Getting to grips with Unity.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been developing an idea that has been with me since I was at the Eurogamer Expo 2013 Last September.

I am still adding and irritating the design document. Since the document is still in its early stages I would prefer to stay quite on it for the matter. This brings me to the main reason for this blog post, since I am going to be making my own game, I am having to learn how to use Unity. To learn the basics I bought Will Goldstone's book Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials.

The first thing I had to do was get to grips with the Unity interface, I did this by spending an evening reading Game Development Essentials I was able to build a first person controller that was able to shoot at a wall of red cubes. The outcome for me was to learn the Unity interface along with understanding of different functions with in the game engine, such as prefabs, rigidbody. I learnt some basic scripting, allowing me to write character movement, also how to fire projectiles in a specific direction.

Here is a video showing what I built.

I will post another update with in the week, that will show off where I am currently up to with my prototype for game that I am creating and what I have learnt from it so far.

Rob Lloyd Morgan

Throwing Ideas Around.

Two weeks ago I went to the Wales Game Dev Show, were I spoke to a lot of different and interesting people. One of the most interesting was meeting Ian Livingstone, co-founder of Games Workshop as well as CEO of Eidos, creators of Tomb Raider Series (1996-2013). After spending some time with him I came away excited about wanting to make games, so since then I have been jotting down ideas for creating a new game.

I came up with three ideas, one of them I am keeping close to my chest as I want to proceed with it at a later date. The game that I am going to try to create however is a fast paced, mini game styled cooking game. The reason for it being a cooking game is that I want to create something that takes on another passion of mine which is home made cooking. So in Maya I quickly built a kitchen unit and I a rough design for an egg that opens up, with a rig setup.

Here are some screen caps I took.

I spoke about my ideas to a friend at work and he mentioned that I could use physics to make a really cool egg that will break up into bits when cracked against other objects, such as a frying pan.

For the past month I have been watch a handful of developer talk panels to educate myself of what the industry expects from me.

Here are of really amazing videos from the GameIndustry.biz Career Fair, sadly I can not get the videos onto my blog, I can only link you to the web pages. I urge you to watch them though. Art & Animation, Games Design, and Careers & Education.

This is all I have for now, but I am going to be designing a rough character and a frying pan, then proceeding to throw it all into Unity to make a realised vision of the game that I want to not only create but to play.

Show Reel 2013

I have recently finished updating my show reel, which is a display of mainly my current work with a few clips of older footage. It is a showcase of my abilities in being able to modelling with good topology, animate, and rig setup which is what I specialise and enjoy doing the most.

I am experienced in using Maya, UV Layout, Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop

Here is my 2013 show reel, music by C418 - Meatcraft (Remix).

Finally we have started animating now, we have gotten several shots done in around five days, which is looking promising when taking into account that we only have 42 shots in total.

However the issues of too many characters is causing problems again, we only have four of the five characters fully finished. I am really stressing out that they're not all finished at the moment, we still need to attach the rig to Coco, and I know full well that, I'll end up having to fix his vertices and clean him up, just as I did with Blackberry and Acorn.

ANNYYYWAYYY I have been testing lighting in Maya, using the mental ray software which is a plug-in rendering software, looking at tutorials, online and magazines. I was able to gain a better understanding on how to create a real sun and sky effect. I also learnt how to attach different lend on the camera to change what the overall effect will be when rendered out, when using the camera with the newly attached lens

Here are some renders I did while testing for a suitable lighting style.

 This set of lighting was not done with a physical sky or sun as I did not know about them at the time, this why they are so dark.

 I found the physical sky and sun.

 After some messing around with the values on the physical sky and sun, i started to gain an understanding of how I would achive the desirsed look I wanted.

 This test here is my favorite by far, the saturation is a lovely rate of 1.5-1.8, low multiply of 1, and a good handful of other values.

I continued to do a few more tests after finding the look I like, just to be sure.

Two Rigs Notice

sorry I haven't post anything in the last couple of weeks, I have been having such a nightmare with the rigs I am currently using.

So what happened is this, I was talking to one of my lectures about how my work was going, and how teaming up with Sancha in the long run will help us both out. I raised my concerns with making rigs for the characters as I have never really made a entire rig for anything in Maya before and my tutor brought up an add-on for Maya called the Set Up Machine, which allows you to automatically create a rig, which has many infulences associated to it. I was forward by my tutor if I did use the Set Up Machine then, I would have to do more skin weighting than if I made my own; which I thought was an alright deal, as I was not confident in my rigging skills and if I messed something up while building the rig, it would set me and Sancha back a bit, and we can not afford to lose time and with skin weighting if you miss a part of the body you can fix it with out having to backtrack to older save files. Anyway I will get to the point of it, basically, I worked on attaching the rigs to the meshes of the characters, that part was fine, it was the skin weighting part which was the part that took the biscuit; no matter what I did, I could not fully clean or apply influence properly. After speaking to the Maya technician, he unfortunately told me (to be bunt) that the rigs were never going to work correctly and to make a new ones from scratch.

This bit of information, was disappointing as I felt that I had wasted two weeks, and gained nothing of value, other than DO NOT EVER USE AUTO RIGS!.

Anyway, rather than being annoyed for too long, I took a seventy video installment, tutorial on how to make a professional level rig, from Digital Tutors. It took me four solid days to get it done, and now I can happily say I can make rigs, weirdly I really enjoyed rigging, I like the techical challage that it provieds, but more importinally is the satisfactions i get when rigging feels good, rather than when I animate, I feel that I don't get much emotional satisfactions when I have put a lot of time into making pieces of animation.

It is safe to say that I am really considering being a rigger as my career choice in life, sadly I only have one item to put into a riggers show reel, so what I might do, is the 3rd years next year and the M.A students is to offer my assistance in helping them complete their films. as rigging can be really tricky if you do not understand what is going on around you. I will also do a lot more rigging during the summer for my show reel.

Here ares some of the still of the past few weeks.

 As you can see here I have stated to make some controls, such as the chest and Center of Gravity (COG) controls for the character rig.

 the images above is me creating a expressions, which are add on nodes/features which are set in the channel box.

 Here I have created the reverse IK foot set up for the rig, with it a foot, toe, heel control.

 you can see the foot bank in action here, which allows the foot to sway side to side.

 This is the lower half of the characters rig, as you can see it is colour coded, so i can easily identify the left and right side controls.

 here is the a shot of the full 3/4 veiw of the rig with some nodes on the left hand side panel.

here is a side view.

this is not looking so good anymore

ok, I do not mean to sound like a diva or a drama queen, however I am starting think that maybe partnering up with Sancha maybe of been a bit of a mistake. If you have been reading my post for a while now, then first thank you for keep up with me, and the other thing is that I mentioned in a previous post that there are five character in this film, originally I was bit hesitant about there being so many characters in a CG grad film, but I thought that there being two people working together it might be ok.....that was until the other day, when I got given Sancha's models that she had been working to create some blendshapes for them, the flow of gemomatey is non existent, it was so messy; here have a screen shot to see what I mean.

As you can see in blocked mode the mesh looks hideous, so I ended up having to fix them meshes as quick as I could to bring it to some form of animate-able condition.

 for black berry there are just far too many polygons it would of been a nightmare to create any blendshapes

Here is acorn who i have started to patch up so she is able to have a good deformation when animating .

Modeling the one of the Characters

This past week and a half I have been modeling one of the two characters for the film I am working on with a fellow student. there isn't much to talk about really this week other than showing you some images of the process when making him. oh just for the record, this is the mushroom character.

I am hoping to finish him off next week and also by adding eyes, mouth, tongue. Also I am planning on starting to