Matt Swanson's Art

Salvage Youth - Inches from Alpha

2012-02-20T23:02:00.000-08:00

With Alpha due Wednesday night, the majority of the team spent all three days of our holiday weekend working together to get the as much done as possible. It was great having everyone together, solving problems, working on features and polishing assets and layout. We didn't get every single thing done we'd like, but we still have a couple of days before Alpha itself is due.

We had a number of specific goals we wanted to really target as we got started.

Focus on polishing the first puzzle area after the tutorial
Get the character controllers working and feeling good to move around, jump and explore
Get the GUI system in and functional, including animated textures for status animations and our dialog popups to guide the player
Build and implement a system to control the camera for cinematic animations between puzzles to help guide the player
Fill the world with interesting scenes using the dozens of props we have implemented in the engine
Polish textures, lighting, tiling and level layout
Build any new assets needed to get the first section of level 1 working really well

Given this list, we got to work. We had a number of specific goals to address, and managed to get a ton of them done. By Friday of this week, we had a huge number of new assets, scripts and plans ready to go for our marathon work session.

One of the first things we did this week was address the lighting - we had only sort of blocked it in prior, and it needed work. We wanted to lighten up the assets and really focus on getting the feeling of warm sunlight and cool shadows. To do this, we tweaked the ambient light system to give us a cool baseline blue to work from, then used the directional light in Unity to get a nice warm yellow light, with a purple directional facing the opposite way to provide an additional fill. In the pictures below, the image on the left is our original settings, the image on the right is our new light system.

The clarity and enhancement it provides is remarkable. It makes a huge difference in how the game levels feel. We're going to try for an opposite approach for our tutorial section, which takes place in a sort of "bat cave" inside a mountain of trash bags, so the light will be a cooler night-time blue with a few god-ray shafts of sunlight peaking through holes in the mountain. It should provide a nice contrast and a great feeling of exploration to go from the first short sequence to a drastically different "main" world.

We also started looking for ways to really break up our environment more, and Beau created this paintover on how we can add streets receeding into the distance to create more of a feeling of distance and place. Before our level was a single long strip, and as you went up you could tell all the roads were just long parallel lines. This helps break that up and make the exploration feel like you're crossing from block to block.

He also created some new concepts for some plants and shrubs to help add more variety to the grasses that are overgrowing our neglected world of trash.

Alexi, naturally, whipped these into full 3d models in no time.

Alexi has been on an absolute roll this week. He re-styled the textures for the backyard fence and the rooftop planks to match the style we had on the pallet and crates.

He also created basic flood fills for our collectibles.

And as if that wasn't enough, he finished the texture for the rocket, which looks awesome.

He also made sure that we had access to all the bits and pieces from the rocket to use as extra trash throughout the game.

The rocket is the first major setpiece for our game and helps introduce the world and story to the player, and then takes us into our first in-game cutscene and introduces our crisis that the players spend the rest of the game solving - as you would expect, having been made by little kids, it doesn't work so hot. I grabbed the rocket model early this week and applied some very basic animations to make sure we could get the cut scene working in-game, and then gave it over to Jermz to work his magic on.

This, combined with a camera shake, textures, lighting and particle effects, looks so good in the game.

We got the new rocket model placed into the tutorial area and added a lighting system to help draw the eye to the goal - getting Dustin into the cockpit.

Visual cues like this, along with our camera animation system and dialog, are going to fix the biggest issue we've had in playtesting - our players don't know where they're supposed to be going or what their goal is.

Knowing this, we spent a ton of time working with the iTween plugin and got a great camera animation system in and functioning well. Already we are guiding the player, using cinematic pauses in the game, to show them where to go next.

We put a ton of attention into getting our dialog system up and running, which was a pretty complex job. To get it fully functional we want it to:

Utilize the GUI system to float in front of the screen in a predictable location.
Pause gameplay during dialog systems.
Allow for pauses in dialog for camera animation.
Pull all dialog as strings from a database, to allow for localization into multiple languages and much easier editing.
Have animated images of the characters talking next to the dialog.
Have "typewriter" style text so that the letters appear rapidly one character at a time.
Allow the player to skip through the dialog at the press of a button.

All of this required a lot of systems to work together well. We didn't get all of it in yet, but we've got the GUI in and pulling from the database, we've got the script set up for the entire tutorial and all of the first two puzzles converted into the database, we have animated textures for the dialog rendered off of each character, we have the ability to show and hide the GUI at a key press, we can pause input for the scenes and we already have our camera animation system in. We have the basic tech in place to allow for triggers to occur to start the next sequence of dialog, there's just a lot of under the hood wiring that needs to take place to get it all working together, and we're working today and tomorrow to get as much of it in as possible before compiling the Alpha build.

To create the animated talking head textures, I got the character rig files and set up a light and camera rig, setting up the scene to hand over to Jermz to animate. Zach went through and made sure we had a suite of textures to apply to the characters, and using this system we would create a whole batch of PNG sequences rendered from the camera, with a transparent background, that we could pick and choose from to make our character appear to be talking. I set up the camera in each scene and created a three-point lighting rig, customized for each character.

With these, we can create the final marqueed images.

I was setting up the camera rig and testing a batch render for Stu when I accidently rendered from the wrong camera. The result, however, was so adorable I couldn't help but fall in love.

Look at him go! Awwwww.

Anyway.

A lot of my time this week was spent using the existing assets we had in the game and making new setpieces or background elements out of them, like this rickety-looking treehouse we have hidden off in the background.

I also modelled a whole bunch of new trash piles, using our tiling trash bag system, and created a ramp of trash to put next to our schoolbus, a setpiece for one of our puzzles. Once I had it in engine, I absolutely covered it in trash and other assets, trying to reach the level of "fullness" we wanted for our game. This is the first spot we have in that really feels polished and to the level of visual storytelling and neglect we want to convey our world.

We came up with a rather brilliant way of scattering lots of objects around in our world quickly - a system I like to call the AutoLitterer. Essentially we take a bunch of small objects, like the fast food bags and soda cans, add rigidbody physics and mesh colliders to them, duplicate them over and over, then just hit play and let gravity do the work. Once they settle, we can copy their locations and reset them back to their original place in the AutoLitterer, then paste in new instances of them back on the ground where they settled. Then we simply select the new trash on the ground, revert them back to their original prefabs and it strips them of the expensive collision and physics. Voila, instant trash!

In the background of the image above, you'll likely notice another new addition - Zach got us new grass textures in-engine, so now we have lanes and patchy areas of dirty and grass. Alexi also modelled up the new curb system with the corners and the "vertical" roads, and Beau painted new asphalt textures and crosswalks, completing the picture.

High up above this scene, we've got our Buzzbot chugging along. Jermz got these dudes animated, and combined with Zach's textures, they look awesome in the game.

In this picture, you can see the grass and patchy dirt textures a lot better, as well as another new addition - the trees are done! Beau made some really clever new geometry and textures for the leaves, and they really fit our game world a whole lot better.

He also got in some new low-poly versions to replace the ones in the background.

Steffani finished up the Work Bench, both in the high-poly for the main menu and the low-poly version for in the game, and it looks great.

The character controllers are now fully functional and feel a lot better to control - we've dialed in the speed and abilities of all of the kids, and got Dustin's double-jump ability in and working. Even better, we've got the animations for most of them working. The double-jump animation looks so good. I'll have video of gameplay coming soon, and I can't wait to show the whole world coming to life.

Speaking of which, there's another new addition we added this week. It isn't a critical feature by any means, but it looks really neat - trash blowing and tumbling in the wind. We took a couple pieces of the little trash from the AutoLitterer, then gave them limited mass and drag and applied a constant force. When we hit play, they roll and tumble down the street, gathering up in corners and moving past like tumbleweeds. It's another small little touch, but it really does add a lot of neat little life to the game.

Let's see, what else? Oh! We've got a way to record the gameplay footage now. This was all recorded on Saturday night, so a lot has changed since, but it's still cool to see it all together.

I think that covers just about everything so far. As I said, it was a busy weekend, and a ton of fun, even if we are all exhausted. We'll be working through tomorrow and Wednesday, as schedules allow, to get the last bits ready for Alpha. It still isn't quite as far along as we'd like, but it is so gratifying to see the game falling into place the team working together to get so much accomplished in so little time.

As we finish up Alpha, we'll be trying to polish up as much as possible through next weekend, then recording off gameplay footage and other neat stuff so that we can prepare it for GDC, which is just around the corner. Almost everybody on the team is going, and we're all looking forward to having a break from working on the game and getting out there and showing it off to everybody in San Francisco.

See you next week!

Salvage Youth - Countdown to Alpha

2012-02-12T21:52:00.000-08:00

It has been another busy week, with a lot of our work being done on behind-the-scenes stuff as we shift into polish mode and try to get the gameplay revisions we've planned completed in time for Alpha.

Alexi has been going back and revisiting a lot of our old props, making sure that the art for them matches the style of our world.

He's gotten a first pass done on the rocket texture sheet. We're tweaking this a bunch, and he's already started on the changes for it, but we'll be getting the animation done for its cut scene this week. Should be fun.

Finally, he also worked on making some more low-poly terrain assets for the game, little bits of weeds and stuff we can put around in our environment to help tell the story.

We got a very cool little script running in our game now that was quick to put together and adds a very subtle but important feature in bringing our characters to life - we can swap textures on the fly now, and we tested it first by having the kids blink their eyes randomly every two to six seconds. It's a little thing, but it really does add to giving them some life. With this feature, we'll be able to swap in other "emotion" texture sheets as needed, like if one of the kids is distressed or if they do something correctly.

Laura has been hard at work getting things prepped for our opening cinematic, and she's really nailing the design of the kids. She has been creating some great storyboards for the cinematic, too.

Steffani created a fantastic rendition of Jenny's workstation that we'll be using for our main menu and in low-poly version in our game. She stayed really true to the original design, and it looks awesome.

Jermz has been creating some fantastic animation work, and we resolved our export issue - like most things, it came down to a single check box we were missing, but that little check box cost us a couple days of heartaches. Oh, technology.

We've started recording and importing sound effects this week, as well, which is going a long way to bring all of our hard work to life.

Finally, we have a whole ton of other code and design changes: getting the boss battle really working, fixing problematic camera issues, getting AI states in, throwing boxes from lane to lane, double jump for Dustin and better jump controls, all kinds of great stuff.

We've got another major deadline looming large, and then we're off to GDC shortly after, so this week is going to be a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone crunch time. We've been very carefully going over our list of features, additions and assets left and how much time we have total, so we're quite aware of the amount of work we have ahead of us, but we're all confident and excited - we're getting so close to getting our game in front of players, and that's the best part of all.

See you next week!

Salvage Youth - Pre-Alpha Status

2012-02-05T23:09:00.000-08:00

It's been an incredibly busy and productive week. We managed to get the whole team together a couple of times and the unity and motivation between everybody is just outstanding. It's starting to feel like a real studio.

This Friday I was able to volunteer for the Washington Interactive Network's Power of Play 2012 conference, which was a fantastic experience, getting to hear from VPs and GMs of the region's largest game companies talking about the direction the games industry is heading and all of the incredible support networks available. I can't wait for their next Startup Workshop.

The game has been progressing incredibly fast - we have prototypes working for the tutorial section, the first puzzle and the boss fight, which is very encouraging. We're going to be testing these sections as much as possible this week while we polish the gameplay and get the other two or three puzzles in place, polishing the art and look of the world as we go.

Bobby Simpson, one of our newest members, has been hard at work rewriting the character controller code, to great effect. Already we have a lot more control over the way the player moves through the world and a much better understanding of the underlying code for it. It is great to have some support for Ryan, who has been working so hard on getting everything coded for our designers to get gameplay in place.

We've got the first draft of our dialog script in place now and are revising it as I write this, giving Laura Franke, our Cinematics Artist, something to work from. She's already been hard at work sketching characters and thumbnailing panel ideas, getting a good understanding of the style of our game. She's picking it up very quickly, which is encouraging. We're all excited to see it in play.

I worked with the game project file this weekend and played with the fog color and set up some particle systems, tinting the smog more brownish and away from the blue. It is already making a big difference. I also modelled up a big trash pile and set it up in the background along with a number of other props. This, combined with a world-sized cloud and dust particle system I built, adds a lot of depth and animation to the game world, giving it a sense of life and place. We'll be revisiting this stuff a lot to get it polished, but the few hours I was able to put in today already show a lot of promise. The plumes of distant smoke were made before the other changes and are looking too blue at the moment, but that's an easy fix.

I also went back and retextured the trunk of the tree to match the style of our game. It looks a lot better already.

Steffani Charano, our new Environment Artist, has been polishing the look of the dumpster and the minicar.

Jermz Gallardo has been doing some great work animating the characters. We ran into an issue on the export for them, but we'll have it resolved tomorrow or Wednesday, as time allows.

He also made some great UI elements that we're incorporating for testing today. We'll have fully animated UI elements in by the end of the week.

Zach Hartlage, our character artist, has shifted to working on more concept art for props and environment assets. He created an absolutely fantastic concept sheet for the work bench that Jenny uses that will also serve as the background for our Main Menu.

I spent time working on the tiling trash bag system earlier this week, as well as the textures for the individual garbage bags. They're not quite done yet, but they're getting a lot closer.

Alexi Gil, our Lead Environment Artist, made some wonderful crates and barrels, mainstays of any self-respecting video game. I used his texture sheet to model up a few pieces of debris from the crates that will be used when the boxes break.

Alexi also modelled up some terrific fast food trash to scatter throughout the world. He's incredibly fast at this stuff, it's been great watching his process evolve this year.

We spent a lot of time working on optimization this week, as well. We got the light baking system in Unity working correctly and were able to create shadow maps for hundreds of objects in our scenes. This was a tremendous boost in terms of performance, and on our test machines we're able to run reliably at around 120fps. We are experimenting with replacing the transparency grasses with polygonal geometry, as a lot of our render time is spent on transparency and alpha sorting, and should have some solid results soon.

It is encouraging seeing the results from our optimization be so promising. It is freeing us up to really focus on density of objects in our world and create the over-the-top feeling of an abandoned, neglected world.

Alexi did some more work revisiting older assets, as well, finishing the dirty texture pass for the schoolbus. He's unwrapped the rocket model and will start texturing it soon.

Beau Bateman, our Lead Artist, is out of town for the weekend, but has been hard at work writing the script for the dialog and opening sequences in our game, as well as giving needed feedback on the status of all of our work, keeping everything in the style of our game world.

Finally, tomorrow we're meeting with Prof. Stephen Saulls, who will be creating the audio assets for our game. We're all very excited to meet with him and get this process moving forward. We've provided him with an exhaustive list of assets, and we'll be discussing priority and style questions tomorrow when we meet with our other advisors. This will give us the last critical element we need to bring our game world to life.

We've got a lot left to do, and deadlines are looming, but our team has been incredibly hard working and efficient, and they are all working together extremely well. Everyone on the team knows who to go to with questions and we all lean on each other to provide our specific sorts of expertise. I am so happy to be working with such great individuals on this project.

Salvage Youth - A New Semester

2012-01-29T19:18:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I've gotten to put up a progress report, since we took our long break for the holidays. A week after returning, we were hit by a snow storm that shut down production for a week, but we've gotten back into the swing of things and are in crunch mode to meet some very intimidating deadlines over the next few months.

The last post I made was right before our First Playable presentation, in which we showed off all of the content we had in place at the time. We were able to really get the basics of gameplay and demonstrate all of the basic mechanics, as well as show off how our focused art production pipeline was paying off in terms of our tied-down visuals.

Since that time, we've made a lot of changes - the biggest change has been in terms of our team itself. We've lost two full-time members, but we've added four new ones: Jermz Gallardo is coming on as a full-time animator, Steffani Charano is joining us as a 3D artist, Bobby Simpson is our newest Programmer, and Laura Franke has joined us as a 2D animator to focus on our opening cinematic.

All this new help is already paying off a lot - our production process is speeding up and we're able to really focus on polishing the work we've done and getting new work pushed through the pipeline at record speeds.

We've really focused on filling the world up with content - now we have scripts set up to allow us to literally dump garbage all over the place to give us a bit more of a randomized feel, breaking up some of the inevitable pattern-forming that occurs when everything is hand-placed.

We got a lot of other new assets created before the break and added to the first playable demo, also.

We worked hard to get them incorporated into the environment and tied together for our presentation.

We got a working early version of our main menu in.

Our tiling terrain system is already working well for us.

We've also built multiple levels of detail for the houses, giving us the ability to create lots of depth without costing us too much performance.

After our presentation, we took some time to take a break and step away from the project. It was incredibly therapeutic for the team, giving us a chance to relax and come back with fresh heads. The difference was amazing. We had a long, incredibly energetic meeting when we came back where we looked at what was working, what wasn't and how we wanted to finish our game. The result was thrilling - we've redesigned our opening sequence, are revisiting the puzzle mechanics into more condensed and focused fun gameplay and we've got plans for a terrific boss battle that should be a lot of fun. Even better, this new focusing actually reduces scope and gives us a chance to really focus on good gameplay and incredibly polished assets.

During the break, I played around with AfterEffects and learned how to make this game team splash sequence.

Beau took a lot of time over the break to just have fun and concept up a bunch of great ideas.

He even modelled up a great early version of our Incinerator Bot.

He also made these adorable, only slightly creepy cookies.

Beau finished up the final concept sheets for the BuzzBot so that Zach could begin texturing.

Alexi made a bunch of meshes for our collectibles.

I got the first pass at a walk cycle done for Stu.

Beau concepted up the area for our new tutorial section and game up with some great rocket designs.

Alexi made a first pass at a tiling garbage bag texture, and then took the rocket design and made it a reality. It is almost frightening how fast he is at this stuff.

Zach made a first pass at the textures for the BuzzBot...

...and then took our feedback and went back to finish it, then make two more.

We've gone ahead in-engine and gotten working versions of our tutorial section and our first puzzle in place and will be prepping them for testing early this week. We've got a LOT ahead of us, but with this new, larger team working together stronger then ever, our excitement and confidence are really helping us power through and prepare for our deadlines. We're very excited to get the game in front of people for testing, and expect to do so by the end of our Alpha presentation. Keep an eye out!

Salvage Youth - Week 12 Progress Report

2011-12-01T13:45:00.000-08:00

Another busy week, with a much-needed short break for the holiday, but we're coming up on a very big milestone next week and we're pushing hard to prepare for the deadline.

Our changelog for the project for the week is as follows:

Art Imports
Compact Car
Oak Trees
Bottles
Mattresses
Couch
Fence posts
Picket Fence
Skybox
Trees
BG Hills
Clouds

Design
Camera Fixes
Pause Menu Fixes
Name Tag Labels Appear when you change characters

Level
Added down ramps to the high platform areas
Checkpoints
More trash to the world
Swaying Path in Dustin’s Lane
More Wooden Pallets
Fog Fixes
Trees
Fences
Cloud Particles
BG Hills

Code
Checkpoints
Camera Target-Changing Triggers
Tweaked Button Triggers
Rope Spawner / Rope Segment, Rope for the Pulley Puzzle
Occlusion Culling
Name Tag Labels Appear/Disappear when you change characters

A big push we've been focusing on this week is getting in the last critical art elements to start tying the world together - skyboxes, clouds, tuning in the fog/fade and incorporating more detail elements to the world, such as trees.

We've also completed preliminary work for our first robot, the Buzzbot.

We're really excited to get this guy rigged up and ready for the game - he'll replace the last of the placeholder art we had in the game. Randy's been working hard on getting the rigs complete, Stu's rig is nearly finished and he'll move on to getting little Buzz here ready for animating shortly.

With the current push, my plate has been incredibly full working on keeping everything on track and doing a lot of the critical texture work needed for the game. I've been too busy to keep up with the animation needed, but the ridiculously talented Jermz Gallardo has volunteered to help us out in that regard - he's starting work on getting Jenny animated this week, and I'm really excited to see what he does for her.

Zach's been speeding through getting the high-res Stu and Dustin models finished, and they're looking great.

He's wrapping up the last of the detail work on these as I type this, and will be moving on to getting the texture work for them done soon. We're thrilled, they're looking really great, and he's doing a wonderful job of exaggerating the details to make sure everything reads clearly in the engine.

We've been making a big focus on gameplay, too. One of the things we're currently missing is collectibles, motivation for the player to explore. Beau's been doing some great concepts for ideas.

We're also looking at reasons for all the platforms to be in the world - one of the ideas we have that we like is the old scaffolding and cranes from the rockets the parents left the planet on that are now littering the trash-strewn world, as well as old abandoned rockets that weren't ready for lift-off for the Great Leaving.

Finally, I've been working on texture passes for our houses, working getting them ready for final import.

We've been spending weekends in group work sessions, which have proven hugely beneficial - we've been able to get both the Art and Tech Teams to work directly together and get through a lot of issues very quickly, with great results. We're still pounding away to get the last of the work done before our Art Freeze this coming Monday and our Code Freeze this Tuesday, but they're close and we are all planning to take a little bit of much needed time to rest between semesters as we prepare for the second half of production and really polishing our game.

Salvage Youth - Week 11 Progress Report

2011-11-23T09:54:00.000-08:00

Another busy week with a lot to show, but I can tell the team is starting to feel the weight of a long semester. It'll be nice to have the Thanksgiving holiday to let everyone depressurize a bit and get some rest.

We've started keeping a more detailed changelog as the designers get in and start making tweaks to gameplay and getting more and more mechanics into the game. Current changelog for this week, as of Monday:

Art imported to engine

Stu Rev1 Model
Jenny Run animation rev1
House wooden Planks
Picket Fence
Billboard houses
See-Saw final

Game changes

Pulley puzzle set up for Jenny/Dustin
Start of splitting up of kids within the level
Added House Billboards to the level BG
Got Jenny Animation working in engine
Got Stu model in engine
Bug fixes to Stu Pickup/Throw
Stu can Jump!
Dustin has a gui element (temp art!)
Dustin's sprint has a trail
Main Menu camera Tweens edited
Main menu button fixes, no more invert
Jumping controls smoothed out
Atmospheric fog
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
Field of View changes per character
Camera fixes so all 3 kids are visible
Outline shaders edited
See saw puzzle edits
Messaging system

Even beyond this, we've made a number of other changes - we've got basic screenspace GUI elements in place, such as a rudimentary word balloon.

You'll also notice we've got a first pass at fog to create atmosphere as objects recede into the background. We should be getting a skybox and background planes for the distant city in within the next week or so, as well as low-poly houses instead of the single-plane billboard-style houses.

We're also going to be adding in a lot more art into the screen to start filling out the world. We're in the process of planning our modular trash pile system and just got our first pass at models for one of our trees - we should have older decaying versions of this tree and a couple other types within the next week or so.

Beau finished up concept work for the bus, the third and likely final vehicle model we're working on for this push of assets.

He's also put in a bunch of time getting the concepts tied down for our Buzzbot model, which we should have modeled soon.

Meanwhile, Zach finished up the base model for Stu, and we've got him in the game!

This is just a flood-fill texture, we'll have a much more detailed texture pass on him in the next couple of weeks as Stu and Dustin get put through Zbrush for high-poly sculpts and final textures.

Alexi, as usual, has been modeling like crazy.

I got some more texture work done on top of working on the animation for the kids.

We've got our First Playable presentation coming up in just a couple of weeks and we've scheduled out the tasks needed to get us ready for this milestone. We're already in pretty good shape, things are really moving along quickly, but we have a left to go. We're pushing hard to polish gameplay up and start getting sound into the game, and there are a lot of art assets we're going to need to get the world really tied together, but we're all on track and excited to get this next big push complete.

See you next week!

Salvage Youth - Four weeks and a world away

2011-11-18T18:35:00.000-08:00

We've got another big milestone coming up in a few weeks, wrapping things up for the semester, and we've been listing out everything we need to get done before the deadline. Getting it all listed together, seeing it all in one place, it's intimidating. Lots of work, not a lot of time.

But then I went back and looked at an old build.

For reference, this is a screenshot from the most recent build we're testing with, created 11/17/2011.

This is a screenshot from a build a month previous, dated 10/18/2011

Seriously. Less then four weeks.

I love my team.

Salvage Youth - Week 10 Progress Report

2011-11-17T14:28:00.000-08:00

Another productive week with a lot of exciting progress, even with the myriad distractions that presented themselves this week.

First up, we got the car model finished and unwrapped. It is now being sculpted in Zbrush by Dan, and we're excited to get it in-engine.

We made a handful of smaller props to help fill out the trash in the environment, too.

Alexi also made a set of platforms we can attach to rooftops and piles of junk to help build out the paths the kids will take through the environment.

Additionally we have the base models we're using for our main menu completed and ready for sculpting and textures.

The see-saw and mattress are also ready for texture.

As well as the first draft of the small car model.

And the picket fence.

If you hadn't noticed, Alexi is an absolute beast when it comes to producing models.

I made a texture set for the see-saw this week.

Beau has been cranking through concept art as well as churning out great game concept layout work.

The designers have shifted focus, now that we've got a lot of core functionality in-game, to laying out fun to play platforming puzzles and then providing them to Beau to make them make sense for our game world.

The game layout itself is getting to be a lot of fun - still a lot of placeholder art and objects in, but it's coming along great, and the data we're getting from our weekly testing has been incredibly valuable.

Zach got ill this week and wasn't able to get through everything he wanted to, but he still did some wonderful work getting the wrench finished up and working on designs for Stu, our third kid.

He's already underway on modelling him so we can get a rough version of him in-game and get rid of the last of the placeholder robot guys. We're all really excited to see him in-game.

Finally, and most exciting for me, Randy finished the character rig and got animation import working for the game.

I've been spending the rest of my time working on animating Jenny and getting her ready for in-game. It's been a lot of testing and working with the designers early-on to get the speed and physicality down, but I should have a lot of fun stuff to share soon.

We set ourselves some new goals this week and are looking at making some really exciting new art and gameplay over the next month or so, and with any luck we're hoping to have the game ready for early public testing by mid-January.

Cobbler & The Elves - Process Work

2011-11-13T18:22:00.000-08:00

I've really been inspired by a bunch of work posted to a few art blogs I follow lately, especially when they detail their process work - in particular, Ralph Horsely and Sam Kieth's blogs are wonderful resources for inpiration, tricks and ideas. Ralph is an astounding fantasy artist, which I'm a huge geek for. Sam was the artist and author of The Maxx, a comic that had a huge impact on me when I was a teenager, and he continues to create amazing mixed-media pieces on a regular basis. You should check out their work.

In an effort to share a bit more of my stuff and talk about how I work, I thought I'd try and do some of the same, although obviously not with work near their level. I just completed this piece below as an illustration for a class and had a lot of images available to show the progression - I've taken to working on a new level any time I reach anything that feels like a milestone so I can go back and see how things are coming. It's helped a lot in keeping me on pace and on track.

The piece was an illustration from the story of the Cobbler and the Elves. We were given three stories and told to find scenes from them we wanted to illustrate and take to a finished state over a couple of weeks.

I began with some very rough thumbs, trying to find compositions and images that told the story well and would be a fun challenge to work with.

I ended up selecting this piece. Now, this is where I ended up causing myself the most heart-ache. Instead of going in and doing a tighter pencil drawing, I just used my thumbnail. Foolish, lazy mistake. Every time I do that in an effort to save time I end up causing myself WAY more work. It's the same way with animation - if you don't put in the planning work at the beginning, it'll cost you a ton more heartache later when it gets a lot more complicated. Had I been wise I would have tightened up and resolved all of the shapes, the detail and the perspective here rather then trying to do it in paint in Photoshop. Live and learn, I suppose.

To start, I laid down a warm medium grey/brown tone as my base and began painting in my base values roughly to get a decent feel for the illustration and composition. Again, had my pencils been better, I would have been able to solve a lot of problems here, such as the cobbler's wife, the drapery and filling in the dead space.

Once I reached a certain point I turned off my pencils so I could begin working with the actual values. This is really where you know if a painting will work or not - does it read without the linework?

Here I began increasing contrast slightly, defining a little more of the forms and adding in some fill light, building up the shadow shapes and trying to figure out a bit more of the forms.

At this point my instructor gave me a great little paint-over on my piece, first starting with a line sketch over the Cobbler, helping to round out his shape and add better detail.

He also did a scrub-in of light and dark to add better contrast and form to the piece.

I selected my old cobbler and just blurred him out, giving me a decent base to paint over without getting wrapped up in the details.

Here I went in and started tying down the changes to the forms, adding in light and form to the wife, the cobbler's head, arms and beard. I also added the clothing for the elves he was working on onto the workbench and filled some of the dead space behind him with a shelf of some kind. Lots of defining shape and form.

More definition, more contrast. I should have worked from more reference of candle-light, there is far too much ambiguous and ambient light for a piece that has the single-point lighting of the candle.

Softening the forms of the shadow, defining the wife and the basket, getting a bit more work on the Cobbler.

At this point, I decided the lighting was still too ambiguous so I just did a huge rough lighting pass on a new layer, pushing the idea of cast light and shadow and increasing the contrast greatly.

I then blurred that layer and used its information to paint up new light and shape into the forms.

Softening the light a bit more, giving a warmer feel and adjusting the levels for clarity.

A final levels and contrast adjustment and the piece and I were ready to part ways.

I wouldn't say this is my strongest piece ever, but I learned a lot from the process and enjoyed working on it a ton. It was one of the first digital paintings I'd done where I felt like I was in control of the process and enjoying it.

I did nearly the entire piece using a single brush, one I gleaned from a tutorial video by a stellar game artist, Jesse McGibney. He demonstrates the brush, along with a number of his other techniques, in the following video.

The brush itself is actually pretty simple - a rounded corner square with the direction set to follow the direction of the stroke, with size, opacity and flow set to pen pressure. That's about it, but it is remarkable how much it creates a feeling of actual painting.

This was also my first piece working with the new painting tools in Photoshop CS5. I have to say, I really, really like them. The new color picker that lets you compare your selected color to your previous color is an absolute revelation, and I can't imagine working without it any more. Great stuff.

Anyway, I hope this post was useful to someone. If anyone has any comments or other process work/tips to share, I'd love to hear them.

Salvage Youth - Week 9 Progress Report

2011-11-02T17:05:00.000-07:00

It never ceases to amaze me how quick things happen on this project - every week I have to go back and look at what happened since my last report, and every time I'm amazed that it only happened in a week.

Like what, you ask? Well, we've got a logo now. Makes things all official and stuff.

We've already used it in some branded artwork hanging on the projects boards here at school - great looking stuff Beau put together.

Alexi has been hard at work as always, modelling up a storm. We've got a few more gameplay props being pushed through the pipeline.

We also did a lot of work this week standardizing sizes and shapes for our tiled terrain system - the basic unit is complete, with a rough texture pass done for it. I already tested replacing one of the sidewalk tiles for another shape, the banked sidewalk that allows driveway access, and things worked perfectly.

I actually had time to do some texture work this week, too. I love getting to polypaint, it reminds me a lot of painting miniatures and traditional models, something I almost never get to do any more.

I also spent more time playing with particles, getting the water spraying out of the hydrant looking more realistic. I also got to do a little animation - the hydrant now rumbles and flaps as the water shoots out of it, and when you fix it, the lid floats up and slams itself down on top.

If you look closely, you'll notice another new feature we've got working in the game - real-time shadow-casting. We need to spend time dialing in the lighting, and right now it severely slows down our framerate (we're still averaging around 80fps, though), but that's an optimization issue - every item in our game is casting real-time shadows. In later builds, once we get the layouts more established, any static object (items that don't move around) will get shadows baked in, so that we don't have to render their shadows every frame. It'll save us a TON of computing power.

We've got some other new features working, too - we have patrolling enemies (the robots above, although the art used for them is placeholder art for the time being) with incredibly intuitive tools for setting their waypoints, thanks to Ryan. We also found a great plugin for Unity called iTween, a free system that allows us to animate or constrain objects and characters along splines and bezier curves. This lets us actually move objects along complex curve systems and control speed, direction, all sorts of things, in a perfectly predictable manner. The tool is pretty robust, and it's already found its way into our main menu system and some of our puzzles. It'll also allow us to move the kids between lanes much more naturally as well as make their lanes curve from side to side around objects, rather then the perfectly straight lines they were previously. Good stuff.

Alexi's been working on getting the first car up and ready for texture/sculpting, which is great - this is one of the props with a lot of character we've all been looking forward to seeing come together.

He's also got a great little mattress all finished, ready for texture and sculpt. Meanwhile, Zach's been hard at work getting our fast kid, Dustin, ready for putting in-game.

At this point, Zach is switching gears - instead of getting the zbrush sculpt done, we're going to get the Stu character concepted and put him in some drawings with Jenny and Dustin, making sure that we are thinking about the color schemes and designs of all three kids at once, rather then waiting until the end to do him. Zach has been rock-steady reliable for his contributions since the start, so this change-up shouldn't effect our estimated progress at all.

We're really moving along, getting tons of stuff in-engine and in front of testers, and it's really going great. We are all still excited and motivated about the project, but we all know we still have a long, long way to go. Hopefully we can keep our enthusiasm up through the rest of the year, but with a project this fun, it shouldn't be too much of a challenge.

See you next week!

Salvage Youth - Week 8 Progress Report

2011-10-26T14:28:00.001-07:00

I missed putting up a report last week, since we were focused heavily on preparing presentations for our milestone, but I'm excited about sharing all the progress we've gotten done over the last two weeks because we've gotten a ton of work done on the game.

First of all, we've made a huge step - instead of having art assets for our game, we've actually got art assets in our game. This has been a gigantic milestone for us, and is starting to make it feel like a real game rather then just a demo of the Unity Engine. The Art Team is excited, seeing their art actually in-game, and the designers are having a great time working with the assets to make levels for testing that are much more reflective of real gameplay. It's hard to overstate how critical this stage has been for all of us.

The art itself has been chugging along wonderfully - adding Dan to the team has sped up the process greatly, as he's taking over doing all the high-res sculpts of the prop objects.

We've been doing a lot of planning for the beginnings of our UI stuff, starting with the Main Menu. We've got a neat idea we're hoping to get in-game soon that should tie in well with our backstory and help explain a lot about the world in an elegant fashion. Beau's concept work for it has been gorgeous, as always.

He's been cranking out great concept work for other props and world objects, as well.

We're getting more world props built and pushed through the pipeline as well. Alexi is a modelling machine, he's constantly getting props built and ready for texture and sculpt. Unstoppable.

Zach's got Dustin's concept art nailed down and has already started modelling him.

Randy's got the first rig test complete, but we were given a bunch of information on rigging for Unity by a former classmate, Micah Zahm, that pointed out a few issues we need to address, so we're going back and revising the rig to ensure we won't have any problems getting the character in engine.

I spent some time last week working on building particle systems and getting the designers familiar with the tools. At the moment we currently have a "starburst" particle effect that creates a UI reward element for any time the player does something correctly, solves a stage of the puzzle or gets a collectible. It's already helped with some of our playtesting, giving important feedback to the player as to the context and consequence of their actions.

This week, however, I spent a lot of time researching - I came across an incredible suite of tools called Substance Designer by Allegorithmic that allows us to create modular, dynamic textures. This lets us make "dirty" versions of all of the props we already have in-game and scale between the dirty and clean versions in real-time in engine, as well as creating a ton of modifiable dynamic tiling textures using set parameters - in other words, it saves us a ton of time in our art pipeline and adds variability to our world that we wouldn't have otherwise without devoting an absolute ton of programming time we just can't budget for. Awesome stuff.

We've already gotten successful tests in-engine in controlling these "dirt" passes, allowing them to scale in real time, so we can have Jenny fix an object and reflect her effort on the model by cleaning it up over time. Really, really neat. The Substance Designer toolset is incredibly powerful, and I'm just now starting to get in and wrap my head around it, but I'm excited to spend some time with it and get the results of the work in-engine.

We've really been moving these last couple of weeks, making up for lost time from a few weeks ago when it seemed like everyone was out sick. We were a little behind for this current milestone, but we put together a very solid plan on how to get back on pace for the upcoming milestone in a couple of weeks, and we're already racing to get everything back on schedule.

Wasted Youth - Week 6 Progress Report

2011-10-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

It's been another exciting week of progress, with at least as much work on the back-end planning stuff then on all the pretty art that's so fun to post.

First of all, we've got a new artist on the team! Daniel Samuelsson has joined Scrap Metal Games as a support artist, he'll get to start working on high-poly sculpts and texture work on props this week. This helps us fill the last major gap in our pipeline, and just in time, as it frees me up to focus on animation right when we're getting our character rig completed. We're all excited to work with Dan, he's a great 3d artist, go check out his blog.

That's right! Our first iteration of the character rig is nearly ready! We should have a prototype of it tomorrow to start testing, making sure that the system will work in-engine and we can test the last major hurdle of our pipeline, getting character animations in and scripted to be fully functional, right away. As I've been helping some underclassmen with their animation lately as a Projects TA, I've been itching to get a chance to do some more animation, so nobody is more excited about this turn of events then me.

We spent a lot of time this week trying to finalize the most recent drafts of our GDD and TDD, and are getting a very solid roadmap of where we're headed with the project in the process. We got some really valuable feedback from professors on how we can further refine them and where we can put more attention, and we're well on our way to having an exceptionally thoroughly documented project - with a crew ten students working on this game, often in their own time at their own houses, this is a critical component to success, and helps us make sure we're working on the highest priority tasks we can be at all times.

We also wrote up a complete roadmap of our roadmap feature commitments this week, giving us a long, thorough overview of every critical feature of the game we're planning on implementing and when they're expected to be deliverable. It really is great getting to look this far ahead and see how everything is coming together - especially considering we're still right on schedule to meet our current deadlines.

We had a lot of new concept work and art tests done this week - Beau has been pumping out concept art for new props.

He also worked on testing some grass and foliage alphas to put through the "painter" feature in Unity that allows us to lay down broad strokes of plants and other debris on terrain objects. We're planning on using this feature to help scatter random trash and stuff throughout our environment, filling the world way faster then it would be if we had to place each object by hand. He put a bunch of this stuff down in-engine along with some test models just to see how things might look in-game, then dropped in a first-person controller to let us walk around the models and see how things look!

We got some new art assets textured and ready for engine, too.

Zach got Jenny all textured, too. There's a few final touches to make, but she's nearly done! If the eyes and mouth seem a little out of place, that's because they are - they're going to be applied later as an animated sprite texture, allowing us basic facial animation without having to deal with facial rigging, a major time-saving feature.

And last but not least, we may have a new name for the game! Wasted Youth was always a working title for us, as we liked the idea of it but it has some implications we're not particularly pleased with, so without further ado, I present you with our newest name:

Whatta ya think?

Wasted Youth - Week 5 Progress Report

2011-10-05T10:47:00.000-07:00

Another busy week, and a whole lot of progress. We're all getting very excited, as we're on the verge of getting the first art assets in-game this week, which will prove out our asset pipeline.

A lot of this week was spent on getting art assets ready for import into the game - we have a couple of props complete now with normal, specular and diffuse maps.

Our Jenny character has gone through the ZBrush sculpting phase and is now moving on to texturing. This is thrilling, as it means we can get our character rig built and ready for testing in the next week. Plus, she just looks awesome. Zach's done a great job on her.

Randy's been doing great work on the tank, too. The high-res mesh is complete, with placeholder colors to demonstrate how each plate is a separate object that can be colored on its own.

He also did some rigging experiments with the treads. We may use a path deform, like in the video below, or we may just animate the UVs for the treads - we haven't decided yet.

Alexi got the first house unwrapped and ready for texture tests, and we should have diffuse maps for it in the next week or so.

The house uses four different texture maps - one for the roof, one for siding, one for trim pieces and one for accessories like the porch, windows and chimney. This allows us to swap out a different roof style, for example, to create a ton of variety with very few assets.

Beau and I spent part of the weekend working on writing the script for the opening cinematic and promotional materials, and we're nearly ready to create the art for it. We're really excited about this stuff, but we don't want to give away too much yet. There will be more to show soon.

In terms of design, we've spent a ton of time working on improving the gameplay feel based on testing feedback, we've got placeholder UI in place and are working with the particle systems, greyboxing out the first few puzzles and getting the interactivity scripts such as scripted physics events and such working. We also spent a bunch of time finalizing our most recent draft of our GDD, which came out to nearly 60 pages! There's still a number of things we want to refine further, but it's been great having such a detailed blueprint for the project.

A lot of our meeting this week was spent looking at our task list and making sure everything was up to date. We're right on our expected schedule, and we may be bringing in another artist to assist with high-res sculpts and texture work, which is awesome. We've got a very busy couple of weeks ahead of us, but we're all motivated and working very hard to get stuff in-engine and get the game looking good. We should be able to get character animation tests in in the next week or so, and that'll be the last major pipeline test we need to resolve - if that works as well as we hope, there's nothing stopping us from cranking out art and gameplay through the rest of the year.

Wasted Youth - Week 4 Progress Report

2011-09-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

It's been another exciting week of production on the game as things are starting to really come together. The most visible change is that we have a playable early build of the basic game mechanics put together and ready for testing! We actually got it in front of testers yesterday and started gathering up feedback on the control scheme and basic mechanics and got a ton of wonderful data in the process. Really exciting stuff, and a huge boost for morale - it really made everyone feel like we're working on something tangible.

Working with placeholder art elements, of course, but we've got them actually working in game, with working physics and everything.

We've already incorporated a ton of the feedback into the game and should be able to test the new changes in tomorrow's playtesting session.

Jenny's base mesh is basically done and being unwrapped in preparation of texturing and high-poly sculpting.

This low-poly version of the mesh will have additional edges added to it and will be brought into ZBrush for high-poly sculpting so that we can extract normal maps and make it look really great. Zach has been working really hard on this stuff, and we're really excited to get the mesh in-game.

What an adorable backpack.

Beau spent some time working on more concept work, focusing on some great designs for our robots.

He also put together another great look and feel piece, helping to resolve some of the style questions. It was extremely helpful and brought up a lot of new questions we are going to work together this week to try to resolve.

This week we're going to spend a lot of time working on tying down the backstory for the world, putting together the script for the comic book that will serve as the introduction to the world, the opening cinematic and a great promotional piece.

Finally, one of the most exciting pieces of art we got this week was a glimpse at one of our favorite pieces of the game.

How cool is that?

Wasted Youth - Week 3 Progress Report

2011-09-20T20:23:00.000-07:00

This week one of the main tasks the art team had was to create textures and high-poly sculpts of a few props so that we can test out our pipeline and try to nail down our style. The props given to most of our team were the lawn mower, power pole, trash bin, wheelbarrow, mailbox and mailbin. Each artist was told to get as many done as possible and return with the results so we could compare techniques.

Aleksei, our environment artist, came back with the mailbox, sculpted in Mudbox. He didn't get to do many others, however, as he spent most of his time working on other models. I'll post those in a moment.

I had the time to work on a number of props. The first one I did was the mail bin.

High-poly sculpt made in ZBrush

Render in Unity of the model with the first pass at the diffuse, normal and specular maps. Not very happy with the diffuse, it needs more detail, but it was just a first attempt.

I also worked on the mail box.

Profile view of the sculpt.

Detail view of the mailbox - I used a very stylized alpha image for the wood grain and tried to exaggerate the main details like the rivets and the number stickers so they'd show up well in the normal map.

Render of the mail box in Unity with normal, specular and diffuse. The specular here is WAY too strong.

I also worked on the garbage bin and the lawn mower, but wasn't able to get diffuse maps painted for them, as I ran into some problems with the models once I had started sculpting - a benefit of doing this test is it gave us a chance to look for these sorts of problems and make sure they aren't repeated later in the project.

Detail of the wheel and body of the mower - mainly focused on adding the primary details to the wheel and damage and scratches to the mower.

Another detail of the mower. We only modelled one wheel, which will be duplicated and added to the mower in-engine, making for fewer resources to work on in the production phase.

High-poly sculpt of the trash bin.

Detail of the wheel and damage on the trash bin.

Our lead artist, Beau, did a test of the look and feel of the game levels themselves.

First he created rough models of the houses and laid them out in perspective.

Then he took that image and did a quick paintover, adding in the lanes for gameplay.

Then he focused on creating the levels of detail needed for each row of houses, simplifying and reducing contrast each row.

More detail and content added, giving us a good feel for how the game layers might look.

Alexei, our environment artist, started the first pass at creating models for our modular house system.

This process of building the house in parts then assembling them later will allow us to create a tremendous amount of assets in-game without having to make each of them by hand, giving us the ability to adapt to game testing and build tons of levels in a minimum amount of time and effort.

Alexei also created a new set of props, including a newspaper, a couch, a tire, a fire hydrant and a wood pallet.

Finally, our character artist Zach got the first pass at color comps done for our first character, Jenny. We critiqued these comps and he's working on a revised pass at them, as well as about halfway done with her base model.

Our designers and programmer did a bunch of other great work this week, getting multiple lanes functioning, as well as location-based lane-restrictions. They've also got character abilities started, keyboard and controller input working and the first basic level ready for testing. Next week we're moving forward with menus, creating a complete list of sfx and our robot characters, getting object throwing, pause and quit menus and researching how to add sounds and checkpoints in Unity.

For the art team, our goals for next week are to add texture work to the style guide, finish the comps and model for the Jenny character, complete the concepts for our tank and keep working on new houses, props and texture work.

Wasted Youth - Summer Post-Mortem, and reflections on what's next

2011-09-13T23:44:00.000-07:00

I spent the majority of this past summer working with my game team, Scrap Metal Games, on what will be our collective senior project - a side-scrolling puzzle platformer with the working title Wasted Youth.

The game, as pitched to the team originally during recruitment and over the first couple of weeks, was an ambitious one - turn-based tactical combat plus squad management with dozens of levels, similar to the X-Com series or Jagged Alliance, one of my all-time favorite games. The squads would consist of children living in a wasteland of trash and scraps left behind when all the adults in the world abandoned their pollution-wrecked homeworld in pursuit of a new utopian planet to infect, leaving the children behind. The meek literally inheriting the Earth. Through a long, difficult, amazing and exciting series of weeks we really collaborated to find ideas that we were all passionate about, could get behind and thought were of an achievable scope given the team, resources and time, and that's where we're at today.

As of now, Wasted Youth is an entirely different animal - we retained the original world and the idea of the kids in the wasteland but decided to move in a more positive direction, eschewing the violence of squad-based combat in favor of trying to communicate positive messages through play - collaboration, teamwork, clever non-violent solutions to difficult problems and the value of discarded things.

The team consists of myself as Producer and Animator, Beau Bateman as Lead Artist, Alexi Gill as Environment Artist, Zach Hartlage as Character Artist, Randy McMeekin as Technical Artist, Jeff Mountain as UI Artist and Art Support, Thor Gass as Lead Systems Designer, Vincent Leone as Level Designer and Ryan Cassell as Technical Director.

Our main focus for the summer semester was to prepare ourselves for the Fall Semester and get us to the point where we could enter full production, to spend our time exploring the art styles, gameplay choices and world designs we wanted to so that we could enter production mode having made the hard decisions and ready to go to work. In that regard, I think we were very successful. We also spent a lot of time getting used to working with the game engine (Unity3d, in this case) and preparing basic prototypes to test ideas and the general asset pipeline. In that regard, as well, we were successful and have a fully interactive and playable rough tech demo in place, and are on schedule to have the first couple of levels designed and playable within the next couple of weeks.

One of the biggest challenges with working with a team of this size is communication and collaboration, making sure that everyone knows what they need to be doing, where the project currently stands, to collaborate on work, share progress and get feedback. For this team I found that using one of the Google Sites worked spectacularly well so far. I set it up at the beginning of summer and got the entire team to subscribe to it so it emails out whenever it is updated. Each of us share current progress in the blog section. I embed various Google Docs documents to give us all easy access to our Game Design Document, Technical Design Document and Style Guide, and we use the list/task system to keep track of who is doing what and when it is due.

I've also been working on developing a thorough cascading scrum toolset in Google Docs' spreadsheet program, but it's been difficult - I needed it to perform certain jobs that I couldn't really work on using Microsoft Project, as this task set has different requirements for budgeting time then you'd see in a business environment since we're all students with varying schedules, but it doesn't really feel like a good fit for the team so I've been playing it by ear, being sure to keep track of what tasks are going to be necessary for the project and getting them scheduled in our weekly team recap meetings on Mondays. Having them be part of the process, volunteering to handle a task rather then just assigning one, is far preferable in my opinion. Additionally, it helps all of us retain ownership of the work we have to do, we're more accountable for our work and we learn how to better estimate our skills and abilities.

Keeping a fairly well established chain of command for issues and such was also useful. Having Beau and Thor be the leads for their own teams makes sure that the two departments feel like they have ownership over their own jobs and know who they need to turn to with questions.

All in all, I'm excited for the next few weeks - we've just moved into full production mode, we're scheduled to have the first levels greyboxed in soon and we'll be ready for playtesting in the next couple of weeks. We've established look & feel for the world and for individual props and are just dialing in the texturing pipeline now, already having established the styles and pipeline for the characters, rigging and environment models. Now all we have left is making our group vision come to life.

Finally, I want to show off some of the fantastic art that's been generated from this project so far - a lot of the art that follows wasn't made by me but was made by my team during our summer exploratory preproduction phase.

Early environment model tests by Alexi Gill, exploring the ability to reuse assets to create an assortment of environment props and areas.

Look & Feel concepts and paintovers by Lead Artist Beau Bateman. The first is a rough concept and color comp of one of our characters. The rest is a process series in which he created rough models of the environment to speed up getting the shapes and perspective correct, then did a rough color pass. He then went through and populated and aged the world, then tossed in the character concept so that we could all see how things should look in-game.

Character and prop concepts by Zach Hartlage.

Vehicle concepts by Randy McMeekin.

Parkour Animation

2011-07-14T22:03:00.000-07:00

The second piece of animation I did for my Ani399 physicality class was a short, 100-frame parkour piece. First step was to analyze my video reference and create thumbnails, timed out in flash.

Next was to build a stage and block in the animation in Maya.

I then took feedback in class and incorporated the suggestions into the poses, then began splining.

I took further critique from class, changed the set to be something a bit more dramatic, finessed the splines and rendered the scene.

Ninja Drop animation

2011-07-14T21:44:00.000-07:00

I started taking a class in animating for physicality. The first piece I did was of a ninja dropping from the ceiling and then slinking away.

First step was to sketch out thumbnails based on my video reference.

I then took these and blocked in the key poses for the animation.

From there, I took the feedback from my class session and fixed some of the poses. I then I began splining the animation, first using linear and autoTangent and then finessing them a bit.

There was a number of issues, especially the "sticky" hand resulting in the IK/FK switching, which I hadn't done before. I fixed the issues I could and polished the splines, resulting in this rendered version of the animation, the final so far.

PRJ350 - Week 15 Project Post-Mortem

2011-04-26T22:21:00.000-07:00

Having gone through the process of creating this short, I want to look back at what went well, what didn't and what I'm taking away from the project.

First of all, I should look at what it was I set out to do, my initial plans, versus what I was able to accomplish in the time I had. Initially, I wanted to have a much more playful portion of the scene where the goblin turns the god lights on and off by touching the sword. Now, the god light stays on, even after he removes the anvil - not what I had hoped, but by the time I had gotten to the actual animation, I had run out of time for the polish needed.

Additionally, I wanted to use Maya's Paint Effects to put in geometric grass to soften the background, give it more volume and shape and help with the transitions between the ground and the trees. This, again, wasn't possible due to time constraints and had to be abandoned - what it would have done to my render time alone would have made the project impossible in the time allowed.

As far as the character's controls and acting, I really wanted to get more blend shapes set up to allow more facial rigging and expressions. This, too, had to be abandoned, as I had already taken up far more time then was allotted for the rigging process.

There's a number of other things that didn't make it in or had to be sacrificed for the project due to time constraints, but breaking down the specifics isn't particularly interesting. Instead, I should look more at the reasons behind why - most of the time spent on the project was in research and development of the rigging process and creating and tuning the textures and subsurface scattering shaders. Had I been more familiar with this process, I could have better planned the time for it, and gotten through the process much easier, but that's what I'm happiest about taking away from the project. The power of the rigging process in Maya and the capability that can be built into it is intriguing, to say the least, and I'm excited about learning more about it - the rig I have in my scene is pretty basic, all things considered, but it did the trick for what I needed it for, and I learned more about how to plan a rig for animation and how to animate a rig well just having spent the weeks researching and building it and learning from others who were more proficient with the process.

At the outset, I did lose a week or two of work when I had to go back and redesign the character - a step I'm very glad I did, as the new character design has a lot more appeal and was just a lot more fun to work with. The more I model, the more I learn about edge loops and how to design them for deformation, and this character's belly and wrists certainly could have used a lot more careful planning. His skinning, as well, is a bit atrocious, which is something I'm definitely going to have to learn more about. Using Maya's paint weights tool was a new experience, and more difficult than I had originally planned, and I spent much of my animation time posing the character in ways that minimized or hid any problems I had with the skinning.

Overall, I wish I had gotten through the process of building and designing the character faster so that I had more time for animation - as it was what I was hoping to focus on, having only two or three weeks to do more animation then I had done in all of my animation classes for the year combined meant that great sacrifices had to be made in quality. There simply was no way to have time to properly block in poses and spend the weeks needed to polish the spline curves and finesse the animation into appealing, smooth and high-quality motion the way I would have liked. Tight deadlines are a reality in the industry, I understand, but with all the technical hurdles I faced in creating a well-rigged character that would allow for quality animation, I don't know what the alternative would have been other then planning for very simple, short animations or creating a simpler character without the technical requirements a well-rigged and skinned character posed.

PRJ350 - Week 14 Progress Journal

2011-04-24T21:39:00.000-07:00

What a long, miserable day.

I've spent the last six or seven hours having to render out the first 140 frames of my animation one-by-one by hand, because if I don't, the volumetric "god lights" don't work. It is absolutely maddening, tedious and incredibly boring but it is nearly done.

So, what's changed since last week?

I spent a lot of time cleaning up the poses in my animation and fretting over what to do with the opening of it - the walk and his "surprise" reaction just never worked right for me, and it was getting far too close to the end to fix them. It was upon reflection to this problem that I had an epiphany.

I don't need them at all.

If I start the shot out with the goblin already looking at the sword, we get it. We understand the setup right from the get-go - he's a goblin, this is a sword in a stone. We know how this story goes. I needed to give him some time to consider the sword, to think about it and to ponder his approach, but trying to tell the story with him walking in was trying to tell too much. I needed to introduce his personality in his walk, his mood and why he might be feeling that way, then show a drastic, big change of emotion followed by another drastic change of emotion, from sad to surprised to cautious, all at once, and that is really, really hard. And really, really unnecessary.

I proposed the plan to Pam Matheus and Antony DeFato, both former Disney animators with excellent senses of story and timing, and they agreed it was the right decision. DeFato even brought the idea one step further - start the shot with the camera tight on the character so I could really play up his thinking process, then pull out to reveal the goblin's motivator. Genius.

I deleted my walk and surprise keyframes and got to work adding a good animated hold, using his eyes and slight shifts in the direction of his head to really try to get the subtle animation in to show his thinking process and then proceeded from there. Additionally, I spent a huge amount of time working on getting the spline pass done this week, all while working on wrapping up other assignments (expect more blog posts in the next few days as I finish work for my other classes). I really, really wish I had a few more days for this, or weeks, or months, but I'm happy with what I'm getting so far, and very happy with everything I've learned from the project. I know it isn't the strongest piece in the entire class, but it is the culmination of months of hard work, and I stand behind the result.

I'll have the final posted here in a few days, once I've had time to composite it, build in the title and credits screens and do the post-processing. I'll also follow this post up with a post-mortem, most likely, to review what went well, what didn't and what I'm taking away having gone through the process twice now. For now, I've got to render out the last of the frames (11 left to go, thank god), start the compositing and get some rest before the last big push of the semester.

PRJ350 - Week 13 Progress Journal

2011-04-17T20:04:00.000-07:00

A huge effort this week went into working on getting the blocking pass done - it took a lot more work then I expected, but animation always does. I'm still not particularly happy with the first half, but from the moment when he pulls the sword on I think looks great. Good weight, good action and follow-through, and enough poses to make the splining pass a snap, at least to get passable motion. Funny enough, with the character design, I almost prefer it without the splines - the stepped poses actually give it sort of a stop-motion feel.

The below video is another playblast of the viewport with the final camera postion. I need to revise the timing of the initial walk-in and the spurprise pose, add in a couple poses there, and add in a couple poses for the goblin looking around to see if he's being watched when he goes into the cower pose before the first pull. After the first pull, I need a couple eye darts and slight shifts of weight when he surveys the sword and anvil. Beyond that, there's a couple other acting choices I could make, but the clock is definitely ticking.

I also spent a little time working on the lighting, trying to get softer shadows on the god light that comes down on the sword. I worked with Professor Chun Lu and reviewed some notes she gave to our Maya class last semester and found the settings I needed. The final result gave me this:

This week is going to be a mad rush to get everything done and rendered - the project has swollen to 900 frames, meaning I'm looking at around 24 hours or more of rendering. Really need to get the last little bits in and start the process so I can get it composited and submit it in time.

PRJ350 - Week 12 Progress Journal

2011-04-10T22:43:00.000-07:00

What a week.

After reviewing the animation blocking I had completed last week and looking at the schedule I had left, I decided it was time for triage - I had to get rid of the bad blocking and do it over. It really didn't work well enough for what I needed, and it would have taken more time to try to fix it then it would have to just do it right. Having gone through the process, I feel I made the right decision, but the clock is ticking and I'm not particularly happy with what I'm going to have left at the end of the process - something I'll get into once I've completed the project and can do a post-mortem.

First thing I did this week was revise the basic lighting pass I had and get the "god lights" into the scene, as well as get the final props I was going to need in. I had to get this done, as the scene wouldn't work without them, and having the real things in rather then the proxies meant I could act to them rather then to where I assumed they would be in the final, then spend time later fixing the issues - time I wasn't sure I would have.

I would have liked to have modeled a custom sword for the scene, but I was on borrowed time, so I re-used an asset I had built for another class - the dagger from the table in my Bandit's Crossing interior scene. I stretched the blade out, tossed it into zbrush to get a better texture (the one I had wasn't working well at all, as it was grouped with a number of other items on the original texture sheet), a technique that worked well, as it allowed me to practice the process of baking out matcaps to the diffuse channel and get a better, more accurate normal map, something we'd been working on in my Zbrush class.

I got the sword into the scene and started tweaking the light setup. Most of the images shown are rendered with a test diffuse material on the goblin, as it shows up correctly in the viewport window and allows me to animate easier then with the SSS shader active - the SSS shader shows up as pure red in the viewport, making it difficult to read eye direction.

I messed with the godlight settings until I got them into the ballpark, then turned on the environment lights to make sure I'd have a strong enough effect to work in the composition, but not be too overpowering so that you couldn't read action happening behind them.

I ended up using two of the volumetric lights to get the falloff I wanted - one with a wider diameter but a softer effect, and a narrower, stronger one in the center to get a more powerful beam.

Finally, I turned on the SSS shader and played with a number of the shadow settings until I got exactly the look I needed - it still isn't ideal - the shadows have far harder edges then I'd prefer, but it is producing the desired effect well.

I then modeled out an anvil and textured it rapidly, using photoshop and Zbrush, got it into place and began blocking. I put in a lot of time between Friday and Sunday getting these poses in - I still have some timing issues to resolve and a few storytelling moments that need clarification and revision, but I am feeling more optimistic then I was earlier. I've rendered out some of the stills, as I would do often to ensure I was getting the result and composition I needed in the blocking, and it was often hard to tell in the viewport quite how things would look when rendered - these are all with the reference diffuse shader on the goblin, however, so keep that in mind.

Below is a copy of the revised blocking playblast. After speaking about my concerns about finishing the project in time with a number of professors, we revised the story beats a bit. I'm happy with the changes, although I'm going to miss some of the beats that were cut.

I'm nearly done with this phase, and hope to have it fully blocked by Wednesday so I can spend the rest of the week working on getting the spline pass completed. I'm not as happy with the result as I would be, but I spent too long in the rigging phase - the effort spent there was worth it, but it left me without the time I needed to spend elsewhere, and I learned a huge amount about something I was previously not proficient at at all. I also learned a lot about getting subsurface scattering shaders and modeling a character for animation, and am pretty happy with what I'm leaving with with the project, I just wish I could have focused further on the actual animation process during it.

Acting to Dialog 3 - Blocking Pass

2011-04-05T17:18:00.001-07:00

First pass at blocking to dialog, this time with a longer scene. I decided to forego my usual approach and block it in straight-ahead, setting poses on twos and fours, for the most part. I've got to tone down a little of the motion and add a bit more gesture to it, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. Audio is a clip by Johnathan Winters in Its A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, downloaded from MovieWAVS.com.

PRJ350 - Week 11 Progress Journal

2011-04-03T22:05:00.000-07:00

Animation Blocking

I spent some time working on getting the base poses down for my character's initial walk-on before I realized I was being too hasty - I wasn't following my vid ref or my thumbnails, and with the complexity and length of the animation I had ahead of me, I really needed to have a better roadmap. To this end, I took my original vid ref into photoshop and began tracing over each major key pose onto unique layers. Doing this gave me a better insight to the lines of action in the pose and was a much more accurate and quick way to sketch out the poses then it would be to do so by hand on paper just using the video as reference.

Once I had these initial sketches, I composited them to the sheets above and printed them off. I also began adding them to Flash on the original frame numbers so that I could watch how they moved. This is a lengthy process, so I only got the first portion done, but it is very effective. One benefit of this process is I can quickly and easily play with timing, rather then trying to push and pull dozens of keyed object keyframes in Maya.

Once I have a little more time, I can start playing with the timing and get the rest of the frames in, but I wanted to make sure I had a chance to work on getting initial poses into Maya. I brought up my animation file and worked on getting the first pose right - it tends to be one of the most important ones. In the case of my animation, I actually started with the second pose, the first that the goblin is fully on-screen. I can work backward to have him walk on, but I needed to ensure that I had the right starting position figured out.

I then worked on following my thumbnail roadmap, being careful to exaggerate each pose to really enhance the action and to fit better with the character's proportions and anatomy, and really try to make sure I had the right arcs in place for the IK hands - a tricky process. I got the first part of the walk in, his notice and take and his approach blocked in after long hours of moving him around, and already am noticing severe issues with the skinning I'll have to address - this was part of my plan, as I knew they'd start making themselves more noticed once I started the actual animation, and I'll be working on them soon enough.

All told, things are coming along well, and the animation is working out okay, although I'm already noticing major problems with the timing. The beginning of this week will be spent getting the final models for the props in, getting the lighting resolved and blocking in the next portion of the animation. I'm right in the thick of crunch time now, so everything has to really count, but I'm really excited to see the little guy coming to life.

PRJ350 - Week 10 Progress Journal

2011-03-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

Huge amount of progress this week, although much of it isn't readily visible - a lot of behind-the-scenes prep for the next big push - animation blocking.

I began by building out my basic environment, using a technique I learned last semester in CG300 to create a tree, then duplicating it and tweaking it to create a second. Essentially, I built a cylinder, then used a number of latices and nonlinear bend and twist deformers to create the central trunk, then duplicated that shape and scaled it and twisted it to create the branch shapes. I then cut the hole for the branch in the main trunk and combined the meshes, using target weld, and pushed the combined verts around until I had the shape I wanted.

I then exported the tree from Maya into Max and unwrapped it, as I prefer the pelt and relax unwrap tools available there to Maya's unwrap options for organic shapes. I had a good wood bark photo in my reference library that I converted into a tiling texture, then applied it to the re-imported tree shape in Maya, repeating the bark texture as many times as needed to get the scale to look right.

Once that was done, I exported the ground plane into Mudbox to sculpt it, creating a roadway sunk into the ground and a slight valley where the main action was going to play out in the scene, allowing the sword and goblin to break the horizon and be silhouetted against the sky. I then re-imported this into Maya and got it placed where it needed to be.

I then brought in a tree from a previous project to save time and add variety to my scene, one that had been sculpted in Mudbox - it is a bit higher poly then I'd like, but it will look great rendered, and I can always render the background plate separately from the foreground elements, since the lighting won't move - this will likely be a necessity once I get the high-poly grass laid in. I also brought in a copy of the goblin's mesh, to make sure the scale was going to work well. I blocked in the camera and deleted any of the polys from the foreground tree that weren't going to be part of the final render, to cut down on excess geometry,

Finally, I got the textures set up for the ground plane and new trees, as well as the sky background. They're still not perfect, but they're looking okay so far. As I mentioned previously, I'll be painting in high-poly grasses in the foreground and background to help add a better finished look to the scene and create a more realistic environment, but for the blocking phase this is unnecessary, as it creates a huge overhead for rendering and file size, and makes it very difficult to work on the school's sub-par 32 bit systems as they tend to choke on high-poly scenes. I'll likely end up adding the grass fairly soon and making sure it is on a separate layer, so I can turn it off when I don't want it in the scene. It will also make the rendering process easier, having them out of the way.

I also brought in the fully rigged character model at this time, so I could begin test renders. This was a tricky process, as I often lost a lot of the shader information or rigging if it wasn't done correctly. I ended up spending an hour or two cleaning up old garbage left behind in both scenes, lots of hidden geometry and rigging artifacts that aren't used and won't ever be used, to facilitate the process. To get the merge to work best I ended up importing the environment into the rigged character file, rather then the other way around, then going through and carefully removing and renaming things that may present problems in the future.

Once I had the two files properly merged, I had to spend some time fixing some rigging issues and adding the last few controllers I needed for the rig that had gotten missed previously - in particular, I had somehow neglected to add nurbs shapes for controllers for the loincloth and ear joints. Once I had them in place and the model was ready to animate, I wanted to get a rudimentary lighting pass done, as I knew it was another critical, tricky step that I would likely need assistance and feedback on, so better to get it started now.

The first lighting pass was problematic - some of the lights didn't want to work properly, I was inheriting lights from the previous rigging file that weren't visible in my scene view but overpowered everything in my render, and the shader for the goblin had to be rebuilt.

I had a lot of notes left over from last time I built the shader, so it was simple enough to re-link the files and tweak some of the settings to get it in - I need to revisit it soon, however, as the light is passing through the character far too strongly and ruins the effect, causing the little dude to glow a bit.

Once that was corrected, I moved him to the point where he'll first stop and see the sword and anvil (the sword and anvil are currently just placeholder geometry - I need to model them both this week, and they don't really have much on them in terms of lighting).

I also put the character into his first real test pose - I will need to revisit a lot of the blend shapes, I've got a handful of them built now and I imported a dozen or so meshes of the goblin to use for other blend shape targets once I get the basic blocking in, as it will be easier to build target sculpts then, since he is a one-off rig.

And that's where we're at for the moment. I'm hoping to get some more of the base poses in tonight, but I wanted to get this blog post up before midnight, and I've got to go to a quick birthday dinner for a friend. All in all, I'm feeling a lot more confident about the scene and am excited about the next few weeks, although there is a huuuuuge amount of animation to get done for this project, and not a lot of weeks left to do it.

Zbrush - Nazi Dino Progress, part 3

2011-03-23T18:32:00.000-07:00

Got to spend some more time working on this guy. Going to try to push and get the base model done tonight, if possible, so I can focus on the armor and gun platform this weekend, if I can get enough of my other homework out of the way.

Started working on the back leg by setting up a series of poly patches just below the knee - I wanted to establish the geometry around the lower leg all the way around, so that I could ensure it flowed into the existing edge loops on the rest of the model.

I continued this process, getting the general silhouette of the leg established - I can pull and push the verts as I need to get the overall shape correct soon enough, but for this stage I needed to make sure I at least had the basic geometry there to work with, and the right shape in at least one dimension.

Then I worked on connecting it to the existing body topology and started working on fleshing out just the most basic part of the anatomy - I know this isn't correct yet, but it is at least starting to form the shapes I need. Using the three-view, with the top and right views on the left hand side and a perspective view I can tumble around the model on the right ensure that it will look decent.

Finally, I connect the leg to the rest of the body, filling out the thigh. I'll correct the edge flow momentarily, but at first I just want to make sure I have the polys and edges all working right, keeping the entire model in quads to ensure perfect subdivision for when I bring it into ZBrush.

Then I connect the back around and start extruding out the tail. This got a little tricky until I figured out where the 5-pole needed to be to allow the edge loops to split away from each other and allow the right shape for the tail.

Here I keep pulling out more and more loops to form the tail - right now, there's more then I really need, but I can pull some out as I go - right now I wanted to make sure I had the basic loops to form the belts. When the time comes, I'll select those poly rings, extrude them out to form the belts, and then separate them out to create their own geometry - this way I know they fit snug to the shape of the model, rather then trying to duplicate the organic shape by hand, and I can remove the loops used to create the belts on the tail itself at that point. Additionally, having the belts as their own geometry allows easier sculpting and subdivision, as I can add the loops necessary to protect their hard edges without requiring the same issue on the tail.

Finally, a quick screen grab of the model in its most recent state - I am widening out the rib cage and still need to work on defining the anatomy under the skin on the back legs, finish out the feet and leg thickness, and I've got a lot to do for the crest, but things are progressing pretty well.

Hell yes, dinosaurs.

Zbrush - Nazi Dino Progress, part 2

2011-03-22T21:38:00.000-07:00

So I got to spend a couple hours updating and revising my dinosaur model today, refining the head and closing it out.

I started by building extruding out the planes around the eye, then shaping the lid to match the contour as it would in real life. For the eyeball, instead of using a standard sphere geometry - they terminate in triangles at the top and bottom, which don't subdivide well, leaving an irregular point - I took a cube and subdivided it into a sphere, ensuring the shape was entirely made of quads.

Here I've continued to finish the sculpting around the eye, getting the lid shaped the way I wanted it.

I then extruded out more planes to complete the cheekbone ridge and start the upper beak. The beak itself still needs a little more work to complete, as it isn't a great job of maintaining the edge loops around to the inside, but it is a complicated area that has a lot of geometry running into a very small area, so I wanted to try to avoid having it get too dense.

Finally, to check my work I set up a Nurbs modifier to simulate the initial step of subdivision and set up a basic pass at smoothing groups. I still need to insert edge loops around the collar to preserve the hard edges and I have a lot of work to do to complete the ridge and the horns that will be extruded out of it, but for a couple hours I got a lot of work done.

I also spent a little bit of time revising the shoulder area, getting a little more muscle definition in. The bulge around the elbow needs to be removed, and there's still a ton of work left, but I'm excited about the project so far - I always love this phase of a project, the exploration and learning process.

Zbrush - Nazi Dinosaurs are a huge thumbs-up

2011-03-21T18:49:00.000-07:00

So this week I began the process of quad modeling the base mesh for my next ZBrush sculpt in my digital sculpture class. We were supposed to create concept art for a quadruped creature, preferably with a mix of hard and soft surfaces. Immediately, my mind went to "awesome dinosaur with huge ol' guns on it", because... well, because it is awesome. I found lots of great stuff from the old Dino-Riders cartoon for inspiration, and then came across this beauty.

It was created for an upcoming game, Dino D-Day, for release on Steam for PCs April 8th. Man, I fell in love. It is fantastic concept art, wonderfully tied down and realized (I do wish it had a better front view with the whole anatomy, but who am I to complain?). I know I'm not skilled enough to create the concept art to this level, so I spoke with my instructor who said that if I can contact the developer for the game, he'd give me permission to use the art for the project.

I did some research, found the contact email for the developer and sent off an inquiry. The next morning, this email was waiting for me:

Hi Matt,

You have my permission to use our concept art for your project. Thanks for the high praise.

The only request I have is that you don’t show us up! This model’s already built and will soon be unveiled when the game hits Steam at the end of the month.

Best of luck. Send me some pictures when you get it finished!

Abe

So awesome.

I began the research process, looking up as much reference as I could, gathering images and articles from across the web. I gathered images of Styracosaurus, Triceratops and similar dinosaurs, focusing on anatomical reference, scale and color patterns and images to help inform me of their shape - in particular, how the back of the neck connects with the back of the crest, and how their legs are shaped from the front view, as well as general shape were it not wearing a giant mobile gun platform. Also, I looked up similar animals, such as the rhino, and gathered information about how to go about building out the topology, especially around the shoulders, as it would need to deform well, and I've never built a 3d model of a quadruped.

Additionally, in my research, I found that the original piece was created by an artist named Ben Mauro, a former student of DigiPen. All the more reason to really try to nail this project.

With all the research in place, I started the modeling process, using the side view to patch model out the basic topography of the first bit of the dinosaur, then pulling the geometry into place to begin forming the contours.

At this point, my friend Mario Toon gave me some tips on modifying the topology around the shoulder, ensuring the edge loops run concentrically around them to help deformation, should I end up animating the model. Taking his advice, I removed a copy of the front leg and got to work fixing the problem.

I then finished out the basic shape of the front leg - it is going to need a lot of revisiting soon, to get the musculature and shape correct, but at least the topology is all there.

I'll post more as I get the model further along, but I've got other projects due soon that need my attention.

PRJ350 - Week 9 Progress Journal

2011-03-20T19:22:00.000-07:00

It has been an interesting, hectic week. I had to miss a couple of days of school due to being in a friend's wedding, which was a very welcome break from the constant hustle, but it put me behind my projected schedule - one that was already starting to slip from where I wanted it to be. Additionally, the Redmond Digital Arts Festival took place this Saturday, and while I got a lot of drawing for my animatic done during it, it did take up a lot of time that could have been spent in Maya polishing the skinning and getting the initial environment completed. Regardless, it was easily worth the time, because I got to hear incredible lectures and presentations from artists like Bay Rait, Chris Taylor, Stephen Stahlberg and Ryan Woodward. Amazing, inspiring stuff.

Additionally, until Tuesday I was expecting to be interviewing for a job position on Thursday. Luckily, I received a call to reschedule it for the 31st of this month, which was an enormous relief.

Despite all these spectacles this week, I did manage to get a lot of work done, including getting a basic timed animatic completed. It still has a small number of little beats that can get worked out, which will help me tell how well the timing is working, as I'm not entirely sold on it yet, but it is well within the realm of my capability this week, as I plan on powering through the last little road blocks, getting my environment blocked in and getting the first couple of poses actually in Maya this week. I've got a couple of stumbling blocks to overcome for other classes (namely, another big milestone due for CG350, a project I still need to update this blog to reflect), but the pipeline for it is in place and I have no doubt I'll be able to get caught back up.

Much of my time this week was spent revising and tweaking my rigging options and getting the skinning in place. It still needs some work - the belt and the shoulders, in particular, have problems, and I realized I need to set some driven keys for one of my foot controllers that somehow got missed, but it is simple enough to do.

Anyway, with everything I had going on, I didn't get a chance to get a lot of screenshots this week, but I have the animatic available below.

Acting to Dialog 2 - Blocking Plus and Polish Pass

2011-03-15T19:51:00.000-07:00

The above is the Blocking Plus stage of my second dialog animation. The initial blocking stage is viewable in a previous entry, available here. In this stage, I have begun working on smoothing the animation together in splines, but haven't yet had time to really finesse the motion. I'm mainly trying to get the first set of motion in, to ensure the timing works and the body moves between poses well.

In this pass, I begin working in the graph editor to really focus on getting the motion as smooth and natural as I can. I mainly focused on body mechanics in the feet, hips and torso, as well as tracking the arcs in the punching arm and the head. I'll be making one more pass at this to refine the animation before moving on to my final scene for the class.

Projects 350 - Week 7 & 8 Progress Journal: Rigging, Skinning, Blend Shapes and Animatics

2011-03-13T23:19:00.001-07:00

The past couple of weeks have been a headache, but they've been incredibly productive when I've been able to work. I'm a little behind the projected schedule, but as soon as I can get past this last little hump and get through this upcoming ridiculously busy week, I should be right back on track - I'm both in a wedding and interviewing for a very exciting potential job this coming Thursday, and preparing for both has required a lot of attention that I hoped to devote to this project this last week.

I spent the first part completing the rig, learning the ins and outs of how to set up a biped rig in Maya. This is a very tricky, very technical process, and definitely not my specialty, but it is done now, and very functional.

I've got a lot of features built into the rig shown above - both arms and legs are IK driven, and I have a reverse-foot setup, allowing me to keep my heels locked on the ground, roll onto the balls of the feet and do all sorts of other great functions. I have a fully articulated spine, a jaw bone for controlling limited facial animation, duo-jointed ears, bones for the eyes, and a series of bones set up to allow secondary animation on the loincloth.

The eyeballs and eyelids themselves are set up on the eye controllers, and I created a locator object above the character's head to allow him to tip his head to the side without causing odd pivoting or rotation action in the eyes or eyelids.

All eye activity is controlled through a series of controllers, using the Set Driven Keys commands in Maya. Through this technique, I can control blinking, eye direction and eyelid rotation, all through a single controller. This functionality was used on the hand controller, as well, allowing me to grab a single object to control the rotation of all finger joints, the spread of the fingers and limited rotation of the palm for exaggerating the form.

When I was rigging one of the hands, I came across a strange problem - all of the translate options for one of the finger joints was just... missing. It appears that somehow the transform node was, at some point, removed, leaving the only available keyframe-able option as Visibility, not a feature I need a lot in animation. The solution for the problem ended up being rather clever - I created an empty group object, basically a null object in Maya that doesn't have any actual data or anything attached to it beyond transform data. I then unparented the finger joint from its hierarchy, parented the null node onto the joint, and then moved the set back into the hierarchy. A little convoluted, but it solved the problem and allows me full functionality of the hand again.

I've also been working on my skinning, which is proving a little more problematic then I had originally anticipated, but it is coming along. I'm looking up further tutorials and other information from experts to assist, but I've got a good range of poses set up, it's just a matter of figuring out the strategy and learning what the model and rig can and cannot do. In the process, I'm learning a lot about how to better design topology for deformation, as I realize precisely what the theory really means, now that I can see it in action on a model that was this carefully planned.

Another success is that I finally got the mouth complete - I was having a huge issue getting teeth to parent correctly to the jaw bone and rotate right. No matter what I did, the teeth seemed to move twice as far as the lip would, meaning his teeth would receed or shoot right out of his mouth. It turns out that the lip was inheriting some of the skin weight from somewhere else, but that has since been remedied and we now have a great looking set of chompers.

Once I got them in, I ran the character through a number of facial poses, using the blend shapes I had set up and learning how he looks as his face distorts. Turns out? Adorable.

I even discovered, by moving and scaling the jaw bone, some additional functionality that the model possesses that I didn't realize - a happy little accident. Behold:

I've also begun work, and am about halfway done with the initial drawings for, the animatic, a useful stage in which staging and timing issues are resolved before moving toward animation. In doing so, I also created a more resolved version of the background image.

It is still a very loose and unresolved piece, but it solves a lot of the composition problems I had before, and getting the more final model of the environment complete this week, getting grass into the shot and getting hte first lighting pass is going to be very exciting.

Right now, though, I really, really just want to get this skinning done with so I can move on to starting the animation work. Time is running short, and there is a huge amount of work left to do.

Acting to Dialog 2 - Blocking Stage

2011-02-22T14:27:00.001-08:00

My second attempt at 3d animation to dialog. This is the blocking phase. I'll be pushing it into splines and revising some of the poses and layout based on received critique this week.

Projects 350 - Week 6 Progress Journal: SSS Shaders and Rigging

2011-02-20T21:19:00.000-08:00

Huge amounts of progress this week. I spent a lot of time learning how to use Subsurface Scattering Shaders in Max and Maya, as well as getting my rig prepped and ready for animation and skinning.

Subsurface Scattering Shader Setup

At the beginning of the week, I got a chance to get my diffuse map painted a little, with a start getting the head and hands a little bit more textural. Once I had a decent start, I began testing out the capabilities of the FastSSS shaders in Max, as I had heard they were a little simpler to use, and my finished model hadn't been exported to Maya yet. I played with the settings a bit and was astonished with the result. I quickly built a base specular map by converting my diffuse to greyscale and painting over the parts that needed tweaking (eyes, shoulderpad, etc) and made a rough normal map using the NVidia photoshop plugin. Enjoying the result, I created a quick turn-around set and rendered it out to use as a target for setting up the shader in Maya.

The detail and effect of SSS was astonishing, as it was my first chance to play with it and see the result. Even better, it really didn't add to the render time to any major degree. I burned off another closeup render to use as a target for the Maya shaders and got to work in the other program.

The Maya shader system, being node-based, offered a lot more control but was considerably trickier to get fully functioning. I found a wonderful set of free video tutorials over on Gnomon's site and went through them, taking a couple hours to really make sure I understood the concepts - longer then I hoped to spend, but I think it will be far worth it in terms of quality of the final product gained for the investment.

First I got the basic shader set up and began with the normal map, making sure it was still going to function properly, as the added simulated contour would help inform how the shapes were going to look in the renders, and it would tune the basic three-point lighting system I had set up.

I then began tweaking the different shader settings, beginning with the back scattering.

Once I got this blocked in, I recorded the settings, turned it off and blocked in the Epidermal Scattering layer.

Again, once this was blocked in, I turned it off and began the Subdermal layer.

I then began turning them back on, first adding a color map to the backscatter layer.

Then I brought the color map to the other layers and spent time fine-tuning the weights between them.

As you can see, it really knocked back the effectiveness of the shader, especially the normal map, but much of it is due to the fact that the different shader layers need to be painted more to get the most out of this. Also, at this point I didn't have the specular layer applied. I brought in the specular map I had created before and set it up in a rudimentary fashion, and then had to call it a day for this part of the process, as I had an appointment to work on the rigging.

I'll be going through the tutorial more to learn to fine-tune the specular layer, and will be following another tutorial on setting up a shader for the eyes separately from the rest of the mesh. I may also set up a new shader for the shoulder pad and the metal of the loin cloth and belt buckle, and possibly the cloth of the old sack he's wearing. The overall paint still has a lot of work to do, adding details and defining the shapes and contrast, but for a lay-in test this is working very well, in my opinion.

Rigging

I also spent a lot of time this week meeting with various folks about getting my rig set up - I worked with Suzanne Kaufman for a while, who showed me a lot of great stuff, but it was a lot like drinking from a fire hose. She was rushed as she had other appointments to make it to, and she knows a ton about the process and how to do it right, but we just didn't have the time together to really cover everything.

Megan Noble was quite helpful earlier this week, showing me how to create new attributes for controllers, how to orient joints and a number of tricks when it came to setting up the skeleton, as well as just answering questions when I'd get stuck or confused.

Earlier today, I spent a couple hours with Micah Zahm, who was gracious enough to give a couple hours tutoring me on the process of setting up a rig the correct way in Maya, teaching me about simple things I was doing wrong that can break a rig, and the best ways to do it right. It was incredibly helpful, as rigging has always been my downfall before, and he showed me a number of things I found very enlightening about the process.

Already, I'm finding Maya a much better system for all of this stuff then Max, at least in my limited knowledge. I was able to set up a full skeleton pretty quickly, and actually did it a few times before arriving at the final design.

I have a whole suite of features built into the design of the rig that I needed in order to have the most success in the limited amount of action I'm planning for the character. Ideally I'd like to use the character for other things later, but for the time being and my current needs, he's going to work out great, I think.

Micah was very helpful in showing me how to set up a reverse foot rig setup, and helped explain exactly how it works, which is something I've never been able to comprehend precisely before.

Essentially, the bone at the bottom of the foot doesn't get skinned to the mesh, it sits along the ground to allow the rig to pivot on its heel, but still allow the model to rise up on its toes or rock on the ball of the foot without lifting the foot controller but still moving the ankle IK, making the knee follow, as well.

You may also notice he's got a "wiener bone", as it was jokingly named. That is a series of bones created to be skinned to the loin cloth mesh only, allowing for secondary motion as it flaps around when he walks.

I've also set up a pair of bones for the eyes, which have Aim Constraints for the controllers which float out front.

The eyeball mesh is skinned entirely to those joints, and the joints themselves are parented to the head joint to make them follow in space. This lets the eyes rotate around inside the head without moving, but they follow the head as it moves. Just below the head joint is a joint for the jaw. I'm going to build two sets of teeth - one for the top row, which will be parented to the head joint, and one for the bottom row, which will be parented to the jaw joint. This will allow him to open his mouth and have the teeth follow. Finally, I have a pair of joints set up for the ears, allowing a lot of expression and secondary action in them.

I also spent a lot of time getting the hands set up to a controller. The hands themselves are IK controlled, and are moved by the wrist controller. The wrist joint itself has an orientation constraint to the controller, which allows the arms to be moved by grabbing and pulling them around, but keeping the hands oriented to the world, as they should be. This will be a little trickier in the animation, as it can be hard to maintain proper arcs with IK rigs, but they're necessary to lock down the hands in the world space when putting any weight or grabbing onto objects.

I also added new attributes to the hand controller and mapped them to the fingers, so that instead of grabbing controllers on every little joint I can manipulate them from a single space - much, much easier to work with and animate this way.

I still have a bit more to do to finish the controllers, and have a LOT of work to get the deformer targets built for all the expressions he needs (blinks, scowl, wonderment, confusion, grimace, grin, elation, surprise, etc), but I'm getting much closer, and am moving through a step that was previously daunting, thanks to the help of some very kind folks.

Projects 350 - Testing shaders

2011-02-16T14:16:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post - got the first little bit of my diffuse map painted up a little, and started playing with a Subsurface Scattering shader pass. Lots of work left to do to really bring this together, but I'm excited about the results so far.

Projects 350 - Week 5 Progress Journal, part 2

2011-02-13T19:11:00.000-08:00

So I spent a bunch more time this weekend getting the model unwrapped and prepped for texturing. I found a great rainbow and numbered checker pattern so I can be sure I'm distributing the UVs where I need them, and that I'm laying them out in the orientation I want. The unwrap went pretty smoothly, with only a few parts that needed to be overlapped - the legs, arms, ears and eyeballs all share the same UV space, since they can be textured identically. All other features, including hands, the head, the feet and the costume, are textured individually.

The only parts I'll have to be cautious about in terms of seams are the cheeks and the wrists, for the most part. I had to make cuts there to get the mesh to flatten out without too much distortion, but painting over the seams carefully in photoshop by directly importing the model should help create a fairly seamless paint.

Once I had the UV layouts arranged, I went in and created a flat-color flood, to test out the model and be sure it looked okay.

I then applied the texture to the model. Success. So far, things were coming together, and it was exciting to see him with some color on him - it meant I'm that much closer toward my goal.

I then applied an Ambient Occlusion diffuse map to the model and set it up with a number of directional lights to eliminate hard shadows, so that I could render out a burned AO texture pass.

Once rendered, it created a basic shadowed and flat version of the model texture, which I could overlay on the original flood fill to help inform the shape and give the illusion of light hitting the model. This will greatly speed up the texturing process, and give a much better overall look.

The new texture was then applied to the model, and the components were re-separated from the mesh. I'm now having to step away from the project for a bit, as I've been neglecting my other work to get this far on it, but I'm glad to see so much progress and I'm looking forward to getting to paint him up.

Projects 350 - Week 5 Progress Journal

2011-02-12T15:59:00.000-08:00

Less progress then I'd like, but lots of technical background work, prepping the model for the next phase of development.

I've spent a lot of time working on getting the model cleaned up and making sure the topology is where it needs to be in order to animate well. I'm considering this last version the final, and am moving on to getting it unwrapped, rigged and ready to go.

I spent a little bit of time re-familiarizing myself with projection mapping tools in Max, and was able to create a reasonable tiling texture of chainmail, to be used on my little goblin friend's loincloth, which will add a little fun secondary animation to the model. To do so, I created a torus, rotated it into place and then duplicated it and moved it, creating a single pair of linked rings, then duplicated that set and moved it into place. By doing this step over and over, I created a good base mesh for the chainmail.

Once I got it set up over a plane, I scaled it to the point where I was reasonably sure it would tile well, then used the Render to Texture panel to project the chainmail mesh onto the plane below, creating an alpha, normal and ambient occlusion map set.

This resulted in three 1024x1024 texture maps, one for each of the passes. The transparency map will be hidden in the alpha channel of the diffuse map, once I paint over it. The ambient occlusion pass will be used as the base color channel for a paintover to create the diffuse map, and will help inform the specular map, as well. I'll be laying over rust colors and textures to help that process, when the time comes.

To test the new setup, I imported the file into CrazyBump to ensure it tiled well, and it does, at least reasonably well. It isn't perfect, but for my purposes it'll do well.

I'll be using this method to create better normal maps for a number of the props and pieces of my environment, and using CrazyBump to help create texture maps for much of the process, as well, as it seriously helps speed up the process - making normals for pitted iron for the shoulderpad and anvil, for instance, or the bark of the trees, is a snap in CrazyBump.

I've begun unwrapping the model, and am looking at a number of tutorials and plugins to help expedite the process. There are good ones available at the classily-titled site Poopinmymouth.com. I've gone back and forth on this process a bunch of times, getting mixed results, but I'm determined to have this portion done by the end of the weekend.

Finally, I've also begun rigging the goblin in Maya, and after speaking with a number of fellow students I'm moving forward with the process.

I've got the skeleton itself in place and have begun basic tests for the skinning showing a lot of progress - the joints seem to deform quite well already without having gone into the weighting refinement process, which means that completing the skinning should go pretty well once the rig is complete.

I've started the process of setting up three arm bone sets so that I can have a switch between IK and FK-controlled arms, which will be crucial to the animation I have planned. I've found a good tutorial here that should help the process.

I've also learned how to set up additional attributes and link attributes in Maya to controllers or controller sets, so I can do things like have a single controller for all of the fingers on one hand, for example. This will greatly ease the animation process, and is good experience to get under my belt.

I'm going to keep pushing forward on this stuff all weekend, and I have an appointment for later this coming week with Micah Zahm to help fix any issues I can't resolve myself. All in all, I should be through with this technical hurdle soon, which is exciting - this is what nearly sank my project last semester, and I've learned that it is best to go into something this technical that I'm not particularly strong at by planning carefully and seeking help from the folks that know it well, rather then keep bashing my head against the wall and hoping for the best.

Acting to Dialog 1 - Completed

2011-02-08T19:06:00.000-08:00

I finished my first CG Acting to Dialog project and will be moving on to the next one this week. You can watch the completed product below:

You can see the blocking stage for this animation in an earlier blog post here.

Projects 350 - Week 4 Progress Journal

2011-02-06T19:41:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of this week, I had started with the UV unwrap process when Mark Peasley suggested I revise some of the mesh to optimize it for deformation before going too far into the unwrap. As much as I wanted to just get the model unwrapped and start painting the texture, I knew he was right, so I made sure to put attention into the trouble spots on the mesh, which is where the majority of my attention went this week for this project.

I made sure to add additional loops around the facial features that were going to see the most deformation, as well as optimizing the joints.

I added additional loops around the ball of the foot area, as there was going to be substantial bending here and it needed to work naturally. I also added a "patch" around the knee to help keep the form from flattening oddly when it was bent.

The elbows received the same treatment. I also made sure to optimize the loops around the knuckles and wrists.

I still need to go in and add the geometry for his single glove, but that's a trivial matter of just extruding and pushing the mesh and then pushing a couple verts around to clean it up.

I've also begun testing out my first foray at rigging in Maya, and already really like the setup far more then its Max counterpart. I've got a ways to go, especially getting the IK-FK blends set up properly and the facial deformations in place, but I've begun the research and sketching for that process, as well, and should be good to go in two weeks time.

With that schedule in mind, getting the model unwrapped and a base texture down in the next week or two is a goal I can handle. Getting a block model built of the environment, the props built and the initial shader research all in the next four to five weeks is do-able, and I'll be starting my animation planning in that time frame, leaving me plenty of time to complete the project and hit all of my goals, providing I don't hit any major technical or personal snags along the way.

Mermaid Progress

2011-02-05T17:21:00.001-08:00

The week has been exceptionally busy, as I've taken on the role of Lead Artist and Producer for our recently named Art Team, Hobos of Might and Magic for my CG350 class, where we're creating a game in the Unity Engine. I'll have more to share about this project shortly, but suffice to say it has taken up the vast majority of my time, and has been a thrilling experience so far.

I spent last night re-working much of the model I began for my CG315 class, in which I was modeling a crust-punk mermaid to take into ZBrush to begin subdivision sculpting. I threw out the old head and redesigned it, and am far happier with the results. I'm still not thrilled with some aspects, such as the hat, and need to connect the hands to the rest of the body and finish out the forearms - the elbow joint could use some attention, as well, but I think much of this work will be completed in ZBrush itself rather then struggling to get it done in Max working against deadline when I have other work that needs attention.

Here you can see a comparison of the old head (left) to the new one (right). It is far less flat and much more feminine looking, and fits the character design much better. The ears still need a lot of attention, and the cranium shape isn't quite right, but it is a dramatic improvement overall.

Another shot of the new head. Some of the overall issues are easier to see here, and hopefully they'll be addressed in ZBrush. Since this shot was taken, I've completed the head shape and addressed some of the issues with the hat and cranium, as well as extending the neck down below the shirt and jacket.

A look at the rest of the body mesh. Not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but it'll do for now. I wish I had more time, and a lot more experience, but that's how things go with a project of this scope and limited time frame.

The hand, always a difficult model to make. This is severely revised from the previous model shape, and should work well for the purposes I need it for.

I'll be taking the model into ZBrush this week and beginning my first foray into SubD sculpting. I hope I can do the character justice.

Projects 350 - Week 3 Progress Journal

2011-01-27T13:54:00.000-08:00

Group pitch critique, modeling phase complete & technical research

In my previous entry, I mentioned my vid ref I did for basic acting beats and timing. I'm including it as a YouTube link below.

Began the week with a group critique with Pam Matheus and a number of fellow students. Notes from the critique are below.

Overall: Greenlight to proceed
Play up “wants the anvil” story beats and thoughts, helps provide better payoff.
Belt over shoulder could be problematic. Potentially something to remove? Add to texture?
Make belt around waist part of core mesh
Push composition to lead eye better to action
Too much contrast in upper left, away from action

Thoughts for resolving these issues:

I'm going to remove the belt from around the shoulder, just to simplify technical problems. I can add it to the texture, and possibly create a normal map to help make it look like it is coming off of the mesh, but it will ease animation greatly
I'm revisiting some of my composition drawings for the overall design of the scene, keeping the majority of it but working on finding ways of leading the eye.
Adding belt to base mesh.
Enforcing the acting in the earliest part of the scene to help establish the character of the goblin and his motivations. I've got plenty of time to do so, my vid ref pass clocked in at 30 seconds, so I'm good to go in that regard.

I completed the final first draft of the base mesh model of the goblin today, unifying the entire model into a single mesh, with the exception of the shoulder pad itself, which will be parented to a special controller or a bone. Should work just fine. Thanks to Josh Jones, I resolved the issue of the topology around the shoulders, and added more edge loops around the belly area to allow better deformation when the character has to bend. Prof. Lu also suggested removing a couple unneeded edge loops to create better, more even quads, and that made good sense.

I deleted the body mesh that would be covered by his shirt/tunic and extruded the mesh out to match the geometry of the shirt. This went swimmingly well – I originally created the shirt by duplicating that part of his body, using the push modifier to increase its size and then pushing and pulling verts to get it into the right shape, which meant that it shared the same number of verts and edge loops as the mesh below, making it a trivial task to attach it later and patch up any potential holes. I used the same extrusion method to create the belt, and may add a few more edge loops to the edges of the belt if I choose to take the model into a subdivision sculpting program like Zbrush, but that's another issue for a later time.

Having it as a single mesh will make skinning much easier a task then I had last semester, as long as I don't run into the same technical problems, such as having the Paint Weights skinning tool crash every time I use it. I've included pictures of the progress below.

The overall model with the first draft of the final topology, before adding the eyelids. I may extrude the geometry on the right hand to create a fingerless glove, but for the time being I'm happy with the results.

Detail of the connection of the mesh to the boot at the ankle.

Detail of the connection of the mesh to the shirt at the neck.

Detail of the shirtsleeve connection to the mesh. These additions keep the entire model watertight, so that there won't be any holes to view. I also connected the underside of the shirt to the hips/legs area, but it is a tricky one to get a clear picture of.

Technical Research – Rigging & Deformers

As I delve into the technical aspects of getting the character rigged, skinned and get the deformation targets built, I'll be adding my notes and plans into this section. My primary resources for this are the books Body Language: Advanced 3D Character Rigging by Eric Allen & Kelly L. Murdock, and Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right by Jason Osipa. I'll also be drawing on the knowledge and experience of faculty and fellow students, and will try to attribute my findings as I write them.

Known Needs:

Fully articulated character with standard rigging setup. Won't need world mover, necessarily, but having one will be useful for future uses with the rig, if I decide to keep it for making other animations, such as for a demo reel.
Fingers not necessarily rigged individually – he'll only be making gripping shapes, for the most part, although having at least one hand with an articulated pointer finger could help with the humor of the “touching the sword to turn the God light on” situation.
Facial expressions needed – wonderment, strain/scowl, confusion, glee.
Face shapes needed – wide and narrow mouth, open and closed mouth, eyebrows raised and lowered. Eyes open/closed. (do I need separate eyelids? What's a good method for making these? Need to research further. Edit: Found a tutorial here. Should do what I needed.)
May need to model further teeth and possibly a tongue. I created the mouth cavity in the mesh just for this purpose, might as well take advantage of the fact.
I am going to need IK hands in order to grip the sword and anvil properly. I'd like to have FK hands up to this point, but I don't know if I'm technically able to, it is a bit complex to do so. I'll do some research and leave notes below.
Need 2 bones for each ear. No problem.
I'm almost definitely going to need to create different targets for each eyebrow and each corner of the mouth, so I can animate them with a good sense of asymmetry, which will add a lot more appeal to the character.
I should do some sketches of the different emotions needed, so I can be sure to nail each of the different expressions I need to hit. Drawing out an emotional beat board would be a useful guide to have in the future, regardless. Using the Stop Staring book as well as my copy of Mark Simon's Facial Expressions: A Visual Reference for Artists will prove valuable in this regard. Good reference links to remember: Lackadaisy
Need to test out a few lighting tricks, such as getting good volumetric light casting with a reasonable render time in a test scene to make sure the God Rays will look good for the scene.
I need to start researching shaders for the skin and clothing, as they'll need to look good under the lighting conditions, and this project is a good opportunity to explore these methods to enhance the overall look of the scene.

I've begun talking with Prof. Chun Lu, who has extensive experience with rigging in Maya, to help plan out the methods to best approach for the needs expressed above. I'll post progress as I get it.

Projects 350 - Week 2 Progress Journal

2011-01-26T22:08:00.000-08:00

This is the last of the old journal entries I need to update to get the journal up to date. I'll have another entry tomorrow documenting this week's progress so far, but this will get the blog fully updated.

Not the most productive week so far, due to considerations for other classes – both CG215 and ANI350 hit very hard with their demands for work due this week, so much of my time was spent on those classes.

Prof. Johnson expressed his concern about the story, in that the technical requirements for the animation were substantial – showing weight and transference of weight is very, very difficult stuff, and he felt that ending the story at the point where the goblin gets the sword was a good “if all else fails” plan.

In a way, I agree that it would be a good failsafe, but I'm confident in my ability to take on this challenge, providing I don't run into major disastrous issues on the technical side as I did last semester. I am really trying to put this piece together to showcase my ability to portray both acting skill through animation as well as raw, technical animation skill, using the techniques learned in ANI300 and those I will be aquiring in ANI350. Additionally, having gone through the process of early vid ref, I think that the needed poses aren't horrendous, and the entire scene plays out in approximately 30 seconds, which is a manageable goal, in my opinion.

Having looked at the technical requirements for what I need to do, I have planned for the following:

I will need to have IK hands, as they will need to be planted in a single location while the body acts independently a number of times, and doing this with FK simply won't do. It was a major issue last semester, and would affect my ability to animate drastically. If I can, I'd like to set up an IK/FK slider system, and I have resources to assist that process, but it is technically demanding, and may be above my ability. It is currently at a “nice to have” feature, while IK is a “must have” feature.
Planning out and doing my thumbnails of the acting is going to be crucial.
I want a chance to explore shaders, including Subsurface Scattering for the skin. Lighting and appearance of the character itself is going to be a lot of fun, but it is crucial that both work well for the scene for the appeal to be there and support the character.
Making sure that the technical aspect works early is the biggest key, so that I can spend at least half of the semester focusing on the animation, the real centerpoint of the entire scene.
I need to get a model sheet and actual 3d models of the two hero props, the anvil and the sword, very soon. The anvil need not be particularly outstanding looking, and shouldn't draw too much attention, but getting the look of the sword right is important. It should be something to be lusted after, and look appropriately regal.

I also received feedback from other students and faculty about my general topology. For the most part, I'm in good shape, but I need to revise the belly a little to provide the most flexibility, and I will need to reconfigure some of the topology of the shoulders by re-routing the edge loops, always a tricky process. So far the goblin is modeled completely in quads, resulting in great subdivision. I'd like to keep it that way.

Projects 350 - Character Technical Development

2011-01-26T21:59:00.001-08:00

Having hit on the look of the character and having a lot of excitement and interest in the creation of the character model, I got started creating the initial model itself, getting the head blocked out and refined fairly quickly. I also took an export of the model into Zbrush to check for holes and problems successfully, as well as created a rough test of a morph deformation target successfully. It works! I'm on the way, and it feels great.

The head stands at 586 quads (1,172 tris) right now, a very respectable low-poly count for a cinematic like this. I spent a lot of time studying edge loop topology to make sure I'd be able to have a lot of good deformation in the face when it comes time to animate. I bought a couple of books, one on facial animation and rigging and another book on how to set up a character rig in Maya.

My plan for my workflow right now is to build out the models in 3DSMax, then import the models into Maya to rig and skin it. I much prefer the rigging setup in Maya, as well as the animation and lighting tools.

(The following was created a day or so after the post above and was merged with this post as they cover the same topic)

I've finished much of the modeling for the character, having roughed in much of the costume and completed the limbs and extremities. I managed to complete the model without using only quads, which will help subdivision and sculpting for normal maps in Zbrush, if time allows.

I want to have an advisor take a look at my topology before advancing much further to ensure that the deformation will work as I hope it will. I still have yet to model the interior of the mouth or the tongue, but that should be rather simple. Once the design is finalized, I can begin making morph deformation targets for the face to help with the facial animation. I'll be sketching out the needed poses for the face before doing the target poses, and will be sure to work with an advisor to ensure that this is done correctly and wisely.

Projects 350 - Storyboard Pass

2011-01-26T21:52:00.000-08:00

Below is another of my PRJ350 progress journal entries. This one details my first pass at a rough storyboard.

01 – The goblin enters the screen from Stage Left. Seeing a sword stuck in an anvil, he gets naturally curious.

02 – As he reaches for the sword, a shaft of light appears from the heavens. He tentatively accepts this new fact and begins to struggle with pulling the sword free.

03 – The goblin, struggling with all his might, pulls and tugs at the sword, stuck fast in the anvil.

04 – Finally, despite his small stature, he manages to tug the blade free. The resulting momentum, however, propels him backward onto his butt on the roadside.

05 – The goblin shakes his head and comes to his senses. Realizing his situation, he beams at his luck, and then, to our astonishment, pitches the new-found blade into the bushes.

06 – The goblin's true intentions are revealed as he grabs the heavy anvil and struggles to carry it off-screen Stage Right.

Projects 350 - Visual Development

2011-01-26T21:44:00.000-08:00

Below is another entry from my PRJ350 Progress Journal. This entry details my first pass at designing and planning the over-all look and feel for the scene.

Using the cooler, fairly monochromatic colors of a forest under moonlight, I'll be able to use warmer and more saturated colors on the character and the anvil, as well as higher contrast on the character and “hero prop”, to help draw the eyes onto the story elements of the shot. Using the trees to segment two frames of sky, one on either side of the screen, I can build two distinct stages for the action – one for the goblin to enter to and establish his motivation and character, and a second to frame the hero prop and story moments.

I'll be drawing on my experience in last semester's CG300 class to model and light the scene. Examples of those renders are below.

Projects 350 - Character Visual Development

2011-01-26T21:37:00.000-08:00

Below is another excerpt from my PRJ350 Progress Journal. This entry is about the visual development of the character itself.

I initially designed the character after the Warhammer-styled goblins, going for sort of a mean, tough and realistic look, trying to develop a highly detailed sort of character the type of which you might see in a video game.

I developed the first iteration of this character after going through a few different initial sketches, then spent time painting it up in photoshop as a greyscale rendered sketch to figure out the dimensionality of the forms and the contrast needed to make each area readable easily. Unfortunately, I just wasn't drawn to the character as much as I'd like, and once I saw what some of the other students were working on, I went back to the drawing board with a new inspiration, wanting to build a character with more appeal and interest in the design.

After a number of sketches, I hit on the following design, which I inked down a turn-around and build a color comp layout, utilizing a number of color combinations to figure out what might look the best in the scene.

I really like the new character and it feels like a big break from work I've done in the past and appeals to my sensibility of animation and design. I think this will help hold my attention and interest a lot more.

I've shown the color comp to a number of fellow students, professors and friends that aren't trained artists to get a wide range of opinions. I have been getting a lot of interest and reaction to numbers 5, 6, 9, 11 and 12. I think, personally, I'm leaning toward 5 and 6, but I want to give it a few more days to gather up more opinions before making any final decision. Creating textures for the character is still a long ways away, anyway.

Projects 350 - Story Pitch and Beat Analysis

2011-01-26T21:30:00.000-08:00

For my second semester Junior Project, we keep a weekly progress journal defining our progress and documenting our process. I was keeping it in a word doc, but decided to move it to the blog to share the progress of the project. I'll be updating this at least once a week until the project is done.

For the class, we have to create an animated short from scratch, using Maya, Max and other software. We start by building out a story and storyboarding it out, analyzing the beats and making sure everything works while we build out character analysis and art, then model, rig, skin and texture the character or characters, build and light the scene and then animate the entire thing. Depending on our focus, our scene can be between 15 and 45 seconds.

Below is the first entry for the project, detailing my story, breaking it down to a Logline, and then the first pass at analyzing the beats of the story itself.

Story – Pitch and Beat Analysis

Shot opens on a moonlit roadside exterior, somewhere in a thin forest. An ancient sword sticks out of an anvil at the side of the road, an old twisted fence surrounding it. Grass has grown high after years of neglect. Clearly no man has been able to free the sword from the anvil in a very, very long time.

A small goblin coming down the road appears in the left of the shot and, just as he's passing the sword, spots it. He stops to examine the object and gets nearer, getting a good look at it. As he touches it, a beam of light illuminates him. Clearly he is destined by the Gods to be the next great leader of men. He decides to try his brawn and grabs it by the grip, jerking it upward. It doesn't budge. He tries again, both hands on the grip, and it refuses to budge. Grabbing it by the cross guard, he strains and bends and jerks the sword as hard as he possibly can. Finally it comes free and he falls to the ground, the sword in his lap.

Coming to his senses on the ground, the goblin shakes his head, then realizes what he's done. He leaps to his feet, elated, and tosses the sword away into the grass. The beam of light immediately fades as he runs over and grabs his new-found anvil and drags it off screen right.

Logline (story pitch in 25 words or less)

A goblin, finding a sword in an anvil, pulls the sword out but discards it for the anvil itself.

Story Beats

Opening shot: sword stuck in an anvil beside a road under moonlight. Goblin enters screen left.

Goblin notices sword.
Goblin approaches cautiously, examining sword in anvil.
Goblin touches it tentatively. Shaft of light appears above him.
Goblin recoils from anvil, cautiously.
Goblin touches again.
Goblin decides it is safe and grabs the handle, jerking upward swiftly. Sword doesn't budge.
Goblin grabs with both hands and pulls hard but sword doesn't budge.
Goblin lets go of sword, then musters his strength.
Goblin grabs sword by the cross guard, steps onto anvil and pulls with all his might.
After a long pull, goblin frees the sword from the anvil. Resulting forces goblin to reel back and fall onto his butt with sword across his lap.
Goblin shakes off the resulting confusion, notices sword in lap, and jumps to feet.
Goblin pitches sword off-camera into the weeds and approaches anvil, excited.
Goblin grabs the anvil and, straining, lifts it, dragging it off screen right.

Acting to Dialog 1 - Blocking Stage

2011-01-25T21:23:00.000-08:00

Here's the blocking stage of my first 3d animation set to dialog. Lots to tweak and fix, but I'm fairly happy with the results so far. Hopefully I can keep the quality up as I move into splines this week.

More concept art.

2011-01-25T21:04:00.000-08:00

I decided I wasn't particularly happy with the ork concept art for ZBrush, so I went back and grabbed a piece I did last year for my concept art class. The ork was too generic and not particularly inspired, due to the rush in creation, but I had more time to spend developing the character and its backstory, and hit on something I thought was interesting and creative with Ann Enemy, the crust punk mermaid.

There's actually quite a bit of backstory about Ann Enemy I created. She's the little sister of an alternate version of the Little Mermaid. In this version, their father Neptune, known to enjoy his drink and possessing a legendary temper, was an abusive father, and so rather the Little Mermaid escaped to land, bargaining with a sea witch for legs not to pursue true love but to get away from the abuse, leaving behind her little sister. Ann, following the lead of her older sibling, escaped as well, but wasn't as fortunate as her sister when it came to getting legs. Instead she came ashore in Texas, leaving the Gulf of Mexico, and was taken in by a group of tramps who hopped trains and rode the rails across the continent. There she learned to embrace her new life and the anonymity it provided.

Much of the reference came from a wonderful archives of photos by Mike Brodie, aka Polaroid Kidd. I've also found a wonderful model from the 3DSK archives, a young lady named Mary, that is standing in as my anatomy reference model.

I've gotten a start in modeling out the head so far, and will be detailing out the body soon, getting the rough quad model blocked out so I can begin subdivision and sculpting in ZBrush. I'll post progress as I go.

Ork concept art

2011-01-21T13:47:00.000-08:00

Here's a concept art model sheet I did for my ZBrush Class. This week I'll begin quad modeling before I bring him into ZBrush and sculpt the details.

Storyboard work

2011-01-19T15:16:00.000-08:00

For my storyboard class last semester, I analyzed the beats from the opening sequence of No Country for Old Men, and was really struck by the composition choices and use of light and shape. Had a lot of fun drawing these.

We also had to do basic storyboards telling a story about a little boy named Billy and his bathroom. Here's one I did.

For the same class, I had to do a number of on-location sketchbook assignments. Here's a few of the ones I liked.

Ani300 Animations

2011-01-18T19:24:00.000-08:00

Last semester I was lucky enough to take a great animation course from Suzanne Kaufman. In the class, I did a number of animations, including the following, posted in chronological order.

Blocking pass of Walk with Character:

Polish pass of Walk with Character:

Blocking Pass of "Mind the Gap":

Splines Pass of "Mind the Gap":

Final Polish Pass of "Mind the Gap":

Block Pass for "Valley Girl and Bomb":

Final Pass for "Valley Girl and Bomb":

Junior Projects 1

2011-01-18T19:06:00.000-08:00

For the first half of my junior year, I had to create a short animation in 3d from start to finish, including designing the character, building and texturing it, rigging and skinning it, building, texturing and lighting the set and then animating and compositing the rendered result.

I ended up having huge amounts of technical problems, some of which were my fault, some of which were the fault of the software, and so the result of the project wasn't ideal at all, but it's just the first attempt at something like this, and a lot was learned in the process.

Below are some examples of my work for the project.

Initial character design, sans color.

Color comps, testing out color combinations of the basic shapes for the character on a variety of values of backgrounds.

An early storyboard. This story was scrapped, due to a number of technical issues as well as the fact that it just plain wasn't any good.

Below are a number of rendered frames from the final animation. The video itself is fraught with issues, so to preserve my dignity and sanity I'm just posting a few stills.

I'm starting a new semester-long project in the same vein, and am excited about how it looks so far. I'll post more about it as I get more completed.

Echo - Menus and stuff

2010-06-19T11:18:00.001-07:00

Last year for school, I was lucky enough to be invited to work on a really great game team, focusing mainly on ui and menu art but helping out here and there wherever I could. Below are a few pieces I got to design for the project.

The logo for the game team.

The logo for the game itself.

The main menu system.

A character status UI showing current equipped weapon and other two carried weapons, health (shown by color of character silhouette) and ammunition status.

Achievement popout with icons for each achievement.

A pitch meter, for a mechanic in the game where you hum into a microphone to match a beat, similar to Guitar Hero or RockBand.

A texture for one of the models in the game.

Unfortunately, due to changes in the game design (it was a student game, after all, such things are inevitable) nearly none of the art above made it into the final build of the game, but it was still a ton of fun to work on and a great learning experience.