Grimoire Third Person Animations

I've been working on some animations for Omniconnection on their game, Grimoire!  These are the blocked third-person view animations for the wizards.



The model was done by Karen McCarthy, and the rig was done by Robert Campbell.  These animations were done on an earlier rig, so excuse the penetration issues, those have since then been fixed.

Global Game Jam 2014 and Unity Cookie Lights

Just finished the Global Game Jam 2014 today!  You can check our our game, Follow, here.  In short, its our idea of a blind person trying to find his seeing-eye-dog, who had run off.  He can only 'see' by sound, so this was our representation of the world as he might view it.

I got to play a lot in Unity, including some experimentation with HLSL/CG coding.  I ended up doing a lot of work with Unity's lighting, and animated it in-engine with the built in animation tools.  Thank goodness I did the characters from before.  I did some art direction, as well as some set dressing, and simple modeling.

We decided early on, whenever something made a sound, it gave off ripples and briefly lit the area, maybe a mix of echolocation and his mind's perception of what the area already looked like.  The problem was, we couldn't figure out how to do that in Unity.  Our solution was to just represent it with lights, and I went to work on trying to get a ramp shader so we could have some nice blown-out lights with harder edges than the quadradic point lights want to give us.  Think something like Closure's hard lighting.

On the last day, around 8 hours to the end, we found a way to pull it off: cookie lighting.  Weird name, I know.  It uses a map to put a sort of cut-out in front of the light, kind of like light shining through a grate.  I ended up using a point light with a spherical map, and I animated the light's motion.  There ended up being some weird issues with certain angles, and certain intensities, where it just acted like a point light.  I kind of wished I had used a spot light, but I didn't realize the origin of the point-light issue until we were too low on time.

I played a bit in a art directory sort of role.  I pushed the idea of the the fountain and statues in the park to be exaggerated, and had the people represented as bodies with giant lips and teeth; the idea being, a blind person can only see what they are, as he is, and he can't really feel a stranger to determine what they actually look like.  I would have liked to go even more surreal with it, but we had limited time as it was.

And finally, I have to give a shout-out to the whole team.  Our Unity Programmer god was Elio Feliciano, who saved us all when we were almost programmer-less.  Bryce Pelletier also filled in our programming team, mostly working on our AI while having never worked in Unity previously.  Rob Walker was our Lead and he filled in the all-important sounds in our game.  Angel Luis did our UI design and art, as well as writing.  Logan Blosser did a lot of design work, dialogue, and filled in all of the gaps; unfortunately, a bunch of his work never made it in-game, due to time constraints; but he was still indispensable.

And kudos to the artists for making a pretty awesome environment.  These were 4 artists who had to work together and autonomously at the same time, and I'm blown away at how well we worked.  We all played a part in modeling, and all played a part in set dressing.  Ivan Banche took the lead in building the city in Maya, as well as building most of the buildings.  Karen McCarthy sculpted most of the surreal stuff in the game.  Sean Buck modeled most of the set dressing (dumpsters, trash cans, signs, etc) as well as the cathedral and the construction site pieces.  I did a number of scattered objects (gravestones, trees, benches) and did a lot of scattered work in both the Maya file and in Unity.

Check out this beautiful little city made in just 48 hours.  Ironic that it's mostly in the dark, huh?

RR Character Animations in Unity 2D

This project is on hiatus for now, so I want to post the animations I had worked on in December.

Rifle Enemy attack/idle

Rifle Enemy kill (in progress)

Flamethrower Enemy attack/idle

Flamethrower Enemy kill

Commando Enemy idle

Commando Enemy kill (barely any progress)

Demolition Enemy attack/idle

Demolition Enemy kill

Hero attack

Hero death (in progress)

Hero run/idle

I still need to finish up the Hero death, Enemy001 kill, and the Enemy003 kill.  As you can see, the formers are partially blocked, but needs some cleanup, the latter is barely started.  I'll either update this post or make a new one if/when I finish those two up.

Nassa the Gnome, Painted Textures

Finally getting around to finishing her up (again).  You may think that Nassa has become my excuse to try new programs and workflows; and you'd be spot on.  I'm now working on her in 3DS Max to get used to Max's Slate Material Editor.  I'm also thinkin' about using 3DS Max's rigging and animation tool, but there is a good chance I'll go back to Maya for that, and do a new character in Max later on.

I added and changed a few things here, especially her two obsidian-like daggers and oversized pirate hat (stolen from a pirate.)  If you were playing the D&D campaign with me it would make more sense.  This is also the point at which I should link to our campaign log, but I'm so far behind on it, that it wouldn't explain it either.

Funny thing, I have been digging Paint Tool Sai recently, for how their blending brushes behave.

The good news is that I can deal with layered Photoshop files in SAI.  The bad news is I can't export tiff files, nor does Mudbox play nice with SAI's psd exported files.  I like using SAI more than I like texturing in Mudbox; though I am still using both programs back and forth.  Mudbox's Export to PSD features is great for getting all of the zones and shapes down, and then I can work with the flat textures for most of the detail, then take it back into Mudbox for cleaning seams.

The downside to working on this while playing the character is that she develops (and changes) on a regular basis.

I'm not modeling the panther cloak.

Faked Pixel Aesthetic for Unity

A buddy of mine was working on a game concept, and he wanted a pixel aesthetic.  I did a test over some existing animations to see how well Unity 2D could look for pixel art, and I was actually pretty impressed and how well the look carried over.

This is also a sneak peek of the RR four main enemy types (one more coming), and how their idles are turning out.

For a quick breakdown on how I set it up, click "Read more »"

Fix for Unity 2D Not Displaying Translate Manipulator

This is a pretty simple one, but it wasn't obvious to me.  I had to ask about it on the Unity forums.

I was working on my animation in a 2D perspective by clicking on the view cube arrow to give me an orthographic camera.  I'm not sure what I did, but my manipulator went missing.  I couldn't move the objects around anymore.  It turns out, I hit the "2D" button, which flattens it to a true orthographic camera, and then, for some reason, gets rid of your manipulators.  Just toggle it off, and you'll get everything back, just fine!

Check out these pictures for a visual explanation of my issue:

2D Planning for Action Character Intros

I did these as planning for an action character-intro style animation, kind of showing off each character's fighting styles and abilities. I got inspired by Studio Mir's Road to the Cup League of Legends video.  I only really finished the first one, though I am work on finishing the other two, before doing them all in 3D

RR Hero Run Cycle

Just finished our hero's run, as well as the final Unity proof-of-concept.  Now I have to work on all of the enemies and the various interactions between the hero and these enemies.

This guy will constantly charges into enemies, just for your enjoyment.  What a nice guy.

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Tutorial - Using Unity 2D's Dope Sheet for Animation

This tutorial is for anyone who wants to jump into Unity and get to animating sprites in-editor.   It assumes a basic knowledge of Unity, and goes over some of the new Unity 2D features -- enough to get animating.

Getting up to speed took a little time and experimentation with the Unity 2D Demo project, as well as the videos released by Unity.  I thought I might document it here for anyone who needs this information specifically.  For reference, here are the two Unity 2D demo videos currently available:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1F6fi04qw8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qE8cuHI93c
You can find a lot more information about Unity 2D there, on top of the information covered in this tutorial.


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

Unity 2D Animation Tests

I made a post on how to get started in Unity 2D sprite animation.  Check it out here.

I started with a test in Flash, separating the body parts out. I took inspiration from the artist, NCH, and the animation style of Shank. I drew up a character based on my last animation that ended up turning into League of Legends's Poppy (it was all because of the hair).

We decided on Unity so we could easily swap out pieces, in case we later wanted to do some sort of customization system.  While David was working on the programming and Ryoma was working on the concepts, I decided to figure out Unity's new 2D system with animation.

idle

run

attack

Late in the process, I realized I could group objects together (such as the head elements) so I could translate/rotate them together (which would have made the head animation cleaner).  I should have split the torso into two, so I could do bends there; the root of this problem is shown in the attack test.

Also, we had originally intended to keep the framerate low for style reasons (the attack and the idle look okay like this), but Unity doesn't handle stepped animation perfectly, sometimes tweening the frames in the wrong place, or just completely wonking out.

wonk wonk