Final Class Thoughts

February 26, 2013

This is not going to be a technical blog, but rather my final thoughts on the GSP 261 class as a whole.

This was the first GSP class that I actually had to sit down and think about what I was doing. I am not the world's greatest modeler, but I can do somethings fairly well and can work my way around Maya. Having to learn 3DS Max was a huge threshold for me as I do not entirely like the program. I feel that Maya is a much better modeling program, and Max should really only be used for animating. But, those are just my thoughts on the subject. The part that I had the most trouble with was the character modeling and animating. I learned very quickly that I was not cut out to be a character artist nor an animator, and not everyone is. Shannon was an amazing modeler and animator, and I was lucky to have her in my group. Matt was an amazing modeler as well, as he has had years of experience working with Max. I picked a pretty decent group.

Every other part of the class was relatively easy, but some were more tedious than others. The audio portion of the class was probably the most tedious, as only certain effects could generate the sounds you were looking for from the source audio. It did get easier as I worked on more pieces of audio, and in the end I was able to produce some pretty decent sound effects, for being a student that is.

The cinematic turned out fantastic. There were a few things pointed out to us during the presentation that would have made it so much better, but in the end we produced a very respectable cinematic. Every part came together beautifully and seamlessly.

I enjoyed this class very much, and I will be able to use what I learned in almost all of my forthcoming classes.

Group Update #4

February 22, 2013

I know this is horribly late, but I still need to get it done.

The group has gotten all of the audio bites done and imported into UDK. I began, on Tuesday, by first making a Matinee sequence in Kismet and setting up all of the cameras we were going to need. Here is a screenshot of the final Matinee sequence with everything added and animated:

As you can see, it is quite a complex mess. This is our first real work done with Matinee, and I think we did pretty well. The cinematic came out to be exactly 2 minutes long, which was a real shock as I had some reservations about how much content we had and if we were even going to make it to 1 minute. I did run into a ton of problems doing this cinematic, however. Most of the issues arose from movement tracks for different groups, but the main one was the chase camera we use to show the main character from behind. This camera was a complete and total mess to work with. Whenever I tried moving the camera and setting a new key in the movement track, after one had already been set, the camera would move in weird ways. I also ran into an issue with Matinee itself, as when I would close the Matinee editor, it would sometimes move things around that were supposed to remain where they were originally located. The main culprit was the chase camera for the main character. That was a complete nightmare. I am still having an issue with playing the cinematic in PC mode. The issue is that the PC mode will come up, but crash before it even gets to the cinematic. It is really irritating.

The cinematic is finished now, I am just waiting for an email back from the professor regarding the crashing issue. Otherwise, all is good.

Group Update #3

February 12, 2013

This week our group put together the environment that our cinematic will take place in. The level was built in UDK using Additive Geometry, with Subtractive Geometry used to make doorways. This process was relatively easy for me, as I have done it so many times before. I build the level, Matt added in the lights and Matinee for flickering lights and Shannon found textures for all of the walls, floors and ceilings. Here is what the main laboratory chamber looks like in the editor:

I really do think the blue specular color is a nice touch. I do not know how Shannon managed to get that effect into the specular map, but it looks really cool. The idea is to have the hero, Jane, run through an abandoned asylum full of mutants. The initial entry point and first area where action will take place looks like this:

Around the corner in this screenshot there are more doors. One of them is propped open, where our legless mutant will come crawling out and chase Jane around the level. My one concern is that we do not have enough in here to make a 1-2 minute cinematic. We shall see when that part of the class rolls around. I made the asylum really big in comparison to the character size. I wanted it to have the feel of being almost not real, but real enough to scare the player. I want to add in blood splatters around the level to give it that really creepy feeling. That will come later when we put the final touches on the level and get ready to film the cinematic. The lights in the whole level flicker constantly, which adds another layer to the ambiance. We hope to find some decent sound effects including screams, footsteps, slithering (for the legless mutant), maniacal laughing and others, just to name a few. We are most likely going to have 2 music tracks that will play during the cinematic, and one will shift into the other at a certain time. I think it is coming along nicely.

Group Update #2

February 5, 2013

This week our group was tasked with creating two characters for our final cinematic, texturing, rigging and animating them. I had the job of UV mapping and texturing the mutant model (made by Matt) and rigging the Jane model (made by Shannon). I did learn something from this, however. When Shannon was finished creating a custom running animation, I immediately tried porting the character to UDK. Aside from forgetting to rename the second spine in her model (oops!), nothing was wrong. It ported just fine to fbx and then just fine into UDK. The problem came when I tried previewing the animation in the Skeletal Mesh previewer. When I set the AnimSet and the correct animation sequence and clicked play, nothing happened. I was puzzled for a good hour. I tried everything from re-exporting the fbx to force deleting everything in the package and re-importing. It came down to me opening the model back up and taking a closer look at the animation layer of the CatParent. When I looked at the animation in Max, I noticed nothing at first. Click play and the animation played just fine. However, I looked down at the timeline and there was the problem. Can you guess what it was?

The problem was that when Shannon made her original animation, she edited the default running animation, which has no keys set on the timeline. It is built directly into Max. Since her animation had no keys set, the fbx file had no keys baked into it, but no information at those key marks. So when UDK tried to play the animation, nothing happened because it had no information on what was occurring in those key frames. This was such a simple fix. All I did was find the end point of her animation (which was 30 frames in), then set keys every 5 frames for a smooth animation. When I re-exported and imported back into UDK, the animation worked. Huzzah! Such a simple fix, but I overlooked it a thousand times trying to figure out what was wrong. Occam's Razor is indeed true.

EDIT: Turns out she didn't just edit the default walking animation. She created her own. I still don't understand how keys were not used in the animation.

Character Animation

January 29, 2013

Today I finished animating my character for this week's iLab assignment. This was probably the biggest pain out of all of the modeling steps we have covered so far. I initially had a different character modeled, but giving him bones turned out to be too difficult due to the size of his hips and legs, so I made a new one and shrank down the final model before attempting to give it a CAT system. The new character was much easier to put bones into, which I suspect is a side effect of me scaling him down after the modeling portion was completed. This is what the model looked like after some initial messing around with the bone structure:

I know his texture is quite creepy, but it was a quick and dirty texture that allowed me to test the skinning portion of the animation process. This is what his inner bone structure looks like:

He is made up of a pelvis, 2 legs, 2 arms and 2 spines. The second spine, which you can see above the first one, is used to animate the neck and head regions. It is the only way to do so, which I find weird. I wish there was a head option, or something like it, which would add in a neck and head box on top of the spine. This would make it easier as you would not have to determine how many bones the spine needs to have.

The next sequence of images shows one of his animations cycles. It is a kicking animation. Please excuse the extreme warping of his skin, as I did not take the time to paint weights onto the bones. Painting weights onto the bones would allow me to control which areas of the skin each bones can act upon.

I also made a clapping and punching animation. I still cannot figure out why his right hand (our left) ended up in such a weird position from the start. Never could fix it properly either. I assume it is from having an issue with the weighting system, which I would have to go in and manually fix. It is a gigantic pain, so I will save that for a later date and later models. This was just a quick and dirty set of animations.

Group Work Update #1

January 22, 2013

Today after class our group finalized our design with the selection of models to make in 3DS Max. We are going to be making an in-game cinematic that is from a horror game. The story is fairly simple (and a little cliched) as it centers around an investigative team that runs into trouble in an abandoned insane asylum. When the group enters they setup their gear and go exploring. Over a couple of hours, the mad doctor that still inhabits the asylum, Dr. Wilson, begins to take group members hostage. Jane is the only one left, and she is tasked with finding her friends before Dr. Wilson turns them into abominations through experimental medical procedures.

The cinematic will show Jane running through darkened hallways with flickering lights, broken doors and eyes peering at her from dark rooms. There will of course be creepy music and sounds, just to add ambiance to the scene. The meshes that we have chosen to create for this cinematic are science equipment (syringes, beakers, etc.), an iron door, a gurney, a wheelchair and fluorescent lights. We believe these meshes, when paired with lighting and music, will have the greatest impact on the viewer. I have chosen to model the iron door and the gurney. The iron door will be quite easy, but I am going to make two models of it. One will have a little slider that you see on prison doors, and the other will have that slider missing so we can have things come out of the slider in the cinematic. The gurney will be a bit tougher, as 3DS Max does not make filling holes in geometry very easy. In the end, it shouldn't be too difficult to model these things. We shall see.

Soda Can UV Mapping and Texturing

January 10, 2013

Today I wanted to work on the UVW mapping and texturing for the soda can model I made the other day. The soda can was a hard task as it was, due to my minimal knowledge and skill set within 3DS Max. I started out by opening my model and putting the Unwrap UVW modifier on it. Since the can is mostly cylindrical, with a flat portion on the top and bottom and some flared edges at the top and bottom, I decided to map the UVs for the can body by themselves in a cylindrical manner. I also decided to map the flared edges on the top and bottom with the body as well, as when I tried it earlier they just came out looking weird.

The UV Mapping itself was not very difficult once I started getting results I liked. I just chose to map the can body and flared edges as one unit, the top cover of the can, bottom cover of the can and the sides to the top cover, as the top cover was extruded from the can body. The can body I did with a cylindrical mapping, the top cover and bottom cover were done with planar maps and the top cover sides were done with a cylindrical mapping.

As shown in the picture above, I chose not to stitch or weld anything together. It was much easier for me to just break them all apart into the sections I wanted and place them accordingly. It also made painting much, much simpler. Here is what the final texture looks like (excuse my lack of artistic ability. I was going for the feel of a Coke can without having to write out Coca-Cola or find a can texture. Also had to change filetype to a JPEG, as Blogger doesn't accept .tga filetypes).

The completed model, with texture applied looks like this. I know there is a little silver in the red area, but I am no artist.

In hindsight, I should have UV mapped the flared edges on their own. it would have kept me from getting that little bit of silver in the red area of the can body, and would have looked a lot cleaner.