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Just some more characters for you guys to check out! didn’t go into detail about the muscle system on this video since its intention is really to show you a few different characters as opposed to just showing you how the system works. Unfortunately I ran out of time, this could have been a lot better if I had an extra 2 weeks to add better textures for the hairstyles and clothes and particularly to make sure that the body of the character DIDN´T penetrate the clothes (this is done rather easily by specifying that if the character is wearing clothes, the mesh of the body shouldn´t be visible). It´s a setup rather easy to do )which I´ve done several times over the course of this project already as I was developing the concept) but it takes time and I just didn´t have any time left anymore. I do hope you enjoy these characters though! And rest assured that EVENTUALLY perhaps in a year or two, I will come back to this project to optimize it - at the time it is very evident to me that there are a lot of things that could be improved dramatically with time, patience, and particularly a little bit more knowledge on the topics (which I plan to acquire by doing simpler procedural games in the future (I have already started another one by the way!!! keep your eyes open for that))!

In order to learn how to do this, I used the Lynda tutorial on advanced coding for game design in Unity.Amazing tutorial that covers several things, but I only focused on the chapter that talks about terrain generation.

This video details the generation of the Sky which is basically only a a dynamic color (the sky color) which slowly interpolates between two colors, “Day Color” and “Night Color”. When Boolean “itsDay” is true, the dynamic color will LERP towards “Day Color” and when the Boolean is false, it will lerp towards “Night Color”. The video is pretty self explanatory so I will just let you watch it and get an impression of what it’s doing. This script is also controlling the color of the FOG dynamically, giving it the same color as the Dynamic color for the Sky is (this is done in order for the user to NOT BE ABLE TO SEE the “end” of the terrain - as it is important to remember that this terrain is being generated in realtime (meaning that as long as you are not around the terrain, it will be unloaded from the computer as there is no need to RENDER it).

Here’s a quick demo of what my scene looks like with the Gizmos active - As you can see as soon as the character is generated and then selected in the Hierarchy (on the left as “Procedural Character”) - we can see how the skeleton has boxes and cylinders to represent the collisions of the individual bones of the body - we see a head, a chest, arms, hips, legs... etc. This isn’t a super complex process when done through the editor, as one only has to go bone by bone adding the colliders and then adding joint restrictions - granted it isn’t “easy” but it is nothing one can’t learn to do in a few days (however do keep in mind this is only the collision setup, this does not mean active ragdoll by itself is an easy topic, but setting up a humanoid character to work with ragdoll physics isn’t that hard when done THROUGH the editor). The problem with my game is since as I mentioned before, the character’ skeleton is generated in realtime, I am NOT able to do this process through the editor. I was forced to write a script that automatically detects the hierarchy of the character once it is generated and then automatically handles dynamically the positioning and setup of the collisions (going bone by bone detecting whether it’s the “head” “chest” “torso” or whatever, and adding the proper collision object (box, cylinder, etc)). Once the collisions have been set, it is time to add the “muscles” to the system. The “muscles” are “configurable joints” in unity. These are joints that allow you to determine “how much” rotation can happen on each axis of rotation for the corresponding bone, how much force can be added to the body, how much torque... etc. Basically they are like “super complex hinge joints”. These muscles are the ones that will be driving the animations for the character by EMULATING the animations that I baked directly from Blender - that is the procedural muscles system will try to add the corresponding forces to each joint in order for the bones to “reach” the desired pose (which is the one driven by my baked animations). However, given this system, one can handle how much “force or torque” every individual character will have on every independent bone. This allows me to give the characters specific strengths per joint based on whether the characters are super buff, super tiny, have long legs, have long arms... have giant heads.. etc. Since all of this is procedural, every time a character is generated, one can observe slightly different animations. I will post more examples of this in the following post.

Hitman GTA Clumsy Ninja

Here are some more screenshots of a few hairstyles and a few procedural textures for them! These will eventually be implemented into my procedural system for Unity (using UMA).  Hope you like them guys!!!

What you are seeing up here are some images of what a Node based coding system for procedural hair textures looks like on Blender. The idea behind this is relatively simple, and if you’ve ever used Substance Designer or even Houdini I am sure you will feel very familiar with what’s happening here. One of the reasons I love proceduralism, is it’ll let you get away without doing as tedious stuff over and over *like texturing*.  As you can see up here, there are a few nodes holding color values in the graph I show in this post. As you might be able to notice, the first image of the 3d model presents him with dark brown hair, just like the colors you can see in the first three screenshots of the node graph - however as soon as I change those colors to Red, Yellow, Green and Blue, the results change immediately. These colors were chosen because of how easy it is to see what’s happening on the Model’s hair after you assign the colors through the node graph. This information can later be baked into an actual texture that I can use in Unity - so technically speaking, I am only using this node system in order to not have to paint the hair from scratch. Yes, I am a lazy bum lol.

More procedurally generated 3d models for my video game!! These are just to show off the code’s functionality. As you can notice, the character still only has one set of clothing which varies in color but that’s pretty much it. Same thing for the hat and the hair.  These however are things that I will be working on extensively before submitting my thesis. I am actually currently modelling a few different hair sets and will move on to clothing soon - there’s no point in having a procedural system if you’re not gonna show it off the way it was meant to be right??? You’ll get an update on the hair soon!

Hey guys!!! Here are some more screenshots of my Procedural system in Unity (UMA) for my thesis, a Video Game I am working on! Hope you enjoy them!!!

So I finally managed to fix the code that is reworking my 3d Models in order to generate procedural models based out of them (different looking models based out of the same original “recipe” 3d Model). In order to implement procedural generation for characters, I am using UMA for Unity. UMA stands for Unity Multipurpose Avatar - UMA is an award winning, free plugin on the Asset Store for Unity. It is an incredible package that will let you dive into the world of procedural character generation without the need of being a Coding God. Unfortunately, that does not come without its problems. You might not need to be a Coding God to use UMA, however it is certainly not on the easy side either, I would say a fair amount of understanding of code is needed in order to make a functional package with UMA. To be fair, working with UMA IS A PAIN IN THE..... The tutorials are scarce, and also generally REALLY BAD. Most of these rely on you using specific software to realize certain steps, usually software that I am not willing to use at all because of its cost, or simply because how impractical I find it to be, and trust me, if you do not do things the way you’re supposed to, IT WILL SIMPLY NOT GENERATE ANYTHING. You’ll be left there with an invisible character. Anyway.... After cracking my skull for almost a year (yeah, I first tried to implement UMA a year ago, and although I did get a procedural character, this was the default character included with the UMA package. it was the simplest thing to achieve with UMA, and to be honest, it looked HORRIBLE. UMA’s models are really really bad in my impression. Fortunately, after a lot of studying on the subject I was able to figure out the “most advanced” step in UMA content creation; generating your own “RACE” which basically means implementing the system on a 3d Model you built yourself (or got from somewhere else), in order to generate infinite 3d models out of that recipe. This is the results as of today with the code I have managed to implement - it is SUPER IMPORTANT to understand that eventhough these models look SUPER SIMILAR right now, that is mostly due to the lack of “assets” such as different hair styles, different beard styles, different sets of clothing... etc. I am currently working on several hair styles in order to generate more variety out of my system - however the code for it is already running and can be called through several functions to regenerate the body, the full character, the clothing, the face and even more.

Here are some more screenshots of a few hairstyles and a few procedural textures for them! These will eventually be implemented into my procedural system for Unity (using UMA). Hope you like them guys!!!

I listened to this talk almost a year ago, now that I am much more fluent at coding I went back to look into it since honestly the last time I saw it it only made sense conceptually, as soon as I had to start to code it I was totally out of my comfort zone and just couldn’t deliver at all.  Now that I’ve seen this again I get the impression that I can probably try and code something similar this time. Ideally (this was the original idea however it might have to change if this does not result being of relative ease to implement), the enemies in my game would have Artificial Intelligence generated by a Neural Network through the Back Propagation method, which is the simplest to implement and ironically also the only one that is 100% mathematically correct. This means no other method of generating Artificial Intelligence as of today, is considered “scientific” in it’s entirety (meaning the other ones are usually not accepted in the Academia since there are still no proofs of their validity). I will try to work this out to see if it is doable, since doing the AI for my game this way would save me ENORMOUS amounts of time, since it would mean I wouldn’t have to code it entirely on my own (as you probably can imagine, coding Artificial Intelligence  “the old way” is extremely slow, tedious, and also really hard). I will update you guys on the results of any proof of concept I work on!

What do you need to know/learn? Given this requisite, it is imperative to find a way to play audio that is generated from code, as opposed to from music files (such as MP3, WAV, AIFF... etc). This itself resulted in the need to implement a MIDI system that would run in UNITY (the game engine that I am building my game in), since MIDI files store music notation information in the form of number strings - meaning  that through the use of a proper set of algorithms,  one can achieve dynamical modification of these MIDI files in realtime. The basic idea behind this, is representing each note as a “point in time”. Time is simply represented in an axis (out of the X,Y,Z axis that represent 3d space in Unity), and the pitch of the notes is represented on a different axis. Finally, one is able to use either the remaining third dimension, or the length of the normal of the point (which represents the note) in order to represent the volume of the note. Through these simple three parametric representations and the use of RNG (random/range) one can achieve incredible results that might even be able to fool people into believing that they are not actually listening to the same song for the 50th time., since every time it plays, it is different to a certain degree (preserving only the structure that has been defined through code in order to preserve the “essence” of the piece). The main problem this project will be posing is the fact that Unity by itself does not allow for MIDI integration into a game project, which means I will have to find an interpreter for MIDI that will allow Unity to read MIDI files in order to program the procedural generation system. Who can you reach out to talk to outside of class? Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of people working on similar project or information out there about the subject, but I think I have a solid understanding of the concepts that are used to achieve this result, I just need time to mess around with them until I find a viable way of providing them to the user of the game.  What help do you need from the class? I don’t think I will need particular help from my classmates as this project solely focuses on the coding which is what I will be doing, however if anything pops up I will certainly let everyone know about it! I will be editing this post in the future to provide a proper timeline of what the project development will ideally be like - don’t forget to check every so and then guys!!! Until then, good luck and bye!!!!

Hey guys! I am so sorry I stopped updating this -  I was already in a very time consuming major but the last year just got TERRIBLE. This meant I really didn’t have the strength to keep updating this instead of sleeping so I kinda had to stop. Ever since though, I’ve felt this slight void because I was so used to having an art biography which I always though was a pretty cool idea - because of this and the fact that one of my classes for this semester requires me to update a blog on the topic of a certain project that you will find out about soon enough, I will be coming back! I’m glad I am coming back and I really hope I’ll be able to provide as much fun stuff as possible for you guys, so keep your eyes open O_O!!!!