BGP – Day 27

Fixing shaking hands and camera
During this day I just had to focus on fixing the details of the animations, focusing my work on the hands as they have some twitching going on. Which includes going through all the  bones in the hand and using F-curves and a filter called Butterworth too smooth them out. Which looks like this:
Before
After
Smoothing the animations out I can keep some of the original movement that exists within the motion capture data, but remove the shaking/twitching. […]

BGP – Day 26

Animation Issues..
I thought I was going to get to work on the animations today, but guess what, more problems! Today was an issue regarding the rotation of the arm, where the arm didn’t rotate with the hand as it should and didn’t even move with the hand. Causing this:

What I figures is that since the RIG has an extra bone for the forearm to simulate a more realistic rotation/deformation of the arm this might be the problem. So what i […]

BGP – Day 25

Changing the characters position
Exactly as the title says, I have been editing the characters position in motionbuilder so that all animations originate from the same position. If this isn’t done it would otherwise cause the animation to move all over the place. This mean that I had to take the animations, move them into whats called the ”storyline”.
Activate a certain optioned called ghost then choose the translation tool, reset the position to 0, 0, 0 and repeat that process for all […]

BGP – Day 24

Animation
Ending the 4th week I spent the day with starting the final work on the animations, we had some troubles adding a bone to the characters rig and then merging that with the current Motionbuilder file. So instead of delaying my work any further I chose to start over, importing the character and all the takes. I also cleaned the last more ”Cinematic” motion capture data we recorded. So now they are all in Motionbuilder.
Another problem managed to occur, where […]

BGP – Day 23

Alpha
We have reached alpha stage and (should) have a playable game to show our teachers. Luckily we have a playable version of our game, though it is lacking a lot of art, lighting and feedback that is supposed to lead the player through the game. Now a lot of art have been created it just haven’t been put into every part of the game. Before we had our alpha, we had the morning to prepare our game.
I therefor helped one […]

BGP – Day 22

Getting all my work into the project
Today I moved all my textures and materials into the project, including the functions of the dynamic material and the included scripting. This was easy and didn’t take long but sadly adding them to the character or environment have to wait, since we cannot work on the same asset at the same time or it might damage the Unreal project (because technical reasons). But the dynamic material got added to the hand at the […]

BGP – Day 21

Stylized Texturing
For our game we our aiming for a ”stylized realism” which means that everything will be semi realistic, with realistic lighting and high detailed textures, but hand painted. And as I have been working on materials, textures are a part of them and I have only used placeholder textures, I was asked to hand paint some textures. To start of I’m not very good when it comes to 2D art, but here is what I came up with on […]

BGP – Day 20

Looking at Height Lerp and More vertex painting
Today I was asked to look into height linear interpolation to see if I could do vertex painting on materials with less vertices, turns out the difference isn’t that big to what I previously posted, but I still got to create a material that is more in line with our Egyptian theme. 
This is how the material looks like now, tomorrow I will see If i can get it to look more stylized, but […]

BGP – Day 19.1

Vertex Painting and Tessellation
The sun is shining and springs is here, what better than to spend your time sitting inside, learning about materials and tessellation? At least that is what I did. I wanted to look into that, since our Lead Artist asked me if I knew how to use it, I didn’t, but now I do! Also another thing was mentioned when the programmers had their QA with their teacher. The teacher was worried that we wouldn’t get all the […]

BGP – Day 19

Halfway through BGP
We have finally gotten the server to work for everyone, this means we can start to implement our work into one collective project. Other than that I’ve looked into implementing the animations and working together with one of our programmers/Lead sound. We had some issues with having the character to stay in place when walking as we changed it in unreal. Since it didn’t work we instead choose to change this in the animation program, which worked fine. […]

BGP – Day 18

A day of unclean… animation
So today I got all the animations into the animation program and dusted them of just enough so that they can be imported to the engine as soon as possible. Also a lot of my time was spent on trying to connect my computer to our server/unreal project. Which is where our whole project will be accessed and worked through. Above you can see the character come alive. That was all, take care!
 

BGP – Day 17

A day of cleaning
During this day we went to the office to set up our server, which is a computer we all will connect our own computers to, this server will help us work on the same project. Also I Imported all the animations to motionbuilder but some problems appeared and haven’t been solved yet. Most of the day was went into looking into those problems and helping the programmers with some of the particle effects and other questions. We […]