rough texture to the center of the shield which will be highlighted by a darker surrounding colour and scratched on the sides.

Although my shield turned out pretty well there are a few things I believe I could have done differently such as reducing that gap in between as well as giving it more of a fractured look.

I could also add a small amount of blood onto the spikes as well as “brackets” to help hold the split structure as opposed to straps.

These are all things to consider if I a similar design in future.

Practice-Jam

Today I was tasked with essentially a mini game jam project in which I will be teaming up with Lee and Jessie. The objective of the jam is to use all of the features that we have been given so far using code. These features iclude generalt mechanics of running, jumping, picking up objects, having a timer and score count as well as using attraction code for eneamies and also firing something which in our case will be a misile to kill the player.

 

The game we are using as inspiration for this project is called N++ which is a widely renowned plat former game created by  Metanet Software.

http://www.metanetsoftware.com/about-us

 

This game is their major, they started with “N” in 2004 then created “N+” in 2008 and finally “N++” in 2015, the game itself is a puzzle plat former in which the player must complete the level by reaching the goal within the time limit, however it is not always as simple as it sound as there will be keys to collect, enemies will chase the player, missiles till be fired at the player and mines will be placed around the levels meaning some surfaces are untouchable.

http://www.nplusplus.org/

The concept of this game includes all of the thing that we must use throughout this project.

 

Symbiotic character design

Today I started looking at character design based around the concept of having an alternate life force essentially, the relationship between multiple characters who cannot physically sustain without each other.

Examples of this are things such as parasites which once detached from their victim/host they cannot no longer sustain life

The idea I went with for this design was a cyborg and I was looking into the idea of a conflicting core/life force. This could be something along the line of very highly maintained or the slightest fault will mean it will break and stop producing energy or something that could go deeper with character design in which the character himself in essentially a “hero” but the core itself will provoke some evil tendencies.

 

Jam prep – Trigonometry

Today I had a refresher course on trigonometry and how it can be when coding a game to triangulate player moments and rotation.

There was a total of four sample scenes that were available to test

Moving with trig, Moving without trig, Turning with trig and Turning without trig.

Theses each demonstrated the difference between suing the built in unity features for calculating values vs seeing how they are handled with out.

There is a noticeable difference with how smooth the turns and and rotational movements are, the code can also be altered to ensure that it stops priciecly in the direction that you leave the character rather than snapping to up, down, left right meaning it can stop on any angle.

 

Walk Cycle Peer Review

Assessor name: Jessie Thompson

Their animation is smooth, however some poses seem to stop suddenly, at least the hand movements still seems a little rigid. The legs are smooth for the most part, moving fairly realistically. The walk seems to squash slightly while following it’s arch; some slight exaggeration is present too.
Maybe to improve, work on the arms and move the legs closer together as it looks great from the side however, looks a little odd from the front. Maybe have less of a head bob as it looks a little unnatural at the moment.

 

My reflections on my feedback

Looking at my feedback the major point were:

Too much exaggeration on the head bob, legs were spread to far apart, and the hands don’t move as swift as they should.

The first thing that I altered was the head bob which now that it has been reduced I can tell that it does look more realistic.

I next worked on the distance that was between the legs and after going through the frames and moving them closer together I noticed that there was a couple of points where the knee was angled out slightly and this has also bee altered.

I have started working on improving the hand movement but apoun doing this I created another problem, one of the arms now swings outwards a little when it is moving. This is now my new point of interest for improving my animation.

Animated short

The animated short started with some initial planning of ideas and following on from that with my chosen idea I then needed to think up a synopsis and list out what exactly would happen throughout the scene.

I went with the idea of a ceiling robot similar to glados from the portal series.

I then began thinking about the treatment of the animation, this consists of a list of detailed actions that would be implemented into the scene. I then began thinking up an asset list of objects that could help the scene feel more filled and complete

Animation Short Planning

All of this can be viewed via slide show using the link above.

These are the images that I was able to source for referencing, keeping to a minimalistic  style I will be looking more closely at the lego model.

I then refined my model and changed the head block to a casual which fits the design.

I started by using point to point animating, plotting key frames and refining where was needed. When i started playing back and reviewing my animation I used blocking to view it as a literal step by step view of the key points.

At first I was having an issue with Maya and it was not filling in the frames so it was only showing my a blocked animation so ~I started plotting out the entire thing frame by frame myself which ended up looking like this.

But Matt helped me sort this error so I didn’t need anywhere near as many frames and was able to get it down to this

There are still more frames here than I probably needed at this point but it was enough to keep the animation playing in a robotic manor rather than it automatically smoothing out at points I didn’t  need it to.

The images above show my early design which was later changed to a more rounded face

 

Once I had finished my animation and changed the settings back to linear I then needed to create a setting for it to be placed in, to do this I created a sphere and reversed the faces.

This means I can place my model inside of it and texture the inside to create a background. I found the most fitting picture that I could which would fit the sphere correctly (images designed to be used in VR are better for this).