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.

Ascendant Grunt Knockbacks

This is the knockback for a Grunt enemy in Ascendant.  They fall back over time, then loop when horizontal with the ground.  It ends with the bounce and the kip-up.

Ascendant Fly Tests

Goofy fly tests.  Pretty simple, but necessary if the Fly is to move around in-game.

Joint Skeleton-mover Script

You can temporarily download it here until I get it on Creative Crash.
Or click Read More to show the full script at the bottom of the post.

This is a script I started late last year, and I've recently come back and cleaned it up.  It allows you to grab the root joint of a joint chain to rotate and move it relative to the origin.  It creates a locator on your joint, bakes the animation onto that, and then allows you to interact with a shape on the origin to play with your joint chain.  After deleting, it bakes it all back onto the root joint.  Though it's fairly simple, and not entirely original, it has been one of my most-used scripts for exported joint chains (and also mocap cleanup).

It's pretty straightforward; you run the JHH_skeletonMover script to create or delete the skeleton mover.  It will intelligently put it on the object selected, then delete it off when you're done.  There's also a JHH_skeletonMover_originOffset procedure which will center the joint onto the origin; good for zeroing out your animation.  I'll be making a video pretty soon, but feel free to ask if you have questions.

I'll probably rewrite this in Python at some point, just to get some practice in.

I'm Working For Hapa Games

As of today, I'm technically working for Hapa Games.  It's an indie company started by two of my fellow developers.  We're working on a 2D Co-op brawler with roguelike elements.  It's an idea we've been discussing for the past several months.  More will be coming soon.

For funsies, you can check out some of the reference tests I made back in June:

11 Second Club, July 2013

Here is my 11 Second Club entry for July 2013:



I'm surprised how much I learned just by doing this; I mean, I expected to learn a lot, but it challenged me in a lot of ways I'm not used to.  The voice clip was very weird and oddly specific, so I tried to push it to a subject that wasn't obvious.  I went with a gamer stuck in an RTS style game and her roommate sitting on the couch, because all gamers have been there before.

Wentelteffje Animations for Team Escherreal

During the production of Grapple, team Escherreal needed a bit of help, so I volunteered to help them out with animation so they didn't have to cut this guy from the game.  I animated the creature with an insect-like tripedal gait.  I thought it made the most sense with the 6 legs, even though it has human feet.

This is Wentelteffe, or "French Toast", a rolling bug-like creature based off of M. C. Escher's, by the same name.  The character was modeled and textured by Miguel Espinoza, and rigged by Caitlyn Trout (with some tweaks by me).

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.

Painting Using Mudbox's Export-to-PSD Feature

It's a start!  I have been digging this paint-directly-on-the-model workflow for textures.  It just makes so much more sense in my head.

I want to texture using Mudbox's export-screen-to-Photoshop feature.  It works a lot like Pixexix and ZappLink from ZBrush, but I found it to be much easier to use than the latter, and less buggy than the former.

When exporting to Mudbox, I had a lot of issues to fix.  Not surprisingly, it caught me for a lot of T-intersections and non-manifold geometry, both pretty much standard to a low poly model.  For the non-manifold geometry, I seperated those edges who were shared by a plane (such as in the hat), but kept them in the combined meshes.  I am going to swing back and clean up the UVs, before I jump back into Mudbox.

It really doesn't like dealing with multiple meshes at the same time (or perhaps multiple uv spaces at the same time), but that is a problem easily solved by working on individual pieces at a time, with some clever merging and unmerging in between.  I also ran into issues with overlapping UVs, so the simple fix was to get rid of the overlapping during the painting process.