Date:	2009-05-13 11:31
Subject:	Animation and Polishing
Security:	Public
Mood:	exhausted

By the 5th of May the animation cycles were complete. The focus of that time went onto the "dancing" animations which are used when the characters went through to build the bridges. I was struggling with the movement when one of my peers handed me a stick which was laying in the corner of the room and said it might help. It has proved very handy as I could see how much my character's can move. Making the staff have handles made the character's unable to move their hands along the shaft meant it was more simple to animate but I was more limited in its movement.

                After all the cycles were completed, I moved all the assets into one folder, reapplied the textures and started making the final animation. I decided to scrap the pre production animatic because it didn't show the game for what it is and one reason was that the camera didn't show the in game view, another was because it was simply too short.

                I did a little research in the Motion Mixer in the Graph Editor tab of 3D Max. This allowed me to import all the cycles. This allowed me to create an animation more efficiently and I personally felt it portrayed what the in game would look like better. When merging all the modals into the level and setting them up in the motion mixer I discovered that they could no longer be moved so I had to create a new dummy which everything in the Mixer would be linked to. I have also found that characters who are animated and that have long extensions, such as holding a long spear, can be prone to clipping as on multiple occasions the spear went through the geometry of the bridges.


(Long extremetries meant that clipping is a risk when using Motion Mixer)

                With the final animation completed on the 7th of May. I spent the remainder of the 8th patching the final animation up by adding various textures which were more vital to the signalling to the player. Time was taken adding details to the water pools, creating alphas for the falling up rain and the glow and then making them scroll allowing them to be moved and animated. Adding in some light sources meant that the starting power source and the checkpoint looked important. Time was taken to create a curser and combined with the animated camera, created a scene of an in game view.


(The curser and the checkpoint were polished to emphasize the signalling)
 

Date:	2009-04-27 18:13
Subject:	Animation 27th April
Security:	Public
Mood:	good

 This morning I started with the rock character's walk cycle. Unlike the graceful forest character, the rock character will be more heavy footed. I first started making a normal walk cycle before modifying the key frames so that the rising foot took longer than the quick and heavy step. After a little bit of acting, stomping around the classroom, I found putting a pause allowed to emphasize the landing.

This is the result of the animating:

Simon Cooper, Lead Artist in Curve Studios looked over my animation and told me I need to show more anticipation and follow through where he lands his foot, his upper torso should continue that little more. I plan to fix this soon but I need to complete all the other cycles first.

12:00 pm I started on the bridge building animations which I considered to be the hardest. These animations are where the character will build the bridge through interpretive dance. The one I did first is for the forest form building the tree bridge. At first I tried using various videos from YouTube of martial spear arts but the spear that I made couldn't allow for the movement. I scrapped it and started again at 4pm and remembered Simon telling me that animation has to have some acting skill. I decided I can no longer just sit there and animate and so I stood up and physically done the moves which the characters will do.

It is unfinished but this is what I have done so far:

What I have learnt

- Anticipation and Follow through add an emphasis
- Animation is easier done by physically doing the moves yourself though references can still be useful. 

Date:	2009-04-24 15:16
Subject:	Animation and Texturing
Security:	Public
Mood:	accomplished

Starting the 25th I started work on the staffs that the player's character will be using to make the bridges with. I only had a few days left before the Easter break started and I wanted to be ready for texturing. I grabbed the orthographic images of the staffs and put them onto plains which I would modal to. I had already done a fair share of practice with modelling and unwrapping so I was able to make both staffs by the end of the 26th of March. I kept both forms the same length and kept the handles at the same place.

(Both staffs fully modelled)

20th April I begun the texturing. I begun with the staffs as I felt starting on something smaller would bring my up to speed for when I did more detailed modals such as the characters. I managed to get the two forms of the staffs and both characters to a good quality when I realised on the 22nd that I was going to fall further behind in my timetable. I decided to put all the basic colours on all my objects which I completed on the 23rd. I will continue texturing once I have finished the animation.

(The staffs textured)

24th of April

I am currently animating the forest form with the staff. I plan on doing all the cycle animations before importing them into my level to create an "in game" video. I plan on having this all completed and ready to render by the 1st of May.

To animate the Satyr like forest form, I looked online to find videos of graceful horses trotting. I have discovered that the staff couldn't be keyed and animated when it is an xref object but can be linked with the body. I solved this problem by exporting the staff directly in the file so now I can animate the staff across the 3d space.

Date:	2009-04-24 15:09
Subject:	The Game World
Security:	Public
Mood:	pleased

After completing the goals I decided to begin the final level. I begin this on the 19th of March with a search for references. To keep with the fantasy element I felt that the world had to be not of this one but familiar at the same time. I reminded myself of Asian folklore of a land of high mountains which were more like columns. The references I found of these where from a movie "The Forbidden Kingdom" and the BBC's animated intro to the Chinese Olympics.

("The Forbidden Kingdom" [top left] and BBC's "Olympics 2008 Monkey Movie" [the rest] The steep high columns of the mountains added a feel of magic especially with the clouds.)

As well as an aesthetic viewpoint, the use of this kind of terrain allows for the bridge building to be more apparent as the level is bottomless. I begun on 3D Max to create a level by using the various modals I already made, the bridges, starting point, checkpoint and both the goals. These objects were placed around to make the level as small as possible and thusly keep more detail. The other reason for this was I was thinking about what the player will see and how they will react to various obstacles and goals, the player's path.

I created the mountains soon after, keeping them at varying angles and shapes. The ones that were further away were made with less geometry. The clouds were made with planes layered over each other at varying opacities to creature the soft fading of the mountains.

Lastly was the texturing. I was quickly running out of time and I felt that unwrapping every mountain in the game level would take too long to create. I decided to make use of a tiling texture. I remembered from my tree bridge that it is easy to create obvious tiling so I attempted to make a rock texture with no true obvious features. On the 25th the final result looks like this:

(Wide shot of the level)

(Players view of the start, facing one of the goals)


(Level with some base textures)


What I have learnt:

· Level layouts and how players will react to the environment.

· Using simple plains to create an atmosphere

· Creating some tiling textures with no obvious tiling

· Reminding myself constantly that "Small is Beautiful"

Date:	2009-04-22 16:23
Subject:	Personal Development
Security:	Public
Mood:	accomplished

On the 11th of March I posted my latest portfolio piece on DeviantART. It was a learning experience as I did seek to enhance my colouring skills which I felt is incredibly useful for the final major project when it comes to creating diffuse maps for texturing.  Here is the picture of the 24 hours of work:

(This personal development is now used as a portfolio piece. It has taught me methods and techniques I can use in my texturing.)

I started the piece with a simple sketch. To help me with the composition of the city I used 3D Max to create some props out of simple cubes which I drew onto paper by eye. After sketching onto paper, I scanned it onto the computer and onto Photoshop.

(The final sketch)

Beginning with a background colour which consisted of the darkest shades, I added the base colours. I found that using a basic brush with 60% opacity and 40% flow allows for a more painterly stroke and gentle blending of shades. After colouring the dragon, I discovered that there wasn't enough variety so I used an adjustment layer to change the hue and saturation of the horns.

(Using the adjustment layer to change the colour)

It is then one of my peers told me that I should apply base colour onto all the image so I had an understanding of the shading and highlights. Shortly after applying the base colour I realised that the dragon was too bright and I had to fix it using another adjustment layer.

(The dragon began to feel out of place due to the different lighting)

I continued using the paint brush, occasionally using other tools before I reached this stage:

(The image presented to Climax)

After talking to one of the artists in Climax I found I could enhance the image's atmosphere by a deeper understanding of colour theory. I washed the entire picture in a dark blue with the glow of the city lights to reflect on the motorbike rider. To make the dragon burst out of the picture, I had made the highlights on it more yellow. The final result is the image above.

What I have learnt:

·         A wide range of Photoshop skills

- Creating custom brushes and its application

- Creating adjustment layers and masks

- Apply the base colour overall before going into more detail allowing the lighting

- A deeper understanding of colour theory for atmosphere and composition

- Creating a coloured piece with no guide markings remaining

Date:	2009-03-18 14:56
Subject:	Selling Yourself
Security:	Public
Mood:	contemplative

                Shortly after presenting my work to my peers. I was reminded that I had to continue on my timetable otherwise I would be further behind. Right now I have to work on something, get it finished and continue to the next.

                Before I made a start on the exits of both the tree and the stone goals, the class had opportunities to show our works to them and to sell our art. The first attempt ended up with a discussion on how to present myself far more better. Instead of showing him objects in 3D Max and having to explain in words, it is advised for me to simply show a select few pictures which explains my game and that first picture alone telling what the entire game is about. Now I had a folder to itself now with a select few JPEGs on the side so when anyone comes around and asks about my work, I can now sell my game effectively by using those few pictures.

                10th of March and leads from Climax came over to look at our work and to give a seminar about their company and what they look out for, for post graduates. Again, simplicity is key when they explain that having only five or even fewer  images is key to selling yourself and any more is a risk of boring the potential employer. Among other topics in artwork was discussed, one thing I have realised is the use of colour theory where how different colours work together to create atmosphere and more. I used this on my current portfolio piece which I have put on www.draconder.deviantart.com.

                12th of March and both exits have been completed and unwrapped. To show them more as a goal I plan on using lighting shining through the gap between the wall/tree and the door.


(The two exits fully modelled. The stone exit above and the tree exit below.)

                13th of March I have made a start on the Glamour Wells. These are the power source which the player uses to produce the bridge parts. The models need to show this power and so as I modelled both the starting power source and the checkpoint  I kept in mind a number of things.

1. I put the power source on top of steps so when the  player survey the level, they will be on a higher ground and will be able to quickly notice the checkpoints.

2. The wells of power have a glow of light signifying the power, as the power is used up then the glow will fade.

3. There are upside down maelstroms of liquid energy that will shrivel when the power is used.

4. Other effects will be rain falling upwards which will be created by scrolling textures.

Date:	2009-03-03 16:12
Subject:	Final Major Project (testing the tree)
Security:	Public
Mood:	optimistic
Music:	"Walking On Air" Kerli

I have been recently testing various methods on how I can make my tree grow faster with some being more successful than others. My original plan is to have the individual parts of the tree broken up and having their own bones and having the branches sprout out from the tree trunk. This will take time so today I experimented on how I can make a tree grow up along a spline.



First thing I have discovered is the tree, already bent into shape, would deform when going around the curve of the spline (shown above). I come to realise that in order for the spline to work is to have the tree straightened to begin with. I did this by adding bones to the main tree trunk and then attempted to move the bones. The problem this produced is that the bones would follow the path but the tree stayed where it was. (see below)



With the tree straightened by moving the bones, I tried adding a "Path Deform" on the tree itself. The results proved interesting shown with the video below. The geometry would be deformed slightly in the process which I am confident I can fix but what concerns me is that the bones do not follow the tree.

What I would like is to have the bones follow the path with the tree remaining on the bones. This way I can make a clear path on the spline and thusly keep the geometry.

Tomorrow I will look into this. If I do not get adequate results I will have to bone, rig and skin the tree and animate the individual parts manually which may take more time.

Date:	2009-03-02 15:27
Subject:	Final Major Project (The Bridges)
Security:	Public
Mood:	hopeful
Music:	"Broken Wings" SOiL

Wednesday 25th February

I decided to make a start on the bridges because they too are an important part of the game and I decided to texture the main characters later on in the assignment. I first started with the tree support and used Google to find some more references to go with my current concept sketches.

 I started building the low poly version of the tree trunk and branches, fashioning it in the style of a willow tree. The next day I decided to redo the trunk but with more polygons as the player's camera will be going through the leaves and be up close so my detail needs to be high. After 12 hours my tree is at this stage.

I posted this on the forum and many advised me to test the alpha planes. The next day I began by testing the alpha, modifying the photo's I found I added them to the leaves and a tiling texture for the trunk. Upon closer inspection in the player's view, the tree with too low detail, the tiling textures are obvious and some of the leaves floated from the branches. I was advised to remove the leaves and have the tree to be budding. The primary test left the tree looking rather bare, almost dead. My peers suggested I should continue on the willow tree and add more detail. I considered to make the bridges smaller because one line I hear often is "build small, build beautiful." suggesting smaller levels can have more detail and look picturesque but I decided to keep the tree and stone bridge the size they were.

I was advised to continue with my next bridge, the stone statue the next day. Like before, I grabbed more reference to accompany the concept sketch I have. The idea is that these massive statues would come from the ground and pick up the bridge platform for your character to cross over. I learnt that detail on organic shapes, when up close, need more polygons and so I built the statue the same as a normal sized character. The whole modal took 16 hours to produce, 10 for the body and another 6 for the rocky outcrop that the statue will come out from. I also learnt that little details adds to the quality especially if the camera will be close to it so I had a large chunk of his head broken off and it losing a little of its right ear.

The stone bridge has been unwrapped and is ready to be rigged. I plan on having both the statue and tree bridges unwrapped, rigged and fully detailed by Monday the 2nd of March

What I have learnt:

• Objects that the game camera will be close to needs more geometry and/or detail.

Monday 2nd March

Today I have finished the skinning and the rigging. I have found the "Mirror Parameters" in the skin modifier extremely useful as I only had to modify the weights of the bones on half the modal and mirror it onto the other half. This saved a lot of time and has made something that would have taken me 33 hours done only in 16 hours. This shows I am improving by practice. All that needs to be done for the stone statue bridge is to make the bridge part it will pick up and unwrap the rocks. I plan on testing the tree bridge growth shortly after that as I have an idea but not tested the method of how this tree will grow and my tutor and peers were curious if it would work. I need to test my ideas more often or along the line they might not work and I have wasted time and effort. Speaking of testing, on the Friday I did a test of how the statue will come out of the rocky outcrop, this animatic is rudimentary but it is there to show other people my ideas.

Once the wooden tree bridge has been tested, I will make a start on the magical staffs which will be wielded by the character to build these bridges.

What I have learnt:

• The combination of practice, mirror parameters and a skinning script has allowed for a more effective time.
• Test everything once it is complete.

Date:	2009-02-12 12:32
Subject:	Final Major Project (The first three weeks)
Security:	Public
Mood:	accomplished
Music:	"F.E.A.R." IAN BROWN

It was a Monday on the 19th January, 2009 where the final major project had officially begun.  I have learnt a lot about management, mainly revolving around time management. The first thing I did was make a timetable but after posting it on the forum, people found a number of errors instantly.

I spend the Monday working on a new timetable starting from scratch. What I did was on an A3 paper, I written all the tasks I will need to do and then add how many hours I think it will take before cutting things down to fit in the given time which was 450 hours or 12 weeks. This produced a much more competent looking timetable

The only criticism I received from this was the time taken to rig a character which I put down to take just 6 hours. During my second year I made a space ship which was rigged within a day and I was confident that I can do the same with a humanoid character. This lack of experience in skinning and rigging a humanoid character will come to effect soon in the future.

I started modelling on the first character (Wood Form). I decided to keep the body from the Predesign Assignment which I will work add more geometry. The head I decided to start all over using  the head modelling tutorial (www.Maxforums.org). Before I normally made a head by making a box and cutting, extruding and shaping but this time I was modelling with a plane. I found this allowed me to create a head with better mesh flow. The same is done for the second character (Stone Form).





The body I added more to the geometry. The idea that the two different forms would transform to one another meant that I had to have similar geometry to one another. The orthographic views I used to modal both characters only had the front view coloured and the side and back views were silhouettes. The character in the orthographic view were not facing directly front so it made it more challenging to modal the right shape, something I have learned for the future. One the course's forum one thought that the geometry in the joints were wrong and would cause deformation issues in the rigging stage. He showed me a link to another tutorial (www.pig-brain.com).

This is the finish modals of both characters which took a week to do, 6 hours for both heads and 6 hours for both the bodies. I am quite pleased with how they turned out, especially the faces and so it was to the next stage.

Before rigging, I decided to unwrap both the characters. This took me little more than 12/14 hours work and proved to be  uneventful. I placed the different parts of the unwrap according to their id's. The Wood form's hair I left to the side as I will make the alpha's first before fitting the unwrap to the texture.

Wednesday the 28th of January is when I started doing the rigging. This has proved the most challenging experience and the most influential in my learning. As I said before, I have never rigged a humanoid creature before with my only experience being a simple spaceship. I decided to start with broken mesh. I used some references in the classroom to cut the rig in the right areas before detaching all the pieces, naming them all before moving and rotating the pivots. I finally linked all the pieces to produce this:

I then started to skin, adding the bones to the body and manually adding all the weights for every single vertex. This proved more time consuming than I imagined and it soon become apparent after a day of solid work that 6 hours on each character is not enough. A few hours into the next day, one of my peers came over and told me about a script that allowed all the vertexes to automatically be weighted to the appropriate bones. This allowed me to focus on adjusting those weights so the mesh didn't deform too much.

After a week I thought I was almost finished. I focused on both characters at the same time, going step by step with each one as I found it allowed me to adjust the vertex weights evenly. I soon found I had trouble with the arms because when they are lifted above the character's head, the shoulders didn't move like a real human's shoulders. After posting on the course's forum, I got shown to a tutorial on how to make a clavicle for the shoulder (http://www.garydave.com/). This set me back a day and little problems would continued to persist as I found myself having to go back and modify.

I soon had the bones rigged together with controllers which proved satisfying to have done. It is one thing seeing your character modelled, standing stiffly on the monitor but to witness it posed, it makes your creation become a lot more dynamic and makes it come alive. While posing my tutor noted where the character's staff was. Both the characters made use of a magical staff which allowed them to build the bridge, the main game play mechanic. I made a simple staff using a cylinder and attempted to rig it so that the staff can be moved and the arms would follow, like a puppet.  I tried linking the hand bones directly but since those hands were linked to the arms already, this couldn't be done. I ended up having the staff linked to one of the hands.I was shown a few days after that I can have the arms attached to the staff by having the arm IK's linked to the staff and with a controller with an orientation constraint to the hand allowed the hand to rotate with the staff.

On Tuesday the 10th of February my rig was criticized for how the arms bend wrong when the hands twisted. I was shown a way to have a bone for the forearm with a number of dummy bones linked to it with a orientation constraint to the hand IK, set with less influence further from the hand. This allows the hand to rotate and the arm to react the right way.

 This meant that I had to remove bones from the arms but I found that during the skinning process, I scaled the Rock form character and so the original deformed badly with the new bones.

Shortly after posting on the forum, a number of experience modellers replied with various methods to fix it. I was pointed to a option called "Always Deform" in Advanced Parameters which allows me to modify the model and bones without affecting the skin. A wash of relief flooded over me as I fixed that problem.  My character has been rigged and here is are the results from it. Rigging and skinning took me a total of 33 hours for each character though I am sure with the experience I can do it all within two thirds of the time now.

(show some screenshots of various poses.)

Next stage will be making some normal maps using Zbrush.

What I have learnt:

• ·         Time management is key
• ·         Orthographic views should be fully coloured and facing in the right direction
• ·         Skinning and Rigging a humanoid creature takes at most 30 hours of work
• ·         Clavicle bones and their use in arms
• ·         Rigging an low arm and hand
• ·         Creating controllers
• ·         Modelling a face by extruding planes
• ·         Creating the right mesh flow on links so it doesn't deform
• ·         Rigging hands so that they hold a two handed object
• ·         Utilise, crit and advice from peers and forum.