Life Drawing September 2013

One nice thing about being in school is it's much easier to take life drawing classes.  While I'm still at FIEA, I'm going to keep on attending life drawing where possible.  Here's a collection of my work from this past month:

I'm used to drawing with outline, so now I'm forcing myself to use value blocking instead.  I can't tell if it's helping, but I have to assume it is.

Animated Facial Textures in Maya and Unity

Download the pdf document here:
Direct link

Check it out online here:
Animated Facial Textures in Maya and Unity - Full Document

You can check my further notes on the subject here:
More on Animated Facial Textures

Essentially, my goal was to create a texture-driven facial animation system that worked in both Maya and Unity.  Making one in Maya is very simple, but I found very little on getting it to work in Unity, and nothing about getting it to export from Maya.

To give a bit of a background, for FIEA, one of our assignments was to document or write a tutorial about something we learned or wanted to learn.  I took this opportunity to pick up Unity, and solve a possible problem for a game I will be working on soon, and a problem I'd been curious about since when I was working on Intrepid.

I came up with a solution using joint animation that can be baked out of Maya and used in Unity.  The Maya portion gave me some practice with Maya Expressions, which is great considering I want to rig up the rest of the character soon.  And the Unity portion gave me a chance to learn Unity, and also learn some C#.  C# wasn't too difficult to pick up, having studied C and Java in the past; the code to get it all working can pretty much be copy-pasted from the document.

Download the pdf from the link above.  It should be very accessible - it breaks it down really small to start; getting it in engine, and how the math of the expressions and the image offset method will work.  And in sections 4 and 5, it gets to the meat of the whole operation.

If anyone has any questions on how it works, or why I did something; or any comments on how I can improve this method, I'd love to hear it.  Send me an email, or drop me a message here.

Animated Facial Textures in Maya and Unity - Full Document

Click 'Read More' below to see the full document.

Grapple - Amina Enemy Takedown

Here is a shot I've been working on for Grapple.  Amina, the protagonist of the game, is equipped with a grappling hook that she can use to grab onto buildings and enemies.  When grappling an enemy from the back, she goes into a takedown animation.

Epic Games Style Facial Rig

This was my experiments on the Epic Games style facial rig.  It essentially allows them to make one hero face, controlled with morph deformers (blendshapes), and then transfer the animation to a joint system on a series of different faces.  Joints are much cheaper to use in a game engine, and it is much easier on the animators to use a single system across all of the characters in the Gears of War game.

I edited the Nassa rig to have a mouth to test this out.  The left Nassa face is the hero using blendshapes.  The controllers drive that face, which in turn move locators parented to the verts on the face.  (I used a Maya rivet script to constrain the locators to verts.  Make sure your UV spaces are unique!)  Then those locators move the weighted joints on the character's face. The transfer wasn't exactly 1 to 1, but it was pretty close, and with more work, I'm sure it'd be closer.  With a higher-poly face, I'd need some more joints and a bit more time in weighting.  However, even these limited joints transfered to the high-poly Chip face pretty well, with minor editing on the joint weights.

(video coming soon, too)

Grapple Locomotion Animation Pre-Vis

This is a locomotion test for the grappling hook in the game, Grapple.  Right now, the game is getting a bit of a rehaul, and part of that is the player locomotion.  We are shifting to a flowing movement using the grappling hook, and given a number of situations provided by the designers, I've been asked to depict how it should feel from a player's perspective.

It is all animated on twos and fours at 30 fps.  Unfortunately, YouTube doesn't have the compression for accurate playback speed, but it is only an 'animated sketch' after all.

I drew out this simple environment, based on current concept art, and drew a path for the character to traverse.  I tried to include as many situations as possible; standing grapples, air grapples, swinging, enemy interaction, and most importantly, flowing movement.  I imagine it as parkour mixed with a grappling hook.

Animating a Corgi

Here are my animations for Tank, the Corgi. He was the main character in Intrepid. I animated the base locomotion, as well as a couple small actions.  I was never able to clean them up as much as I had wanted (especially the jump/bark) before the game was cut.  Check out the rigging post for some notes about animating the quadruped.

Rear and 3/4 playthrough of all of the animations



Idle animation


Walk, run, and sprint




Jump and bark (WIPs)



Sniff idle and sniff walk



Also, these kinds of mistakes make me love doing my job:

Intrepid Lighting in vForge

I did all of the in-engine lighting for Intrepid. As the art lead, and without a dedicated art director, the job went to me. It was a bit of a struggle, since I did a lot of guessing and working from the heart, because I don't really have the background for lighting. It was cool working in vForge with the deferred lighting, since I could make changes, and see them instantly in-game. Here's a bunch of shots of the level we had made:

 

 

 

 

It's weird, because after a time, I really couldn't tell how it looked, and even today (a week later), I can't read if it looks good or not.  With an animation, I can come back to it in a day or two, and I'll know what needs fixing; but when it came to this kind of thing, it did not come as easily.  I suppose that's why I'm an animator first.

Intrepid Cave Models

For funsies, here are some of the cave wall models I did for Intrepid.  They are all multi-sided (two sides of each being shown), so they can create some pretty cool silhouettes from very few modular pieces.  Click on 'em to show a bigger picture.

Rigging a Corgi

While on Intrepid, one of the jobs I was tasked with (or really, tasked myself with) was to rig and animate our four-legged main character, Tank the corgi.  I wanted to challenge myself, never having worked with a quadruped before.  It's challenge of the rig and animation was also what kept me sane during the harder weeks, because really, I loved every minute of it.

It was interesting to say the least.  I didn't model the character, and we didn't have the time or manpower to iterate, so there were a lot of little things I had to roll with.  One of the hardest parts was the muscles of the leg, where it connects to the chest-area.  This probably won't come as a big surprise to any dog-lovers, or anyone who's animated dogs before.  But getting that to work in the rig took a lot of studying and tweaking before my corrective joints worked on what I had.

I've also included here several resources I used for animation reference, for the benefit of myself in a future project, or anyone else who might grace this page.  Not included is the Edward Muybridge book for animals (which actually was of only limited benefit, due to it's physical, not digital, nature) and any reference that I personally took.

The Thundering Herd (slow motion running)
Goro the corgi slow motion recordings (there are several with this dog that were great reference)
Dog Normal and Abnormal Gait study
Line Test Journals - dog slow walk animation reference
Line Test Journals - how to key dogs walk animation notes

Working on a Different Video Game

I am sad to say that the game I was working on, Intrepid, was cut.  Out of the five games, four were green-lit, and ours was cut.  It came as a surprise to us, as well as a number of our peers; but it's not like we would ever not count on passing through.

This isn't the first time I've had to deal with losing a project.  I've walked this path before, and in a successful career, it certainly won't be the only time.  It's funny, because I was saying, on the chance we might get cut, I'd take it on the chin, and move on.  But I was surprised to see how much I cared about it when the time came.  To be honest, it wasn't even the game I was sad about losing, it was the team.  We had one of the closest teams in the cohort, and a number of people put our game as the game they would want to be a part of, and I'd like to think that's largely because of our culture.

Perhaps a bittersweet ending to a project I poured so much of my time and heart into, but part of being an artist is developing a thick skin and staying flexible.

I don't want this all to sound sad, though.  As I said, I need to move on, and I'm already ready to do that.  The game I had worked on previously, Grapple, was green-lit, and I was put on that team as the Lead Animator, and with several more talented people that came from Intrepid.

Over the next few days, I'll upload the work I've done for Intrepid.  I had to wear quite a few hats during that project, including quite a few that didn't quite fit me, but as the lead, I had to pick up where others could not.  I will say it was definitely enlightening to be out of my element.  After all, as Randy Pausch has said, experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.  And while I didn't get much out of the project as portfolio pieces, that was two grueling months (40 hour weeks, on top of classes) that I'd never give back.

Quick Concept for Intrepid Spider Cave

Quick concept I did for Intrepid.  Our project lead asked for some concepts based on some locations he wanted to present as possible areas to build.  I did a quick-painting of this spider cave, showing that the flood of tiny spiders that would surround the characters.  Jessie, with mild arachnophobia, could burn the spider webs, but she relied to Tank to bark them away from her long enough to do so.

Intrepid Lighting and Color Study

This is a lighting and color study for Intrepid's style and pallete.

Edit: Re-uploaded the image with some slight color and background changes.

Intrepid Lighting and Water

Lighting, color, and water concepts for the game, Intrepid.

 

Edit: Re-uploaded the image with some changes to the color and water.

Working on a Video Game

Usually I'd accompany all of my posts with pictures, but this can be an exception.  Today, not only was Grapple chosen as one of the five games to continue production, I was selected as the lead artist of another game, called Intrepid.  Needless to say, it's pretty exciting, and I'll be looking forward to the next months.  We have 2 months (starting January) to prove to the faculty that the game is worth making, and if we get greenlit, we get the next 6 months to develop it.  Pretty cool stuff.

Grapple Concepts

Matte paintings I made for a game called Grapple, to be presented to the FIEA faculty and students as a potential 8-month production.  I used a combination of photographs and digital painting.

Midna Redesign - Final Concept

This is the final painting of the True-Form Midna concept.  I enjoyed this painting style, and I might try to employ it again in the future.

Midna Redesign - Clothing Permutations

Initially, I came up with 8 body designs for my Midna redesign.  I ended up (as well as the other students) picking the chubby Midna design.  I thought it was the most interesting, considering her proportions as the imp.

This piece was 8 more permutations, this time, addressing clothing.  I didn't want to lose the concept that she as no human gentials, with the clothes being sort of a formality (after all, she is of another race.)  I also didn't want to lose her magic abilites and her hair, both of which sort of get ignored when she turns into True-Form at the end of the game.

Metroid 3D Environment

Metroid-style 3D environment in Maya's Viewport 2.0.

Link to the Past Church Concept

This painting came from a level in Zelda: A Link to the Past.  Early on in the game, the player comes out from a hidden passagway in the back of the church.  This is a 3D realized version of the 16-bit game with dramatic lighting.