BGP Week 7

During this week I worked on some more animations and a box that will be used in the intro cinematic.

In the intro cinematic the robot will fall out of a big cargo ship in a box, when the box falls to the ground it breaks and the robot is revealed.

When I created the box I just took a standard cube and extruded all the sides inwards, and that's about it for the modeling, the icon on the box is the logo for our team, which I think is a neat detail.   

To create the broken box I first used the cut tool to create planes that I would later remove to make the box look broken, the pieces that's laying around the box are supposed to be parts of the box and are just some simple shapes that I then gave the same texture as the box, to create the inside I extruded all of the planes inwards, I then flipped the planes to get the inside of the box.

Bad Landing Low

This animation will be played if the player land in a bad way, a bad landing will f.ex. be when the player does a really high jump and lands on plane ground.

Bad Landing High

This animation will be played when doing a high jump and then lands badly, it's basically the same as the bad landing low except it's more exaggerated. 

Manual Speed 

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If the players speed get's to low he/she will be able to repeatedly press a button  to get a small speed boost, the animation is still far from done but I will probably use the pose when he bends over, the rest will probably get changed, there will also be sparks flying from the robots center to emphasize that there's something wrong.  

BGP Week 6

Last week I keept polishing the main menu animations, I also did 2 animations for moving forward manually, the player will be able to do this when he/she has lost an certain amount of speed, but these animations might not be used and we might use some sort effect to show the player what's happening, the reason for not using the animations right now is that it's unclear what the animation is supposed to do.

During the week I also started working on animations for making a bad landing and a space ship, we will have space ships flying past/towards the player to make the world feel more alive.

Main Menu 01

Main Menu 02

Main Menu 03

Main Menu 04

This is how the ship turned out, it will always be high up in the sky so the most important thing about the model was the silhouette, because the ships will always be up in the sky and the player will never see it up close there was no need to make it super detailed. 

Week 5 BGP

During last week I kept on working with the animations, mainly the main menu animations, they are not quite finished so I will have to work on them for a bit this week as well, I also tweaked some of the older animations such as when the character is in the air.

 When in the main menu the character will be laying on the ground making sudle movements and from time to time larger movements such as trying to lift himself up.

Main Menu Idle 

One of the more sudle animations, he just makes small motions with his arms and head.

Main Menu Idle 02

Another idle where he taps his fingers against the ground, I wanted to make him look restless.

Main Menu Reach

With this animation I want him to look helpless, I will have to push this animation some more until im happy with it.    

Main Menu Liftup

This is the animation im most happy with right now, but I will also have to tweak this some more. As the name implies he tries to lift himself up from the ground, I wanted it to look like he is struggling with getting up and after struggling a bit he falls down.

Ps I had to lower the quality on this video for some reason 

Main Menu Ground Pound

For this animation I wanted it to make it look like he loses his temper and hits the ground, the hard part with this animation is to make it look like there is an impact when he hits the ground. The animation is still not completely finished and some changes will be made especially to the head, the biggest problem right now is that the head is raised to fast. 

Week 4

During this week I continued to work with the animations for the main character, I managed to finish all the essential animations, so this will be a post with alot of videos.

Next week I will start on animations that will be used in the main menu, in the main menu the character will be laying on the ground trying to get up, I think creating those animations will be alot of fun, if I manage to complete all of them before the weeks end I will start on animations to show the characters mood f.ex. if the player does a big jump and lands perfectly the character might do a fist pump or something to express his happiness.

Prepare yourself for all the clips!

I won't comment on every clip because some of them look quite similar, except for small changes such as turning.

Turn

He will be tilted to the side he is turning to, but that will be done with code. The same animation will be used for turning right as well. 

Slow Speed

He is not doing that much in this animation, we just wanted to have him do something or else he would look to stiff and that would look wierd.

Pump

The pump animation was quite tricky, he is supposed to look heavy but that's quite hard to achive without legs but I did all I could, in game we squash the character a little when he does the pump animation which works really well. 

High Speed

With this animation I wanted it to look like he is going really fast, to do that I made him shake to fake 

air resistance.

High Speed Turn

Looks like the fast speed animation except he is leaning.

 Mid air

Looks sort of like the high speed animations, but he has his arms further out to make it look like he's flying.

Mid air turn

Landing High Slow Speed

This animation will be played when landing after a high jump and the players speed is slow, the character will be squashed after all landings.

Landing High High Speed

This animation will be played when landing after a high jump and the players speed is high

Landing Low Slow Speed

This animation will be played when landing after a lowjump and the players speed is slow

Landing Low High Speed

This animation will be played when landing after a low jump and the players speed is high

Collision Slow Speed Light

Collision Slow Speed Hard

Collision Highspeed Ligh

Collision Highspeed Hard

Main Menu "Reach"

This is the first Main Menu animation I started working on, I want it too look like he is reaching for something, but then looses all his strenght/power and drops back to the ground, there is still alot of polishing to do on this one.

PS the headings change size for no reason

Week 3

During week 3 I only worked with the animations, for now I have only worked on the animations which are essential for the character such as turning animations etc. At the moment all the animations are quite rough and I will start polishing them during week 4.

I will show all the animations from the players point of view, which is from behind the character. 

Turn Animation

This is the turn left animation, when the player turn right we will mirror this animation, I only wanted to get a pose I liked, in the final animation he will make small movements while turning.

Slow Speed

For now this is the animation for when you are going slow, just as in the previous animation the character won't be this static, I only wanted to find a pose that looked okey.

High Speed

This animation will play when the player is going fast, to get the middle speed we will tween between the slow and high speed.

 Midair 01

We might use this animation if the character is in the air for a longer time, but we want him to look like he knows what he's doing at all times, and this looks kinda goofy so we might skip it. 

 

Midair 02

When the character is in the air this animation will be used, the character will keep his arms out until he touches the ground, then he will either go into his slow speed or high speed animation depending on how fast he is going. There will also be more movement  whilst in the air.

Collision Slow

If the player collides with a wall at a slow speed this animation will be played, the levels will be built so that the player will never be able to drive straight into a wall so we won't need a animation for frontal crashes.

Collision Fast

This is the animation for colliding whils going fast, it's basiclly the same as the slow speed just more exagerated. To get the collision when colliding at the middle speed we will tween between the slow and fast collision. 

Pump

For now when pumping we will use this animations, this animation is the one I've had most difficulties with, the reason is that it is really hard to show something getting heavier without legs, but when the animation is finished we will squash it in unity to emphasise the player getting heavier. 

I've started working on a few more animations, but they are not worth showing right now.

And that sums up everything I did during week 3, now it's time for week 4!  

Week 2 of BGP

Last week was the second week of Big game Project, I thought I would get more work done this week, but time sure flies.

During last week I mainly worked on the animations but also managed to create two props.

The props I created was two bushes, I created them by using the same method I used for the tree crowns, I didn't come across any problems so creating them went smoothly.

What I spent most of  my time on this week was working on the animations, but before I could start animating I came across a problem which took almost a whole day to figure out.

The problem accured when I exported my animations from motion builder to unity, you could see the animations working in the preview window but on the wrong modell, and when the right modell showed it wouldn't move.

Apparently before you export your animations from motionbuilder you have to do something called plot, which if I understand it correctly merges the animations with the skeleton instead of the rig, doing this fixed the problem and I could start animating.

At the moment I have started working on three animations a turn animation, "pump" animations which the player will use to gain speed and also an animation for when the player reaches a high speed, we will have a animation for slow and high speed, too get the middle speed we will tween between the slow and high speed

For now I haven't figured out how to show the animations in the blog, but I will try to figure it out until the next time I post.

Big Game Begins!

Introduction

Last week Big game project began, Im working as a artist on a project created by Jonatan Keil.
My part in the group which we named Freshly Squeezed is for the moment to create props and animate the main character.

We are using Unity to create the game.

Last Week

My work last week revolved around creating props, I was tasked with creating two different trees, this seemed like a quite simple task. I was wrong it took me the whole week to get the trees to look the way I wanted, other than the actual design off the trees alot of tecnical difficulites came about.

The most anoying off all was how too get alphas to work in Unity, when creating lush looking trees the most efficent way of doing that is too use alphas, when using alphas you take the texture you want and paint everything you want to be seen in white and the rest in black. This seemed simple, but once i imported the branches into unity the alphas only showed on one side of the plane, which made it so if you looked at it from any other angle it turned invisible.

To solve this problem I first created a cube and removed all planes except one, then added the material for the branch onto it, I then made a copy off and attached the two sides and then weld them together.

This solved the problem off the plane turning invsible, but it made the model more expensive.

Here's the result of last week.