MDDN 343, Project 3, Progress

Our progress for our game hasn't been that much unfortunately. But its just starting to improve.
We had another game meeting this week which francis and I tried to make it more design orientated.

Francis is working on the character model because we havent heard from Katie over the last couple weeks and this is quite an important part of our game. He bought along several sketches of what he thinks is a good idea for our main character.


Me and Francis met up the day after to have a day completely focused on working on our game. I was working mainly on assets while francis worked on character design. We decided not to work on extremely high detail at this moment as it would be good to just have something in our game. The assest which I worked on were the boxes and floor. Using maya I created some objects which we are putting into our game. Box

For our boxes we don't want them to look like typical boxes but something really strange. This is what we are going with for now as it looks really different, and it also is easy to stack on one another which is what we want for our game.

Tiles

For the floor we want it to be something which can be tiled really easily in our game. At the moment one of those squares 1m x 1m and have 4 small tiles in them. What we plan for this is to have a simple white tiled floor and for it to be expanded over the entire level.
also Francis has modeled a really simple version of our character which I can use for animating testing for the time being. It is really low polly but the rig probably wont change from the other characters I get from him.

MDDN 352, Project 2, 3 Tests

I have completed my 3 tests for this project. The 3 Tests are for

• Click and Drag
• Accelerometer
• Microphone

They all work as they were described in the previous posts but this time I have put them all onto my phone which I am going to use for small testing purposes for this project because it is a lot easier to export to android than IOS. I assume once I start getting to full screen stuff than I will have to go straight to the Ipad.

MDDN 352, 3 Tests from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

MDDN 352, Project 2, Accelerometer

The Accelerometer is something which is quite harder to do because you cant Test it on the computer so it has to be exported every time I want to test it. For this testing all I want to do is that I want my character just to move left and right up on the screen.

In my testing view all I have is that the image moves left and right across the screen. And there are barriers on the left and right side so that the images doesn't leave the screen


 

MDDN 352, Project 2, Mic Testing

Mic Testing was alot easier because we did a tutorial during the 'holiday' about how to do it.
What is happening in my scene is that I want a long background image and that Mr Whistler walks down across the the screen the length of the background.

The way which its coded is that the Mr Whistler image doesnt actaully move but the background does. But something which I haven't figured out yet is to make the background image stop when the image hits the end of the screen. That is something which I need to work on and want to get it sorted soon.

MDDN 343, Project 3, Intrim presentation

We just had our first intrim presentation as a group and we were all given an aspect of the game which we are going to write up about in our presentation file.

Katie and Ryan were both absent from our meeting on tuesday so it was just the 4 of us this time.
We didnt really cover much and I didnt bring up the things which I wanted to talk about because I wanted to tell them to the entire group.

What we have thought about is that since we are in a government bunker which is holding several types of aliens in them that it could be cool if we have different eco systems in our game. So one level could be a hot desert environment and another could be a cold snowy one. This is a part of our wish list of things we want to do but aren't really necessary for the game at the moment.


For our presentation we are to have a design Document about the game. This tells people the core mechanics of our game, how we want it to feel and look like to the player and also the main roles of our group.
At this stage I have been put on rigging and animating all the characters in the game. I will probably also have to do some modeling of things in the game like boxes and the environment.  To somewhat shorten our game title we have named our alien UDDU which stands for Upside Down Downside Up.  This makes talking about our game a lot easier because we often get mixed up on what our title is actually meant to be.

MDDN 343, Project 3, Team UDDU, Inrim Presentation

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Final Hand in

Here are 6 high res images from Mudbox of my model. Each of them show different aspects of my character.

A final orthographic view of my character

A turntable of my final character

MDDN 343 P1B Turntable from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

Drawings from the part A hand in which were required for this the final hand in

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Painting and Mapping

This time I decided to do my texturing in Mudbox. Using stencils and the paintbrush I got a very nice colouring in my character. The stencils in Mudbox made me able to give my character some slight difference in colours instead of it all just being one plain colour.

I really like how the colours turned out with this and I think that it looks a lot better than my last character that I handed in.
So that I could have these colours in Maya i saved the paint layer as a colour map

In this image you can really see the slight changes in colour and the real nice pattern which I managed to get out of Mudbox.

Putting my character into Maya gave the same problem as before. But one of the other design students managed to find a slight way around it which helped slightly.
In Mudbox you keep adding sub-divisions onto your model to get more detail. My character had 6 divisions and had a total of about 4400000 pollys
The way which we managed to get around the problems which we had before was to import the lowest division of our model (which is the same one which I put into Mudbox from Maya) and put all of the maps onto that model.

There was still problems with my model so I had to again edit my maps in Photoshop. This time I just completely got rid of the parts where I didnt want anything to be changed from my original model

My character didnt look exactly how I wanted it to. But I dont think there is much more that I could do to it to make it look exactly like my Mudbox file. If I had a bit more time I would of tried to find another way which I could of done it. But I am happy how my Mudbox file came out and that is probably where I am going to be taking my stills and turntable from.

MDDN 352, Click and Drag

The Click and drag aspect of my app is something which is going to happen a lot. I mainly want it for the scene in which Mr Whistler is getting changed. I want it that you have to click on the object of clothing and and drag it onto the character so that he can get changed.

So what is happening in the code about is that at the beginning the image for pants and Mr Whistler in his boxers are visible but the image of Mr Whistler in this pants isnt. There is a start and stop drag function added only to the pants so that it is the only thing which can move. The pants also have a boundries so that they cant leave the screen. What happens if they are dropped outside of the screen is that they just bounce back onto the screen.

In the stop drag function there is an if function which says that if the pants are dropped in a specific area which is over Mr Whistler that the pants and Mr Whistler in boxes visibility is turned to false and Mr Whistler Pants is set to true.

Here is a quick video showing what I just said

MDDN 352, Project 2, Interactions

There are several interactions which I really want to incorporate into my app

• Touch and Drag 

•  Microphone 

•  Shake 

•  Accelerometer 

•  and maybe GPS

Those are the ones which I defenatly want to have in my app but if i manage to get other then that will be a plus.

For the 3 tests I need I plan on doing Touch and Drag, Microphone and Accelerometer.

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Changes

From the feedback which I got I have changed some of my maya model.
I have made the front tentacle larger than the others which I think makes it look better. I have also redone the head but have mainly changed it so that the bottom tentacles are smaller than the rest of them

I think that this looks really nice. I have also made the point at the end of the tail more pointy so it actually looks like something which it could stab something with.

I have done more more editing in Mudbox. This time I have put a lot more detail into the back of my character and decided to only have a hard spiked shell on the top of my character and the bottom to just be normal. I have also put in the scooping idea into the hands of my character.

I think that this looks a lot better than my first Mudbox character. And I only hope that I don't run into the same problems with the normal map as i did with the first model

MDDN 352, project 2, Character cut up

Cutting up the characters were a lot harder to do than the background.
How I did it was that I cropped around the image which I wanted to get. Then I created a coloured layer behind that image and then used the eraser tool to cut erase all the stuff that I didnt want around the image.

Once it was all cut up I saved them all as a PNG so that it keeps the transparency for the image.

On the images that dont have good shadows I added a drop shadow to make it look even better.

I took out alot of the assets which I need from the book but I am probably going to have to edit more before the final hand in. Some of the images I had to use the clone stamp to get. An example of this is the jacket for Mr Whistler. There a image of just his jacket so I had to clone stamp some of the darker parts of the jacket so that it doesn't have a gap in it from the image i took it from. I also had to clone stamp a lot of the backgrounds where the old images where so that I can use them later on.

MDDN 343, Project 1B, After presentation

After presenting what I have to the rest of the class there has been a few things which has come up which I need to work on before the final hand in on Tuesday.
These are

• Change the first leg of the character. At the moment all the legs are the same but should the first one be a bit bigger?
• Get rid of the Googly eyes
• Should the top Tentacles be larger than the lower ones?
• Get some more splotchy texture for the face
• At the end of the large tentacles should they be cupped so it could be used for scooping objects?

These are some of the things which I am going to work on before next week to try and make my character look even better.

MDDN 352, Project 2. Cutting up image

Because I am not making my own book I have to cut up the pages of Mr Whistler that I want to use.

I am only using about the first 4 pages of the book but there are a lot of things which I need to take out of those pages.

The first thing which I have done is remake the background so that I can use that for most of my pages.
I have taken a 3x3 square from the background and then tiled it to make it the same size of the screen of the Ipad.

Once I finished tiling entire page I added the orange rectangle at the bottom of the screen to show where the wall ends and the ground starts.

 This will make most of my scenes a lot easier because I can use this for at least 3 of my pages that I want to make in my app.
The Next thing which I am planning on cutting up the other assets for my app like the characters and other things I might need in the page

MDDN 343, Project 3, Group Update

So far we are still in planning stage of our game. It would probably be wise if we started doing some actually modeling for our game real soon.

Unfortunately I was unable to attend our second group meeting because I had a job interview but I still had a good read over the group minutes.



There are a few things that I dont really agree with but I will bring them up when we next meet. What we have decided for our group decisions is to have a majority vote. So im hoping that some of the group might see it my way as well.
One thing I dont really agree with is 

• The side scroller idea - doesn't give much 3D into the world, pretty much 2 1/2 D
• Black humor - Im not sure if our game would suit a black humor style to it especially since its about a character that is pretty much escaping from jail.

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Texturing and presentation

Texturing for my character was quite hard because I wanted to make the character look somewhat realistic.
Having 2 different parts of my character made it also hard to texture and to make it look fluid from one part to another was going to be a challenge.

In the end I found these two image to use as my textures

This is a skin texture which I found. I got a image of a squid and got several people in the lap and asked them how would they describe the texture of the squid and the best thing which came up would be that it looked like a skin texture. So that is what I have gone with

This texture is for the shell of my character. It is some wall plaster. I edited the colour of this image in photoshop and gave it a red overlying map so that it could be the colour that I wanted.

Because my character is all one model I had to combine these two image into my UV map and save that as a image as a colour map for my character. This is also where I managed to add some shading to my character.

Something which I also wanted was to have the texture of the wall plaster as a bumb map for my character. But I was already using my normal map as a bumb map, and you can only have one for the character. So what I ended up doing was overlaying the texture over my normal map and making them into one map. This ended up working and it turned out how I wanted my character to look like.

The parts in this map which dont have the texture on it are where the head of my character would be so that it woulnt have the bump on it. 

To put my character in context I put him in a scene which I made. The scene is how I would picture what the bottom of the ocean would look like if all the water were to dry up.

Here is also the turntable which I will be showing in the presentation


turntable 1 from Richard Hpa on Vimeo.

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Mapping

Adding my normal map onto my character turned out a little more difficult that I expected.

Here is my original normal map which I extracted from my Mudbox file

At first I was 100% if this is what a normal map should look like so i thought that this was fine.
When bringing it into Maya though a couple things went wrong. Here is a image of how it turned out in Maya

As you can see the stuff on the back came out properly.
But for some reason the tentacles screwed up a little bit and some gaps were created. I thought this is weird because I never touched those tentacles in Mudbox.

To get around this I did a lot of google searching and found out that I might of needed to edit my UV map in Photoshop.
After editing my Normal Map this is the outcome

As you can see its quite different from my original normal map. But it did help a little bit. Here is an image with this new normal map added to it.

This came out a lot better. To edit the map I had to mark the places around the head and the tentacle and match them to the surrounding parts of the normal map.

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Mudbox modeling

Bringing my Maya file into Mudbox worked out quite well.
Nothing seemed to be have changed in the model and it looks perfectly fine

After playing around with the brushed, stencils and other stuff which mudbox has to offer. I decided to make my characters back look more like a shell and give it hard rock defenitions, aswell as make its legs look like they have joints instead of it all being one thing. I also lifted some of the skin around the eye to make it look more like a socket and smoothed around the tentacles to make it look more natural.

I really like how this turned out. My only worry is if it will transfer into maya properly or not.
The way which I plan on doing that is the same way in which I were to do if I was using maya, by using a normal map

MDDN 352. Project 2. Concepts

For project 2 of this course we are to re imagine a children's book and turn it into a ipad app.

I am going to be working on the book 'Mr Whistler' which is amount a man who whistles a lot who loses his train ticket.

I have chosen to mainly use the touch screen, gyroscope, GPS and microphone for my book.

Here is what I am hoping to be able to complete in the assignment.
I have chosen to use 4 pages from the book, which 2 pages being 1 scene.
Each scene has at least 3 interactions which the user can do to go through the book.

MDDN 343, Project 1B, Mudbox

While I was modeling my high polly character I came across the program MudBox which is another autodesk software designed specifically for high detail modeling.

Doing a bit of research into the program I found out that you can make some really good looking models in this program.
Here are some examples which I found that I really like

From what I saw come out of mudbox I thought I would put my character in and see if I can do the detail of my character in there