Saturday, March 13, 2010
Peasant Village - Clean plate and Body Double
in Peasant Village, Visual effects in live actionThis week I have finalized the village shot and I am currently trying to render it in nuke, but it’s crashing all the time. My solution for that is that I will have to render out portions of the scene separately and then do a final render with less nodes in Nuke.
Here is an image from the final comp. It now has more colors and more contrast.
I have also been working on the monster shot. I have done a clean plate which involved marker removal, removal of the character during the body double part and fixing the overlap of the two sequences. Most of the clean up I fixed with projections in Nuke. I removed the unwanted parts in one image and then projected it on to a sphere. Actually I had to use like 6 different projections so that I covered the hole shot. I had to do some small amount of painting frame by frame but not much.
The body double has also been animated and comped. I had to do some painting to get the transitions between the real character and the body double to work but I think it works pretty well now.
Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action • Add comments (2)
Sneak preview Character One
in Character Creation for Game / CinematicHere can you see a sneak preview of the sniper girl in unreal.
I have no normals on her yet, I got them but it doesn’t work in unreal. I guess the problem may be world space cordinates Z is up instead for Y.
But it’s easy to fix. If all will go as planed in this weekend I will also put up my second charcter, the Steam robot.
Just to mention it I have also skin weighted the girl and she works fully with animation. But thats eye candy for the final video presentation. So keep up visiting here for updates.
So hope you enjoy this picture.
//Take care!
Character Creation for Game / Cinematic • Add comments (0)
Friday, March 12, 2010
The tortoise is done soon…
in Creature Modeling for Film Production
I changed the displacment map a bit. It got better in one way, but I have worked too much with this tortoise and I can’t get satisfied.
I have fixed the texture more. It took longer time than planned of course - I expected that. But the texture should be considered as done now.
I did a simple rig so I can do just some small movements. I had alot of problems with it, but in the end I succeeded to be done with the rigging and skin weighting etc.
Right now I have started with the animation. I’m not so good at it, that’s why I wont make it move so much.
It’s not so much left now… We will see how this looks like in the end. /Eve
Creature Modeling for Film Production • Add comments (2)
Almost there
in Game Demo Character Modeling
The character is more or less finished, maybe I should’ve made it more detailed, perhaps 6000 triangles is a bit low. We did aim to make the scene low-res though and that’s certainly accomplished 
Anyhow, I managed to fix most of the strange shadows in her face. Here’s some screenshoots from the Nebula Viewer.
shortfilm, HVFX - Rendering and post production
in Shortfilm, helicopter explosion VFXThis week has mainly been about rendering and working on post production effects and editing in Fusion. We have added some more particle effects in the helicopter scenes as well as fluid explosions. We had to remove the tracking markers from all the clips and add images of the vehicle into most scenes. The color correction in each clip still need some tweaking. We rendered out a preview of the clips from the beginning of the movie, just to give us a better feel for what has to be done next. Our priorities now will be focused on our main scenes containing cg material.
We added the raw material at the end of this preview to give both us and the viewer an insight of what has been going on this last week.
A Preview Of The First Scenes In The Film
Shortfilm, helicopter explosion VFX • Add comments (0)
50’s diner - progress
in Realistic 50's diner for film productionI made a render of one of the cameras and it seemed that the “blobs” from the final gathering flickered
a lot. I post a video so you can see. So I have been trying to eliminate those as much as I can, and it works
but it’s still some there. It takes a lot of time to render, and I have more cameras with the same problem, so I just have
to deal with some flickering.
This is the first test:
fg flickering from Karolina Hardinger on Vimeo.
and this is how it looks from another camera:
Realistic 50's diner for film production • Add comments (1)
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!
Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action • Add comments (0)
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…
