Recap!

So it’s been a while since my last post! school has been insane lately with rounding up the last big assignments for the previous two courses. this semester I studies motion capture for games and second level 3D modelling. Both courses have been extremely time consuming and also intersected with the holiday leave, which proved a wee bit hectic in the end. So to sum up some of my progression in 3D during this course I will show some screenshots of my final assignment presented in Unreal engine 4.

This is my sci-fi generator, presumably for when humans have colonized mars:) this model was made in a two step procedure, by first creating a high poly model with around 2 million polygons and then projecting that topology onto a ca: 5000 poly model and baking out textures from that. baking textures has been a painful and interesting experience and in the end I feel that I have learned a great deal more about working with both 3ds max and unreal engine. I’m really looking forward to having the time to make new models and creating new scenes for my portfolio using the skills provided by this course!

In motion capture I have been working the last couple of days on cleaning up motion data from our final assignment in a software called “Cortex”. Most software used in motion capture seems to be in dire need of improvement! there is such a massive amount of time that is being sunk into manually going through every single frame of a shoot because the software’s algorithms can’t handle a few occluded markers. If I get to work with motion capture in the future I will make sure to not even go forward to the cleaning stage of the production before I’ve made sure that the takes I have are as occlusion-free as possible! this could possibly be avoided through better planning of the takes, perhaps avoiding scenes where the actors are huddled behind covers and being dragged across the floor:) I think that next time I should also inform the actors about the range of motions that are ok to perform without occluding the markers and just give them the basics of motion capture logic to keep in mind. However seeing the quality of lifelike motions that motion capture can provide for animating human characters, I think it makes all the hassle worth while for most game productions. Realistic movement is all in the details, small gestures, twitches and pauses and that is very hard to synthesize for an average animator. Those small details could be the tipping point for making a good game great.

All in all it’s been a very educational third semester! I feel that I’m beginning to really understand the actual process of making more advanced games in a technical sense. I’m looking forward to the next 3D course that starts on tuesday where we’re going to create more advanced characters and get to work with animation! yum:)

sorry for the long post… here’s a potato

Week 7

This week I am going to present my work on the animations for the power ups of the game, or rather the effect of an activated power up. In the game “Aggressive Bystander” there will be two different kinds of power ups, one that increases the player’s speed of movement, which is called “blue cow”. And another one called “happy pill”, which drastically decreases the pump-meter, now for those of you who are unfamiliar with the game design the pump-meter is a sort of HP bar that the player needs to keep balanced in order to survive.

In general when creating the graphics for this game, the main focus has been to be as obvious as possible in the design of the feedback the player is given. Being an arcade game that is viewed top down, there is not a lot of room to explain the game features, such as these power ups. So my thought behind these effects are that the player will try them out for the first time out of curiosity and the second time with the intended purpose.

 

I think this one is pretty obvious, it is basically your run of the mill fireball! The power up is called “blue cow”, which is quite the apparent reference to a certain energy drink… due to the name I made the flames blue, going towards scolding white. It is really not that advanced, I had a blowtorch in mind when choosing the colors. I did not strive for a realistic approach when considering the animation of the flames, but wanted it to feel plausible within the frames of the rest of the graphics in the game. I wanted to give a sort of liquid feeling to the flames, so that they would roll of the fireball, and in that way add to the feeling of the increasing speed.

 

This is the happy pill effect.

The thing that worried me about this one is that I did not want to give too much of a drug vibe with the animation. The fact that it is called happy pill is vibe enough! So I decided to keep it as simple as possible, and go with a smiley. I chose the smiley because of the clarity of it, it is something most people associate with something happy in general, and it gets the job done in the fastest way possibly.

I chose to put both of these sprites as something the programmers could summon just beneath the player sprite with the same dimensions, so as to spare them as much work as possible.

That is all I have to say this week! Thanks for reading!