This past week I got back to the grind of making our VR game work. I created a chicken animation for when the chicken attacks the player. This was much easier to make than my past animation as 3ds Max seems to have magically fixed its issues overnight and figured out how to bend chicken knees. Now that it's working better (knock on wood) I should be able to finish the remainder of the animations quickly and get them imported into the game.
We also put our game into actual VR test mode for the first time in a while. It worked relatively well. The game looks and sounds good and the chicken monster is very scary when it chases you around. We did find a couple glitches that we'll continue to work on in the future but I continue to be optimistic about the turnout of this project. Next week I will: -Create the rest of the chicken animations -Start to do pig research and come up with ideas for the pig animations
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This week I got several things done. The first thing I focused on was getting the chicken run animation done. After a lot of slow and steady work with 3ds Max I was able to complete this animation as seen here: The other thing I worked on was the cell phone ballet cue in Dead Man's Cell Phone. My director told me after my rough draft that she wanted the cue that she wanted the cue to build into more a a crescendo. To do this I found some detective suspense music and added it into the cue. I also added in real voicemails so I don't have to hear anymore about that dumb 6th sense detective agency. (If you don't get this joke listen to my rough draft of this cue which can be found on my portfolio page.) This past week has been a series of projects for me in Game Design. First off, I started the week by creating a program template for the winter showcase at DSA. I was put to this task on extremely short notice and created a template within one class period which I will flesh out and improve once we get approval on it from the principle.
Moving beyond that I worked some on sound effects for Dead Man's Cell Phone. Even though there is still a good bit of time before the show I wanted to continue working to get ahead on the cues we need. The third and largest part of my week consisted of working on animating the chicken. Even after reducing the amount of polys the chicken has it is still a nightmare to produce any working animation. It seems like every time I so much as bend the chicken's knee 3ds Max crashes and I have to restart the program. This is not actually an exaggeration as one class period I had 3ds Max crash over 20 times on me as I desperately tried to get work done. The solution I have found is that I must go slow and steady. Move in small increments. Save after every minor adjustment. It's going to be a long process but in the end I hope and think it will be worth the effort. Next week I will: -continue the slow trek of animating the chicken model -work on sound effects to blow off steam This past week in Game Design was a short one. With everyone in anticipation of the Thanksgiving holiday, our group actually started working on a couple new things within our project. The enemy movement script was successfully transported into the demo Unity level. I started working on boning the chicken model.
A unique challenge I faced this week came when I started boning the chicken. Unlike past models I've worked on, the chicken is made up of several different objects which are grouped together (instead of being one large, cohesive mesh. This means when I'm assigning bones and envelopes I need to be mindful of the different groups one bone might effect. One bone might have multiple envelopes assigned to it and I need to keep track of all of them as I start to animate those bones and create motion. Next week I will: -Finish the chicken skeleton -Fix envelopes -Start animating bones This past week in advanced studies things are really coming together for the game design room. We started importing textures into the room and things are looking good. As more and more things start to look like a complete game it encourages us to work even harder on our project.
This week I worked on two things. I made a pig logo to go with the chicken one I finished last week and I made the model and animation for the flashdrive. The flashdrive is one of the key items the character will need to collect to finish the game. Because of this I wanted an inviting idle animation for it. This animation would help it not only stand out from the rest of the in game items, but also it will make sure players won't accidentally miss it. This will prevent frustration and also just look good in-game. For a video of this animation, click on my selected works page. The other people in my group have been focused on completing assets for the GAD room. All of the models are finally simplified. What they are now focusing on is creating textures and getting all the box colliders into the scene that need to be there. Next week I will work on: -Creating more 2d assets including textures if needed -Animating any 3d models that need to be animated Recently I have been doing a lot of animation in 3ds Max for my Advanced Studies team. I have been creating all the simple hand model animations we will need to create our game. Doing this has given me a good sense of the ins and outs of animating thing in 3ds Max.
The Good: There are actually many things I like about animating in 3ds Max. The first is that is uses tweens. This means that all you need to do is set keyframes and 3ds Max fills in all the frames you might need in between. This means you save A LOT of time. Since you don't need to fine tune every single frame you can get very high fps animations without wearing yourself out. The Bad: It still takes a long to bone models and fine tune your envelopes. When you link a bone to a model you need to adjust the bone's area of effect or its envelope. To do this you go bone by bone adjusting a weird gizmo that changes the area of effect. Doing this initially is hard but even after you start animating you can expect to have to go back into the bone structure many times to fine tune envelopes. The Why?: Sometimes 3ds Max just does weird things with your animation. One example of this is every once in a while you will delete a frame that seemingly doesn't affect you model at all. All of a sudden 3ds Max twists your model and you must completely remake it if you want to get rid of the key. -my experience -the good -the bad -the weird This week we finally solved our first big problem we've had to deal with on the coding side of our VR project: getting the controllers to work. This is a problem we've been having since last year with the computer at school. For some reason the code we were using to track the controllers and keep them active in the scene simply didn't work. We tried many fixes trying to both debug it ourselves as well as scanning the internet for possible problems with our code. The code we use is from VRTK, Unity's basic VR codes asset package.
This problem get weirder over the summer. One of our team members got a Vive and started working on the code at his house. A couple weeks from the end of summer he was able to get the controllers to work. As soon as we got back to school, we put his method to the test. He found that the VRTK script had worked perfectly well on his computer and so we looked to see if the asset store had simply updated the VRTK package over the summer. This failed. There was no new updates in the asset store and when we re-downloaded the package nothing changed. Confused we decided the quickest way to figure out if this was a computer problem would be to directly copy it from our team member's personal computer and send it to the one we have at school. After finagling trough our school's system, we were able to get the code into the school computer. It still didn't work. Finally we found the answer on a random forum that told us to download it off of gethub because the asset store didn't have the right version. When we did this the controllers were tracking and working at last. Thus we ended our long struggle and showed that even seemingly impossible problems can always get figured out with enough persistence. Next Week: -Import codes into gad demo scene -Import audio into Gad Demo scene Recently, I learned how to use a new skill in Unity. Unity terrain building is a relatively easy-to-use way of making terrains for your video game. It uses textures and bump maps so you can create a lively environment. But what are the advantages of doing this over just importing your own assets. Is creating a terrain fresh in Unity really better than designing one in 3ds Max?
The short answer is yes! Unity has created a simple built in way of designing your map. It utilizes a point and click method which allows you to paint on mountains, valleys, hills, and streams with ease. The way you shape terrain in Unity feels a lot like Sculptris yet since it's for the specific purpose of making land it works more intuitively for making land forms. Another advantage of building a terrain this way if that it keeps your project centralized and in one place. You won't need to worry about importing a bunch of models, textures, and other assets. If you can make a beautiful map for your players to explore in your game engine there is no need to build it anywhere else. From what I've observed this is a fully comprehensive way to make a play area offering all the same features that any other program I've used (such as 3ds Max) has offered. -What is terrain building in Unity? -Is it a good option for making terrains? This past week of Game Design we left the realm of videos and moved back into the world of 3D modeling. If you've read my past blog posts you probably have some idea of how I felt to be back in 3ds Max. Max and I have a sort of love hate history. At one end I love learning techniques in 3d and the fact that I can make 3d animations is insanely cool. On the other hand our computers at school don't exactly have the graphics cards for 3d rendering and so making anything in 3ds Max requires patience and a lot of restarting the program. Needless to say I was not looking forward to diving back into 3d this year and I've been dreading this unit ever since it showed up in Schoology.
However, I've been surprised. So far what we've done in 3d has actually not been the hell I remember it as. Last year, I often followed tutorials listlessly trying to fix my model on screen to look like the one in the tutorial, which despite me copying all the steps correctly had coming at looking beautiful while mine was... more interesting. This year I feel like I'm starting to get a hang on the principles behind 3d modeling. Part of this is due to the tutorials not only being much better than the ones we used in the past, but also these tutorials are made in a more up to date version of 3ds Max meaning there's much less guesswork that goes into copying them. This year I also feel like bones have become much easier. Part of this is due to the fact that we've been working with biped rigs instead of free form bones but even beyond that I feel like I have made some progress in understanding how to move and use them to be more life-like. In conclusion I think 3d is actually going to be fun this year and I'm looking forward to working more with it in the future especially as we move into making 3d games. Two weeks ago we began our 3d modeling unit using 3ds Max. Over the course of the unit we went deeper into the program solidifying old skills as well as learning a few new ones. Rigging was the first skill we started learning in this unit. At first it was hard to do because it was hard to get used to the way bones needed to be created in order for them to fit into a model. However, after a coupe days of practice it got easier and by the end I felt I had a solid grasp on the skill. We then learned how to skin and animate with bones. This skill was easy to pickup and I was able to pretty quickly animate my skeleton. Then we learned about MassFX and particle systems. These were also easy to pickup though how MassFX actually works still doesn't make much sense. After that we learned the worst subject in the unit: cloth and hair. Hair is easy. Cloth just doesn't work. Finally we moved on to mental rays which was a big relief after trying for days to get cloth to work. All in all this unit was hard but I think I learned many skills and have vastly improved my modeling skills for the future.
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AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
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