Animation Mentor Class 3 Dungeon Crawl - Scary Rooms, Cute Wizards

(Note: I added in the beast at the bottom at a later date. Subtle, right?)

I loved the last one?  No, I love this one.  I could make animations like this for the rest of my life.  I need to do more cute characters.

This one came together really well, just as the last one did.  I'm getting a bit better at my reference; something really clicked once I started my Animation Mentor classes.  I think it's the experience that comes with time, too.

I thing the story in this one is nice and simple.  The animation just came easily with this guy.  I don't know if it's because he is blobby and all about shapes, or if the idea was jut that well visualized.  I got to the point where I was polishing to the camera a lot quicker than I have in the past.  And every part of it, I enjoy watching back.

I decided to play with the lighting a bit, because I wanted that staff glow to play a part when he 'takes a closer look' in the room.  That gave me the opportunity to get that nice lean-in pose, and the really exaggerated waggle before he runs out.  Natural looking lighting is still difficult for me, but I think I pulled it off here.

You can see from my reference below, that he was originally supposed to recover the staff, in an even cuter pawing at the ground from around the door.  But for the staff to land in an orientation that the door could open and close, and he could grab it and pull it out, AND for his stubby arms to be able to reach it; it was just unrealistic.

Animation Mentor Class 3 Dungeon Crawl - Collapsed Tunnel Escape

The three body mechanics assignments in class 3 don't have to be related, but it seems as if most people like to put them in the same theme, myself included. I chose the theme "Dungeon Crawl", though I'm not making them sequential shots, because I want to try out the other rigs available to me. I'm haven't decided on the other two yet, but I have plenty of ideas on paper.

I must start by saying, I love this shot. The reference (which you can see below) went really smoothly, and gave me a great idea of how this would look. I have axes flying in from some unknown pursuers, and the warrior girl cleverly causes a cave in with the loose doorway strut. It translated really well into real life, including the shield prop, and it translated back into an animation quite well.

I love the slide in, and I love the stumble on the run out. There is something really flowing and visceral about the weight when she stumbles. It's easy for me, as a viewer, to empathize with the speed or panic in which she's moving and stumbling about.

The one spot that I need to take another look at is the second swing. The first swing has nice power to it, but the second swing is just kind of weak. I think I need to cut out that whole section and reanimate it from scratch. I spent an extra week trying to strenghten that section, but I was a bit limited by what I already had, and I don't have the time right now to make that broad change.

I also want to come back and clean up the modeling. The walls are fine, but I need to make the wooden struts look actually weak, and actually like wood. Of course, the cave in should use proper rocks; I think I can do that with a simulation. Also, her shield and mace need some love to up the badass factor. Last, I think she could probably use a helmet or something that says "warrior" at first glace. Maybe I can do something to the texture.

I'm pretty darn happy with the way this came out, and that only makes me more excited for the next two! But first, here is my video refence, and a few progress shots along the way:

Sneak Peek at Animated Facial Textures Script Update

Centering on texture and pupil secondary-offset control.

Tile offset, U and V tweaking, working all in one!

I am currently working on a Version 2.0 of my Animated Texture Offset script.  The biggest things I am adding are the option to choose the attribute to read in (position, rotate, scale, X, Y, Z) and support for pupils as mentioned in this post.

Choosing the attribute-in was something I had thought about when I was writing the first version, but it adds a significant amount of complexity to the process, though mostly on the Maya end.  That's actually why I'm writing the Unity C# script first.  I might have to do some weird fanagling with some local variables Maya's Expression Editor.  It could be on the simple side, of setting some variables and copying a script in, or it could be much more than that.

The second bit, the pupil animation, is actually easy to do in Maya.  I was originally going to write a second script to focus on a single pupil texture and offsets with that, but I realized I could merge it with the tiling texture script, allowing for multiple pupil types, as well as keeping it all in one package.  It makes the math significantly more complex, and the script a little harder to read, but it functions just fine.  The one reason it will be more difficult in Unity is because Unity's default shaders take RGB and A all in one channel, so I can't separate out the Place2DTexture of the diffuse and opacity.  I think the solution to that is to include with the script a custom shader that separates out those two maps.  At least that will be easy to write.

On top of those two things, I also refactored the code to just make it a little cleaner and a bit more robust.  The Inspector public variables are much nicer (for example, it takes a GameObject now, rather than a string name), and I have some good error checking in there.

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