Mayu's Blog

Evaluate contemporary practices in a chosen specialization and use this information to shape and develop your own practice. This my first attempt to use particle system. I watched the tutorial from digital tutor called ‘Introduction to Particle Flow in 3ds Max ‘to create the smoke and fire effect. What I have learned from this tutorial-I learned how to create the smoke and different shapes particle with muti-colour. I also played a bit the setting on marterial panel.

For our small group project with Karen and Meg. I used the same method I had learned from the particle tutorial from digital tutors to make the spell effect for Karen’s Dr. Witch. Unfortunately, due to the time limit, we could not finish whole scene, I only applied my spell effect to the first 80 frames. The other contribution I did for this group was I quickly built up the environment with assets I created on previous trimester for the battle scene. I had watched the tutorial to create the smash effect for Meg, but I could not finish on time. I really felt bad and sorry, I actually would like to contribute more to this small group.

New technology I have discovered

One day our classmate, Nathaniel was asking for help with how to make the object become one piece in the Facebook group. I gave him a suggestion by using Boolean, thought Nathaniel said he still has trouble on using VoroFrag on his building for final project. But, at least I know the new method to fragment a solid object via VoroFrag.I would like to try it during the spare time.

Another thing I would like to mention is I had found a advanced crash effect tutorial from Allan McKay, a VFX Supervisor & Technical Director, this tutorial teach you how to Create advanced shaders, Rendering techniques, Compositing, Dynamics by Using Industry Standard Tools - Thinking Particles 6, FumeFX 3.5, V-Ray, X-Mesh and 3DS Max.I also shared this information to Amy and Azam  also Tumblr members, who might interested with this. I would spend my holiday to try to follow the tutorial to do practice.

  Reference:

Kinney,J.(n.d.). Introduction to Particle Flow in 3ds Max .Retrieved from http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/525-Introduction-to-Particle-Flow-in-3ds-Max.

For the  efficient group project, I was assigned to make a research making a moodboard so other members can easily and quickly get idea for pre-production process. The moodboard not just only benefited myself also enabled our team member Azam to build his scene quickly.

The second task I was assigned to develop the hotel scenes and virtual bank scene for other member to use. The hotel scene included hotel lobby, stair, corridor and room. I started from searching some hotel images on website then I ended up with a classic style. I started from lobby then quick duplicated some assets such as paintings, walls, plants, tables and also sofa to create corridor and room scenes. The most challenged section for those scene were lighting and rendering.

There were various issue caused when I did rendering. The render result did not match what it presented on my screen or just black. In order to deal with the render issue I did a few research on website and also asked for help from our facilitator, Steve, he gave me a nice suggestion and solution for solving this problem. I definitely learned a lot for making those environments.  

The third task I had done was animation in hotel lobby. I was making animation by Cat walk cycle. However the walk cycle I made was awkward and unnatural. I felt that maybe I could just key the animation by myself would be easier. Besides, what else for this project  I made was putting the glow sign on the wall of lobby. The sign was with the glow effect and transitioned in colour from pink to blue.

Competing software is tricky. What to learn vs what industry is using. At least getting the principles finely honed will give us an artistic advantage in any software.

Breeding monster

The most interesting section in Monster legends is the players can breed their own legendary monsters.

There are various monsters in this game. All monsters are designed form the egg, child, and juvenile till adult. It is similar to a real life circle. Monsters have been divided to 5 different categories, which are Common monster, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary monsters. You also can have a desired monster by breeding. What this means, for example, you can get monster A via B+C OR C+D with different breeding time and parent’s combination. However, not all the monsters are breedable and it does not mean that you have 2 monsters as parents then you will get the desired monster directly. There are a various chance amounts be set via game developer to give player more of a challenge to own their monster.

Take these monsters for instance, Firesaur + Treezard = Greenasaur(Uncommon) or Pandaken(Rare).

Numerous monsters design and the evolution life cycle are most impressive parts in this game. I took this evolution level setting for reference to develop monster in our game .Not same as the breeding process in Monster Legends, we designed shroomslug with 5 different level evolution to provide certain amount challenge to our players .Currently I only finished the second level shroomslug with basic animation. I am looking forward to developing and finishing the rest 4 level shroomslug in the future.

Reference

Monster Legends. (n.d.) Monster Legends Breeding Guide with Pictures. Retrieved from http://www.monsterlegends.info/monster-legends-breeding-guide-with-pictures/

Ah yes, this particular target market is a good one to include. I think most of us as students want to include the industry professionals if we hope to find employment using what we made as part of our final projects.

Schedule and roles changing

Schedule

Our schedule has been changed several times due to lack of skill on required software, overestimated personal ability and time on each production phase. Take myself for instance, I planned to finish monster texturing on week9 but I actually finished at week10. These are the reasons why I finished over our time estimation. I used Zbrush to do modeling and sculpting. Lack of familiarity with using Zbrush, I spent extra time to watch tutorials. Another instance for changed schedule was no experience on Unity. There are various issues caused when we imported to Unity. The problems we tackled really slowed our production process down. For solving this problem, all we can do are pre-study the texturing and other functions that we might be using in coming production process.

Roles changing

There was a serious matter happened to us on week 11, one of our team member felt he did not contribute enough and would like to leave the group. In fact, another game designer took in charge almost all on Unity technical section. After long discussion, we found what he can contribute to our group. The issue ended up with an acceptable ending. Personally, I had struggled a lot during this trimester. I am actually not graphic designer and not good with digital painting so some productions took longer for me. Same as jack, he was not programmer but he learned on his own. The roles and tasks distribution definitely have to be discussed or using alternate means, especially understanding what everyone’s stronger area and weakness then all we can contribute 100% our skills to the game.

Problem solve

When it comes to problem solution. The importing issues were the most challenging part for us in this trimester. In order to deal with those issues, I went through all the process and did a variety of tests addressing those problems. The beginning imported matter was fixed on its own, but I still did research to understand what reason and why result in this outcome because I might face the same problem next time. The second error in Unity was my monster was inside-out which mean see-through the body to another side. My previous research could not support me to solve this issue. I even penetrated to shader (scripts) zone, unfortunately I failed with changing the script.  Thus, I joined the Unity forum and Facebook groups to ask for other animators and programmers’ assistant. In the end, there was an animator who found how to deal with this problem so I could uploaded to google drive to Jack. For this issue, Jack learned to use shader at that moment so both of us know how we could address this same issue next time.

Risk management

There are few risks we might face during production phase. The first risk is team member might want to leave or sickness. What we avoid this by understanding each member’s merit and weakness and more communication.

Secondly, File missing might occur during the production process. Avoiding this issue happening is storing our file on google drive, own device and also understanding auto-saved on software. In addition, naming properly will keep away from file overlapping.

Technical issue still is the biggest risk for us. After presentation on Monday, during the holiday all team members are required on skype and report what we have done and learned on that week.

Communication

Weekly meeting are held on Skype every Thursday night and CIU class on Monday. Skype Message function could still be used on other days for better understanding of all the production progress.

However, when crossing 2 software on production and test steps, face to face meeting is required. Attended meeting allows each member understand clearly and explain properly. I found this is an important topic that we have to discuss earlier on next trimester.

Lastly, being an international student, English might make me misunderstand or miss some information on meeting. What I did for this was attended all the class, asked and checked more times also typed down on skype. Besides, self-studied game design and Unity also helped me get involved more to this group.

Reflection (went right, wrong, improvement)

The first few weeks I was setting myself only on production section then I realized that I had to get involved more to make our project can work efficiently. Thus, I started to learn a bit game design and Unity. I did all the imported and scale test before I handed to game designers. I believed that my pre-imported test will save other members’ time and make work efficiently.

In order to define who will play our game. I did a web search to understand how to establish target audience. Gamers are often divided to “Casual”, ”Mid-core”, “hardcore” by game developers. A Web user colinmaxwell (2013) indicated Tony Goodman’s (Figure1) definition of those category with gamers are succinct and easy to understand. Hardcore gamer always spend their major time on playing game, game is their part of life. The mid-core players “prefer game is easy to learn, short gaming sessions more engaging, more competitive, and more challenging than other social and casual games. Most gamers are ‘hardcore’ in their youth, reasonability of family or work let these gamers have to drift into “Casual”. This category allows us to define who we make this game for, how to setting the challenge strength and time consumption on each task we developed.

 Hardcore arranges their schedules around their gaming.

Mid-core arranges their gaming around their daily schedule.

Casual entertains self with games when time presents itself.

Tony Goodman, co-founder, Ensemble Studios

Figure 1: Tony Goodman’s gamer definition

 Another information I found for our target audience. According to 3RDSENSE (2011)mentioned the average Australian game player is 30, more than half Facebook users play games and there are 6 million Australian users. Besides, more than two thirds of the web users playing games. (2011)

Extra information was found when I did target audience research. IDATE (2013) forecasted (figure 2) the world video game market will reach to €82 billion in 2017. Considerable growth of the game on portable device such as smart phone, tablet and online game portals and cutting edge handheld with home consoles are the main factors for this result.

.Figure2: World video game market by segment, 2013-2017 (million EUR)Source: IDATE, November 2013 

According to the bar chart in figure 1, traditional home handheld console experience a dramatic reduction from 2013 to 2017.

Home consoles present nearly 40% of the total market in 2017 in contrast to 30% in 2013.

Online Pc software continue sharp rising and occupying the majority of video game market in 2017. It is a worth mentioning that the Mobile software market increase dramatically compared to handheld console.

To sum up, nowadays online games replace the traditional console and the shift platform such mobile phone and tablet can be another choice for the game developer.

As a group discussion, we are going to host our game on online game portal .The other platform could still take account in the future choice. Audience ages won’t be defined on our game but this can provide us ideas for game development.

Reference:

3RDSENSE. (2011).Dispelling the most popular myth about games. Retrieved from http://3rdsense.com/blog/06032011-0925/dispelling-most-popular-myth-about-games.

 Michaud,L. (2013). World Video Game Market: Eight key trends to watch in 2014. Retrieved from http://gamesummit.pro/world-video-game-market-eight-key-trends-to-watch-in-2014/

colinmaxwell. (2013, January 2). The Middle Ground of Gaming. Retrieved from

When it comes to target audience, at beginning we have to define our target. To establish target audience, we have to understand what our purpose for making this game is. The aim for this game is mainly show off our skills and get a job. It means our Target would be the Recruit Company or industry expert also public.

In the blogger Beck’s (2008) comment on topic ‘Define your target audience’, he mentioned he tries to profile his friends or example customer to deal with finding target. Other user Eric (2008) also replied to this topic ‘pretend people’ is a currently be used in advertising world. For implement this method, I pretended I was a job seeker at this moment and went to the CG Society job section found out few jobs I would like to apply.

JOB1:

3D GENERALIST

Briefly this job requires inconsistent art style on modeling and texturing along with experience. This position also needs people is familiar with common 3D or texture created software such Photoshop, 3Ds Max or other common tools ZBrush. Experience in Unity and shaders also be needed.  

JOB2

Visual Effects Artist

•This job require creating visual effects, animation in-engine and assets, supporting other artists, defining or developing shaders with programmers. Also have to working with particle systems and other tools in Unity. Besides, the passionate about video games and experience are needed. Familiar with common 3D modeling and texture created tool are also essential. Communication skills as well.

JOB3

3D Technical Artist

The applicant have to ensure 3D assets stay within technical limits, Implementing 3D assets, animations and visual effects, character rigs and animations in game engines. Creating visual effects, Level creation and lighting.

In addition, the person applied this job have to be passionate about video games and experience in creating and integrating 3D assets and visual effects. Solid knowledge is required. Furthermore, work self-directed and reliably, highly motivated, flexible and great communication skills in English.

To sum up, those jobs all required the technical skills and solid knowledge for creating characters, creatures and assets with texture via 3Ds Max, Photoshop or other similar tools. Experience in game engine and good communication with team member are also essential. Currently I have experienced on what they required, unfortunately I still need more experience on all the production phase and learn more game development. Besides, language such as English improvement also needed if I would like to work in oversea company.

Reference:

Eric. (2008). Beck. (2008). Define your target audience. Retrieved from http://www.eldergame.com/2008/05/define-your-target-audience/

Animation

There are 4 animations made for the blue slug, which are idle, movement, attack and death. The movement animation, I basically took snake and slug movement for reference. However, the shroomslug’s body are not exactly the same as a snake or a normal slug. Thus, I started researching game animations for my reference.

The animations of Fizz, the Tidal Trickster and Nami, the Tidecaller in LOL (League of Legends) gave me some inspiration for making my own attack and movement animations. I ended up with kangaroo style attack. Death animation is the most challenge section for me because compared to real life death style, in game required more dramatic and remarkable death animation.  

There are 3 style of death animations I took into account, which were Cassiopeia’s Crash death, Nami‘s fall over death animations, Zac’s melting death animation in League of Legends and also classic spin style in Crash 1. (CBCrystalsWrath, 2013). (WretchedOutkasts, 2012). Shroomslug’s death animation finished as a classic spin and shrink.

The next phase I would like to develop and design is more complex visual effect and animation to our game. In order to reach this goal I will learn more morph modify and particle systems. A storyboard might need be created for complex animations to help animators and all the team members understand what the animation will be, and easy for communication and discussion.

Texture

The workflow I used for creating textures is researching references (Figure 1), unwrapping UV in3dsmax, painting in Mudbox or Photoshop, and Crazy bump for 3D details (Various maps) (Figure 2).

Take my shroomslug for instance, the idea of the texture on shroomslug is a combination with slugs and snakes skin pattern. I found the coral texture pattern on the right top corner (Figure 1) which I thought was similar to snake skin patterns then applied it to Mudbox and Photohop to do the combination with my existing hand painted texture. After the diffuse map (basic colour) has been made, the last step I took was creating normal maps via Mudbox. The final result is Figure 3.

Another textures I did this trimester were weapons and a torch that I took over from Thayden. The weapons texture required a different result so I added spectacular maps to make it looks shiny and sharp. Basically I followed the same workflow for developing my monster’s texture.The outcome are figure 4 and 5.

Figure1: moodboard for monster texture.

Figure2: texture production workflow 

Figure3: The final result of monster texture.

Figure4: The final result of weapon texture.

UI design

In order to giving our audience and players more visual experience, I also designed the UI. Before I started to create the UI, the Digital Tutors‘ course called “Creating UI Elements for Games in Unity” (Kinne ,n.d.). provided me a basic understanding on UI design in Unity. By doing this, I was able to work efficiently with the game designers. The production progress was similar as I did on texturing, researching, design and painting in Photoshop then handed it in to the game designers. The result is Figure 5.

Figure5: The final result of torch and UI design.

Reference:

Animation:

Hepodix (2014).Top 10 Death Animations - League of Legends. . Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EATo0pGDemM

CBCrystalsWrath.(2013).Classic Death Animation. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYf6feu6jBw

WretchedOutkasts (2012) LoL - Cassiopeia (Mythic) Death Animation [HQ].Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mhmmcaloxk

League of Legends. (n.d.) Fizz, the Tidal Trickster. Retrieved from http://gameinfo.oce.leagueoflegends.com/en/game-info/champions/nami/

Pardew, Les. (2004).Beginning Illustration and Storyboarding for Games: Chaper 5. Concept Storyboards.

Kinney ,J.(n.d.).Creating UI Elements for Games in Unity. Retrieved from http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1979-Creating-UI-Elements-for-Games-in-Unity

  Figure1: moodboard for monster texture.

Katherine. (2012 May 19) Slug Gallery.by http://katherineroy.com/268/

globe-views(n.d.)Snake.http://globe-views.com/dreams/snake.html

Name: Shroomslug

Species: Limax maximus

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Mollusca

Class: Gastropoda

Body length: 50-80cm

Colour: Yellow, Blue, Green, Red and Purple.

Level:1-5

             (L1~5.Yellow, Blue, Green, Red, Purple)

Types:

Shroomslugs come in a variety of different forms, each with a different colour fungus indicating the specific strain of infection.

Attack:

Yellow Shroomslugs – The weakest variety. No hand as normal slug. Body attack.

Blue Shroomslugs – Tail attack (current developing level).

Green Shroomslug – A poison spit attack.

Red Shroomslug – A fire spit attack.

Purple Shroomslug – A powerful magic spit attack.

Movement:

Shroomslugs move by rhythmic waves of muscular contraction.

Food Habits:

Plant material, fungi and mushrooms , green leafy vegetation.

Behaviour

Shroomslugs are the most active in dark and moist environment such as dungeons, caves, and around rivers or lakes.

 Description

A Shroomslug is a perfectly ordinary slug which has been mutated to grow into it’s monstrous form after being infected by highly magical mushroom spores that it becomes symbiotically attached to. These magical mushrooms can take root on solid surfaces such as walls and floors, and Shroomslug nests are often infested with the mushrooms.

The infection of magical mushroom make shroomslugs unable to control their behavior and start to attack other species who are approaching to them.

  Reference:

Distribution

When it comes to publishing phase, there are a number of platforms and approaches that we can host our game. The method can be divided this to 3 sections, Game itself, Videos (cinematics and player demo) and also social media for people to get more information and understand our game.

Unity 5 has been using to create our fantastic RPG game, it allows us to publish to multiple platforms such as Android, BlackBerry, Mac, PS3, PS4 and Windows 8.In addition, Web stores like Chrome market or  Firefox’s new Web-based Phone OS. Furthermore, there are a variety of online game portals that also can be used to advertise our game.

However, considering the softwares we have been using on our game is non-commercial use student version, it means that we are not allow to do any commercial purpose. For this reason, PixelProspector(2014) suggested that there are  2 methods for distributing free games. First method is direct distribute via a file hoster and the other approach is Indirect distribute via free game portals such as Itch.io, IndieDB, Game Jolt, Newground and also Kongregate. Game portals are common and increasingly popular in recently years. In those portals provide a wide range games and have massive amount of players. The next step we have to do is go through those portals to understand and how to meet their guild line/requirements for games. Hietalahti(2006)

  Below shows the free file Hosters and game portals that we can take account to distribute our game.

 Free file Hoster

 http://itch.io/

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

https://www.dropbox.com/

https://www.box.com/

https://www.mediafire.com/

·Free game portal

http://gamejolt.com/

http://www.newgrounds.com/

http://www.kongregate.com/

http://www.indiedb.com/

 Marketing/Promoting /The Publishing Phase

Once the game have been made, game demo and cinematic videos are essential for promoting our game. It is really important to make public and guide them to our website for more information or play game via numerous sources. There are some channels we can make our game visible such as Youtube ,Vimeo and Facebook. Blogging software as Tumblr, Blogger and Wordpress also can be considered. This a very important strategy for this decade to build our own Community. Epona(2012)signifies that build our community by meeting people will benefit with promotion. There are many ways we can do .The significant example is attend exhibitions or festivals by search online or from newsletter. We also can be volunteer at events, this is a money-saver and best way to know people and start developing relationships with industry experts or game players. Currently, Ewan and I just attended “Qantm animator end-tri exhibition” on Tuesday. We got some useful feedback from the other students and most of them like our design and art style. This also gave us a large amount encouragement to keep developing our game.

The other way to get more attention is join the online game development forums or CG group. I implemented this method by participating in Unity forums and Qantm animator/Brisbane Facebook groups, shared the useful information, asked and answer question. I don’t only get help when I faced technical issue but also promote myself and get more attention from other people. 

As we all were busy with production in this trimester, the marketing strategy is still not clear enough and be needs to be discussed. This will be taken into account in next trimester.

 There are  various platforms below can be used for promoting our game.

Online Videos: Player demo, cinematic video.

             YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook.

            https://www.youtube.com/

             https://vimeo.com/log_in

            https://www.facebook.com/

             Blogging platform:

Wordpress

Tumblr

Ghost

Facebook

 https://ghost.org/

https://www.tumblr.com

https://wordpress.com/

  Social Media channels.

Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr,r,google+,behance, .linkedin. Reddit. Twitch

 ·   Events , Festivals and Exhibition-Most of them are held by other country. 

   1.Game Conferences:

http://www.gdconf.com/

 http://www.developconference.com/

    2.Game Showcase:

 Indie megabooth, they help Indies to showcase their games at gamescom + PAX).Website link: http://indiemegabooth.com/.

 Gameconfs - . Website: http://www.gameconfs.com/

  Gameconfs is most useful website for knowing the game industry events. There are area can be chosen and can review the past events as the figure1 shows.

(Figure1 ) Gameconfs event research example.

Tokyo game show: Website: http://expo.nikkeibp.co.jp/tgs/2014/en/.

 Playblackpoo Website: http://www.playblackpool.com/

 GEEK. A festival of games and play .Website: http://www.geek-play.com/about-us.html

 Reference:

Hietalahti,J(2006, Jun 22).Basic Marketing Plan For Indie Games .Retrieved from http://www.gameproducer.net/2006/06/22/basic-marketing-plan-for-indie-games-2/

PixelProspector.( 2014, July 30). IV. DISTRIBUTION: 2. Distribution of Free Games. Retrieved from http://www.pixelprospector.com/distribution/

EPONA(2012, Jan 5).R 9 Steps to Self-Publishing Your First Indie Game .Retrieved from http://indiebits.com/self-publishing-steps/

Freeman,J.(n.d.). How To Make A Game Part 5: Publishing and Marketing Your Game .Retrieved from http://jessefreeman.com/game-dev/getting-started-making-games-part-5-publishing-marketing-game/

There is a free FX Crash Course  Only available until May 17.This might help other group’s movie production or also who is interested with crash effect.

Allan McKay , a VFX Supervisor & Technical Director with over 20 years experience working for studios like Industrial Light + Magic, Blur Studio, Ubisoft, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures and Atomic Fiction.

‘Specialization-smoke and fire effect

Today I practiced how to use particle system to create smoke and fire in 3Dsmax.I followed digital tutors ‘s course :Introduction to Particle Flow in 3ds Max. and did some material experiment to build up my own effect.

What I have learned in these tutorials.

PFsouce

wind

particle display operator

particle speed and amount adjustment

Created fire shape by noise

Created smoke and fire materials by smoke and noise

material dynamic operator

delete operator

I will keep learning other effect and hope this technique can be used in other group project .

Reference

Joshua Kinney (.n.d.)Introduction to Particle Flow in 3ds Max .[Video]Retrieved fromhttp://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/525-Introduction-to-Particle-Flow-in-3ds-Max

My Animation clips had many imported issue in Unity. The first problem I faced was that some bones were accidentally hidden and were not imported. This resulted in the mesh not working properly in Unity. 

The second problem was that some objects consisted of identical names in 3Dsmac, whereas I simply changed those names. The main issue Jack and I faced was linking different animation clips together. I researched Google to see if anybody ran into similar issues before. The first post related to my question was in UnityAnswers. One Unity user “deltamish” (2012) mentioned that animators could create another animation in Unity and export the mesh as FBX, or animate multiple animations in one FBX as Thayden did for our player.

However, this forum discussion in UnityAnswers did not fit my requirements, hence I searched YouTube and found a user “Unitytipsandtricks” that provides tutorials “Exporting and Importing Animations”. There were two approaches used to export various animations in this video, the first one is to export all animations in one FBX, the other method is exporting animations separately. Unfortunately, this video still did not provide a solution for my question.

Rather than doing researches within a broad network, I believe there must be a way to assemble animation clips by using the ”Mecanim” system, as I just did a research on Unity animation system last Thursday, I approached digital tutorials and found the solution for assemble animation clips.

According to digital tutors: Kinney (n.d.)’s Mecanim tutorials I was able to successfully importing 2 animation clips together and also made a brief explanation document for other members and uploaded it to Google drive.

These are my brief notes for merging animation clips by using Mecanim system.

How to import different animation clips to Unity.

1.       Preparing  the FBX files .(Basic mesh, mesh with animations)

2.       Importing to unity.

3.       After importing files to Unity then right click the Main mesh file --->create” Animation controller “àClick the Mesh file again assigned the controller to mesh.

4.       Dragging animation clips from Animation files(only animation clips) to” Animator”

5.       Making transition

     Right clip Animation clips and drag to another one then doing the same thing from another one back       to original one to make a loop.

     6. The end.

deltamish(2012),UnityAnswers:Import only animation from Max:[online forum].Retrieved from

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/341241/import-only-animation-from-max.html

  Kinney,J . (n.d.).Quick Start to Unity: Volume 2:4 Adding the animation clips to Mecanim. [Video]. Retrieved from

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1567-Quick-Start-to-Unity-Volume-2#play-40742

 Kinney,J. (n.d.).Quick Start to Unity: Volume 2:5 Creating transitions. [Video]. Retrieved from

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1567-Quick-Start-to-Unity-Volume-2#play-40743

 Unitytipsandtricks. (2012, Jun 22)Unity Tips and Trick: Exporting and Importing Animations[Video]. Retrieved from

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGAxASffY_o

League of Legends Cinematic: A New Dawn

I have been watching numerous League of Legends cinematic videos. No matter how many times I view the videos, the characters, animation, Lighting, particles, and even the background still astounds me.

“A New Dawn” was one of the significant cinematic in 2014; there were distinctive casts with unique personalities and various aptitudes for fighting. The cinematic video fleshes out the stories behind the game itself, such as the characters’ personality and the environment they live in. Furthermore, the cinematic video also forces artists to understand and discover/go deeper into the characters’ personalities. The animations for each character were so uniquely designed that they each own a distinctive identity that is irreplaceable in the game.

Video story structure:

All the animations in A New Dawn are linked together to portray every character’s unique individuality and battle skills. This required a thorough and deliberate storyboard. In addition to sculpturing the characters’ facial expressions, the developer also included little gestures and unique behaviors in order to bring the game to life.

There were numerous scenes that inspired me in my specialization:

·       The forest particle in the entire video - Ahri, the fox-like girl’s magic particle (0.47) - The colour fog along with facial expressions gave Ahri a more fictional and mystical touch

·       The blur effect of the background during the combat – The blurring effect of the background helps bringing audience’s vision and focus towards the main character

·       The explosion effect (1:43) – The smoke, particles and fire

·       Shattering effect of the anchor (2:06) - Graves was hurt by the anchor, the dust and chips that came from the damaged tree

·       The light rays shined through trees. (3:23) - Believable in forest.

·       The spell (6:01) fire-Jax using his brass lamppost to combat. This character is a bit similar to my group member, Karen’s Witch Doctor.

Considering the time constraint, the scene we plan to come up with now is a combat scene in the forest. Orc and Witch Doctor are fighting in the middle and Orc smashes the tree by a hammer. What I can do for this scene is to create the impact effect of the Orc smashing the trunk along with leaves, as well as the particle/smoke effect of the Witch Doctor’s spell. Lighting and depth of field are also the areas that I’m interested in.

Reference:

Riot Games (2015). League of Legends Cinematic: A New Dawn. Retrieved from http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/creative-spotlight/new-dawn

Animation in Unity

During this week’s supervisor meeting, I was advised to create various animations for my monster. Take the ‘attack’ animation, for instance: if a monster can be killed by 5 attacks, there must be one different animation for each attack. Before I start making numerous animations for a monster, it is essential to understand the animation system in Unity and how it works and provides for animators.

Animation in unity can be handled in different ways. The animation can be created by using external methods and importing, or by the Unity in the Animation editor (Menard, 2011, p222). There are 2 different animation in unity systems. We have created animations from outside softwares as 3dsmax or Maya, or from motion capture studios or other sources, animation in unity will be achieved largely through the Mecanim system; otherwise, it may be achieved through the Legacy system (Thorn, 2013, p244).

 What Mecanim provides:

Animations set up for all elements in Unity including Objects, characters and properties.

Support imported animation clips and also animation created within unity.

Humanoid animation retargeting by Avatar system, which is an ability to apply animation from any source to your own model.

Preview, transition and interaction animation clips before gameplay code is hooked in.

Management of complex interactions between animations with a visual programming tool.

Animating different body parts with different logic

Layering and masking features

 A brief Mecanim workflow of animation in Unity

1.       Animation clips imported (external sources or created within Unity)

2.       Animation Controller, which is a structured flowchart-like system, allows animation clips to be organized.

3.       Avatar system

4.       Animation Component

1, 2, 3 are assigned together on Game object via Animation Component. (Figure1). Animation component refers to animation controller, and animation controller refers to animation clips (refer to Figure 1).

What Mecanim provides:

Animations set up for all elements in Unity including Objects, characters and properties.

Support imported animation clips and also animation created within unity.

Humanoid animation retargeting by Avatar system, which is an ability to apply animation from any source to your own model.

Preview, transition and interaction animation clips before gameplay code is hooked in.

Management of complex interactions between animations with a visual programming tool.

Animating different body parts with different logic

Layering and masking features

 The briefly Mecanim workflow of animation in Unity

1.       Animation clips imported(external sources  or created within Unity)

2.       Animation Controller which is a structured flowchart-like system allows animation clips are organized.

3.       Avatar system

4.       Animation Component

1, 2, 3 are assigned together on Game object via Animation Component. (Figure1).Animation component refer to animation controller and animation controller refer to animation clips.

 Figure1: Diagram showing how the various parts of the animation system connect together

More into animation organization, we can import multiple animation clips and create the files to include various types of animation  from movement, attack, being attacked, or jumping, and set it up by informing Unity which range we need to be in the action (Wittayabundit ,2011,P141).

Besides, the layers of systems allow us to decide which animation layer is of higher or lower priority). The different layers animation allow for crossfade and to blend the weights to build up more complex and impressive animation.

Legacy animation system

Within Unity, we also can create animation clips from ”Animation Editor”, and view the data and edited results in “animation view “(Menard, 2011, p233)

The main reason for using this internal system is to continue working with old projects without having to update it for Mecanim.(Legacy animation system, para1).

It seems that Mecanim seems to be recommended for use in most situations. For our pre-production phase, I  plan  to create various animations in early stages, and use this system to blend and mix animations in Unity.

 There are some tutorials I found from digital tutor might benefit us during the animation phase.

1.       how to create a multi-phase boss battle

This tutorial provides the skills to create boss battle for a first person shooter .This course contains how to import boss model, rigs and animation properly. Setting up the detection system, field of view, animation script. Furthermore, enabling and disabling the damages from players. (Kinney,n.d.).

 2.       Quick-Start-to-Unity-Volume-2

This course cover basics of animation and physics in Unity. The range of this course from import rig, animation clips, and Meacanim. This tutorial is designed to beginner as myself who has never used Unity. (Kinney,n.d.)

 Reference:

 Kinney, J. (n.d.).Quick-Start-to-Unity-Volume-2[digital-tutors].

Retrieved from http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1567-Quick-Start-to-Unity-Volume-2

Kinney, J. (n.d.). Multiphase-Boss-Battle-in-Unity. [digital-tutors].Retrieved from http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1343-Multiphase-Boss-Battle-in-Unity.

Unity Technologies. (2015).Legacy animation system. Retrieved from http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Animations.html.

Unity Technologies (2015). Unity’s Animation System. Retrieved from http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AnimationOverview.html

Menard, M. (2011) Game Development with Unity

Thorn, A. (2013) Unity 4 Fundamentals: Get Started at Making Games with Unity

Wittayabundit,J.(2011). Unity 3 Game Development Hotshot.

Whilst there are a lot of retopology options available. Have you tried the Z-remesher? It can do a good job since the model is not complex. If anything you can use it to get started and then tidy up in Max.