Thursday, March 11, 2010
Peasant Village - Face tracking & Monster shot
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionI’m done with the face tracking shot, color correction will be applied when we have all the shots so we can match them. I’ve begun creating the final “monster”, the one that will break the wall from the inside of a house. It consists of a couple “static”.. ehh… pieces of meat and a big nasty tentacle that is now rigged. This tentacle will hit the character in side, throwing him across the snow… Here are some pictures and a previz of the “monster in the house” 
The previz is kind of dark, and lacks color… Damn cinepak codec!
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Texturing Phase
in Game Character CreationAlmost done with the texturing of the character i will do the props tomorrow and it’s going to be done pretty fast i have also baked occlusion for the character and normal maps of all other thingies…
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Pathfinding
in Game Demo AI ProgrammingFixed my A* so it will now give me a short path. Seems to be some minor bugs in it, sometimes the path I get is kind of strange and not really the shortest but it will have to work for now.
Now I just need to smooth the path a little 
Not really pleased with the way my A* is implemented right now but fixing that will have to wait. Next thing to do is to test the goals I have implemented so far and then implement a few more goals. If that doesn’t take to long I will come back to the A* and fix it.
Testing the rig
in Animation friendly character rig with lip-syncThe Rig is finished and i have been testing it to see if i need to add more blend-shapes, clusters or joints.
I also decided to cut back on the extra facial clusters since i didn’t need them all.
I worked on a short sound-byte i had from the reference footage, so the quality of the sound ain’t that great.
The progress so far:
Animation friendly character rig with lip-sync • Add comments (0)
Pathfinding
in Game Demo AI ProgrammingThe good news is that I solved the problem with finding the triangle I’m standing inside, the bad news is that my A* isn’t working.
Start is the circle to the left in the image and goal is the circle to the right. The lines in pink is the “shortest” path my A* found. It goes far of the screen and in to dungeons and over hills in to the lake for a bath and then some more wandering around the map.
Monday, March 08, 2010
Progress
in Game Demo AI ProgrammingYay! I solved the problem with the Nav-mesh. The problem was when I calculated the midpoint of the sides of my triangles so it wasn’t a major problem but kind of hard to find. This is how it looks now:
After that was fixed I found another problem, this time it’s when I’m trying to find the triangle the character stands inside. Just like all my other problems it works some times an other times it doesn’t. I will have to fix this problem soon because I need it to work to test the rest of my program.
While ignoring that problem I have been working on the goal driven behavior for my agents. Agents should now be able to pick up the enemy flag and return it to their base to score as well as attack each other as soon as I fix the “find triangle problem”. At the moment I’m working on the priority system for the goals. So that the agents will appear “smart” and not just rush in to a group of five enemies.
The agents is also sending messages to each other to make the rest of the team more aware of the game situation. A few of the messages that can be sent if when the flag is taken and returned. Also got a few messages being sent between two fighting agents so they now when the opponent dodges of preforms an attack.
Working with Mathias to solve some problems with the mesh I’m using for the Nav-mesh but I think we got them all solved. The problem was when he made the mesh in parts, my Nav-mesh creation system didn’t find the path from one part to another even thou the character should be able to walk there. Also had a problem where the character could walk through some walls and trees because I didn’t detect them.
First Look
in Framework for Game Engine ToolsI’ve now implemented most of the groundwork and undoable create/delete actions. With some test buttons my level editor currently looks like this:
Tiger-tank truck!
About a week ago I sent a mail to Floh and asked him to clarify how he wanted the command system to be designed. In his answer he told about extending their NIDL system to generate both C++ and C# code, and then send serializable message objects between the two sides. As I have to get a usable level editor until the last milestone, I have already implemented my own design for the message/command system. It won’t meet their standards, but it will get the work done.
Though my goal is to code something that can be used for the Nebula 3 system. So I’ll aim to finish my level editor with base functionality and meet my requirements till the last milestone, and then start anew implementing his solution. I won’t have much time then but I’ll try to get at least the communication/messaging part done.
My current implementation looks like this:
There is three threads working, the main thread for user interface (View), one for receiving/sending data through the network (TcpConnection) and the last one taking care of received data in the inbox (MessageParser). The message parser will only manage thread-safe containers to avoid collisions.
Actions and commands will start through the user interface controls, and then be executed or sent to the Nebula viewer.
At this side it’s mostly interface controls that I haven’t implemented.
Here I got just one extra thread for the communication except for the viewer application threads. This part mostly just awaits XML commands from the C# tool, and then let the CommandHandler extract and forward the data to its respective instance for processing.
What I haven’t coded here is the LevelLoader and some ObjectManager methods.
Some more progress
in Beyond the Frame
The horses main texture is finished. Things left on him to texture is the saddle, harness and the mane, which will be quite tricky to get right. You can see my first test on the mane in the picture above.
The scene is also shaping up quite nicely. Trying out different techniques with moving clouds, and it seems that you have most control over it when its single planars with a cloud-texture on them. And it gives a good depths-effect.
I really do hope that I can get enough time on my hands to get the textures just right. At least with the mountains and background. Time is running low and the deadline feels as if it’s just around the corner.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
Unreal snapshots and visor uv update
in Game Character CreationThe visor texture is complete and i have loaded the meshes and textures belonging to them in the unreal engine. Below are 3 snapshots of the gun, knife and visor…
Spatial Hashing, GUI
in OpenCL Particle SystemI’ve written the spatial hashing the past week. My particle kernel, however, isn’t using it for the moment though, so I’m not sure if it’s working completely – but it’s likely. Some basic GUI functionality has also been added.
The screen space meshes has reach a dead stop, but I spoke to Johannes (one of the tutors for the projects) and he said I should give priority to the particles’ behaviors rather than visual appearance, since there’s only little time left, which sounds reasonable. Thus, for the upcoming week I will focus on completing unfinished features, and wrap up what’s almost done.
animation progress
in Game Demo AnimationTheese are some of the animations I have done, some will still require some tweaking or speeding up.
http://gscept.com/projects/10/gAni/public/aniex01.mov
Not to many animations are left now, athough there is still tweaking left to be done.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Peasant Village - Shot 1 Compositing
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionPhew….it’s been a lot of work these couple of weeks with many late nights. Now I’m finally get to do what I really enjoy doing, which is compositing. Yay! I have been bad at putting progress report on the blog these weeks and I will have some more in depth pictures and explanation in a couple of days, but I’ll try to do a sum up here.
Well since my last entry I have been working full time with the mountain shot. I’ve modeled some simple objects that I placed in the village where I thought it needed some more detail. There have also been some tweaking on the houses to make them look more unique. I could have gone on forever tweaking and adding detail to the village but I have other shots to do. So when I felt pretty happy with how the village and the mountain looked I went on building the surrounding mountains. For those mountains I had to tweak the rock shader and the snow shader because I couldn’t displace them as much as the one with the village. Mental ray wasn’t my friend at this time because I really wanted to displace the mountains with finer detail but then I ran into memory issues.
When I was finished with the background mountains I did some quick test comps to see if they would fit together. Thats when I realized that my camera projection I did earlier didn’t fit in. So I redid that part of the mountain in 3d. Then I got more memory problems and had to do more tweaking on the displacement.
Luckily we have put up our own little render farm so I could afford some back and forth.
These last days I have been working on different types of snow. They are all done with Maya particles or nParticles and they are rendered with the hardware render buffer. I have done falling snow and some layers of snow blowing from the ground and the rooftops. I haven’t worked with particles that much but Christoffer was there when I needed some questions answered. Thanks Christoffer!
Now to the compositing. Firstly I have to say I really enjoy working in Nuke. I have worked mostly with Fusion before and this is my first big project with Nuke, but I must say that it was quite easy to pick up. I like they way it handles the exr format. I also like the 3d capabilities of Nuke because I do want to work with both 2d and 3d and with Nuke you get them both =)
In nuke I quickly put up a script with all the layers that was done at the moment. You can watch the result of that in the video below.
I have continued to build upon that script with more layers and right now the scene looks like these stills. I took the camera animation and some basic geometry from the village to nuke and with that I could easily place the character in the right place. The character is live action footage which I have luma keyed and then placed on a card in 3d. The sky is a panorama sky mapped on to a sphere in nuke.
These are not finals and I would be glad to get some critique. I have been working a lot with this shot and sometimes you get blind and can’t tell if it looks good or bad, so feedback is really appreciated.
Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action • Add comments (2)
Progress report
in Character Creation for Game / CinematicHere comes some images of this week progress.
It’s very late because I did some serious misstake on my highpolygon uv maps for both of my characters.
I wanted to keep the highpolygon uv map when I did a low polygon of it. But I had done some uv seems at most of edges that I was supposed to remove.
When I removed it destroyed the whole uv map. :S
So I guess this will be a workaholic weekend. ^^
Character Creation for Game / Cinematic • Add comments (0)
progress
in Character modeling and texturingi´ve been modelling and texturing the skinny guy this week and also started working on the hair, witch seems impossible on theese computors, maya´s been crashing about 10000 times…
Character modeling and texturing • Add comments (0)
Friday, March 05, 2010
week 7
in Game Demo Environment DesignI have now textured everything in my scene. I’m still not satisfied with everything, but i will have to start lighting now if I am to get done in time. If I’m fast at creating my lightmap UV sets I might take a day or two to add some small things or rework some textures.
