#futureworks

Hi Secret Everlark Anon! :)

Modern Au was the direction I was leaning in as well. OK, that sounds pretty workable. I can't promise anything will be done for a while, because I've gotten behind on some of my original WIPs, but in the next couple weeks I could definitely make something happen.

Keep your eyes open!

This post isn’t really attached to any of my modules in particular as it’s something I’m using in pretty much any assignment that utilises UE4, however, I felt like it’s good to write about my progress anyway.

I’m no animator, especially not one who can rig meshes and create awesome-looking animations like those seen in Assassin’s Creed or Uncharted, however that doesn’t stop me from knowing how to play around with them in-engine.

Acquiring Animations:

Like I said, I’m no animator, so I need to source my animations from elsewhere. The default ones that come with UE4 are great and are all really great for prototyping but they don’t offer that visual flair that I was looking for (I should point out that the example I’m using in this post will be hostiles from my XB2001 assignment). 

That’s where Mixamo comes in. It’s a lifesaver - for those that don’t know it, it’s a site that offers free character meshes complete with skeletons and a lot of animations to play with. They can be imported into Unreal and pretty much any other engine that I can think of quite easily. You can customise details of the animations, too, some of which will be about positioning of certain limbs, the speed of limb movement, how many keyframes the animation has, where the animation has the character staying in place or not and so on.

I downloaded a bunch of zombie meshes from it along with animations to match and brought them all into UE4.

Setting Up the Animations:

When importing a mesh into UE4 it always offers to build a skeleton and a physics asset out of that mesh which is really handy as a mesh with no skeleton cannot be animated. For me, everything went quite smoothly.

Here’s one of the zombies in all her T-pose glory. The next bit was the hard part - I needed to create a way for the engine to know what animations to play, when to play them, and what order it should do them in. For something like this in programming we’d use state machines and it’s no different in this instance, but instead of playing with AI behaviours or camera logic, I’d be using animations.

Now that the engine has a bunch of animations it can play, it just needs to know one more thing. If the zombie was to walk, it’d move but its idle animations would still play. The fix to this is pretty straightforward - we need to tell it that once the pawn that possesses this animation blueprint moves at a certain speed, play the walk or run animations. We’d do that partially in the state machine and partially in the animation blueprint.

Now that we’ve gotten the pawn’s speed and direction and have set those values, the engine will know what to do on its end. The only thing left is blend space - without it, the engine will just snap to the next animation very suddenly and jarringly, it looks horrid. Blend spaces are there to fix that. The programmer in me found them really interesting so I’m going to enthuse about them a little bit, so don’t mind that!

A blend space is something that blends animations together, funnily enough. It adds a smooth transition between each one so that the skeleton of the mesh will have more natural movement once it switches to a new animation. When the default character in UE4 runs then stops, those are just 2 animations - run and idle. The blend space is what makes the transition between the two look incredibly smooth.

There are different kinds of blend space - 1D and 2D. The image above is a 2D blend space, this is what allows me to utilise direction. If you imagine that direct up from the centre is forward, then the lines either side are left and right, then both ends of the graph are backwards, that allows us to create a blend between animations that would involve strafing or running backwards and so on. 1D blend spaces allow us to create a much more linear graph that doesn’t utilise all of the above which is great for when you want to create a game that doesn’t need that many animations.

Mine technically doesn’t, but I want more experience with working with UE4′s animations, blend spaces, skeletons and so on.

There’s a lot more to show off, there’s a lot that one can do with animation blueprints and blend spaces. I’ll be working on them gradually over time because they aren’t a priority in any of my projects but they’re nice to have in anyway because they make the game feel more complete despite it just being a prototype.

https://imgur.com/0Gt7AIg (a gif to show the engine randomly choosing idle states for our zombie friend)

‘I Know You!’ is a social card game for any number of players where the aim is to either convince players of the details of famous people or figure out if that person is telling the truth or lying.

From the beginning, the concept of “I Know You” barely changed as it was always going to be a game of truths and lies. Clear inspiration was taken from game shows such as ‘Would I Lie To You?’ and other social party and card games where the idea is to either guess who you are or guess who someone else is. We felt like it was an interesting idea to combine these two elements of play into one. Initially, we thought about how we wanted to theme the game as it would have a great impact on the type of facts and fictions we would use for these famous people. There were two obvious choices to either be a serious balance of explicit and obscure details or go down the other end of comedy and parody. In the end, while the game isn’t completely one or the other or a balance for that matter, I feel as if we’ve reached a distinct theme of comedy with hints of obscure or interesting facts that some people may not have heard of.

Once we had settled on a theme, the rest was quite simple. We gathered a bunch of famous names and researched into their lives both professional and personal in order to compile a useful range of details about them. At this point, we had reached the biggest challenge of the project, however, it wasn’t quite as big in the scope of things. Essentially, there was trouble coming up with truths and lies that didn’t indirectly contradict one another since the mechanic of telling any three details from any three truths or lies would cause a breakage in the system where the lie becomes easily distinguishable from the truth. This was followed by a struggle to come up with convincing sounding lies that didn’t confuse guessing players with a completely different famous name than the one they were trying to figure out. For example, making a lie about Michael Jackson being a prominent figure in Vegas had the effect of people thinking about Elvis and therefore believing it was the truth. The compromise here was settling with mostly straight up lies that had somewhat of a hint to the famous person which in turn would keep the guesser’s mind on the same name once other truths or lies were added to the mix. Even with this compromise, it was possible for some people to mix up the identity of the famous name but in a more understandable way than there were just some crossed signals.

The rest of production was relatively easy going. We had a concrete theme, working truths and lies and even a tidy aesthetic to the cards once we started to make it all physical. The last bump in the road was re-designing a very muddled point system. Originally, players would earn points determined by the ratio of lies to truths, for example, all three truths would only amount to one point while all three lies would amount to three points and then two points for a mixture. This was for either the guessers or card reader depending on if the truth about the details had been discovered and that person’s identity. What occurred was the already difficult lies not receiving enough of a reward for being used resulting in games mostly involving truths and minimal point totals. The answer to this problem was simply designing it so that each truth was worth one point and each lie was worth two, meaning the potential maximum point rewards had been increased even just for telling truth but more importantly gave better value to lying. Basically, this gave more freedom for experimenting with how often to lie or tell the truth.

Finishing a prototype was relatively simple if not a tad boring as all that was left was to transfer all the information and aesthetics to physical cards. While this was time-consuming and tedious it was well worth the work as the game definitely feels more social and involved when you are actually holding these cards in your hand. We were just missing the last ingredient, something catchy to add some zest to the soup. So in tandem, we came up with the game’s title and catchphrase. With the limitless potential of voices shouting out answers, we required a call out that designated when someone was allowed to make a guess. It made sense to us that since you’re trying to guess who they are then you’ll eventually come to a conclusion that you know them. That’s when the catchphrase and title “I Know You!” was born, and although the prominent mechanic of this game was the truths and lies, this title still related to this aspect as knowing who they are would, in turn, give you a better understanding of the truths or lies. This design kept the frantic interaction of being the first to guess while still retaining a controlled and fair rule set that can be followed.

Overall, this project feels successful. A simple, mostly unchanged concept allowed us room for re-designs and improvements where needed without over-engineering and when faced with problems, a simple design was beneficial to finding quick and logical solutions. We believe ‘I Know You!’ certainly has that social aspect and fun interaction which can be enjoyed by all. The potential for expansion is down to the imagination, and even then, we feel the game as it is can be easily manipulated with new rules and interesting twists to keep gameplay fresh. The question is...I know you but do you know me?

Written by Jack Carson-Fox.

Project Team: Jack Carson-Fox | George Beswick | Lewis Green

This is just one of four projects as part of a whole assignment.

‘Rixa’ - Abstract Game and ‘The Horde’ - Narrative Game can be found over on George Beswick’s page.

XB3992 Honours Project: Character Arm Creation & Rigging

With my honours project Sensory being a first-person interactive level based around a character one of the aspects I am aiming to create a character that feels more like an actual organic game character for the player than a looking glass into the game world.

To do this I have expanded further on the character modelling of the protagonist character adding baseline clothing for the arms and began the animation/rigging process for the arms themselves.

For the clothing to stay within the theme of the opening environment of Sensory being set within a low poly apocalyptic street I have created a jumper sleeve and a pair fingerless gloves as these are common attire seen within post-apocalyptic themed games and visual media due to the practicality the clothing provides within such an environment.

Such attire can be seen on character meshes within games such as Metro Last Light, The Last of Us and Television shows and comics such as The Walking Dead.

After creating such clothing for the character I began the process of applying skeleton bones and creating a basic character reference that once finished will serve as the bone structure for a complete set of character arms and legs.

My overall design goal for the arms and legs is to animate a natural arm swing that replicates that of an organic human being when casual walking and a set of legs that move in accordance to that of an actual set of human leg movements when casually walking through an environment.

Image References:

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi93oWMps3WAhUEuBoKHQerDtIQjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2F183099541073090284%2F&psig=AOvVaw0SGscXxS0ADFMKkdE08wpP&ust=1506873089795191

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjqluegps3WAhUB2RoKHUR6Ba4QjRwIBw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rockpapershotgun.com%2Ftag%2Fmetro-2033-last-light%2F&psig=AOvVaw2oekdZuhaTJeupAONL9ZVq&ust=1506872944911293

XB2002 Assignment Three - Environment Art

The Environment Art Scene Fly Through and Trailer:

For my final development milestone of my low poly environment, I created a flythrough/reveal trailer for the whole environment scene itself.

For the trailer, my main focus was to capture the majority of the environment within the Unreal project and have a seamlessly smooth transition throughout the whole thing for the camera’s projectile path it takes.

For the camera and video itself, the video was captured on a matinee keyframe animated camera, and upon completion of the matinee’s route rendered out the Matinee’s movie projected path at a 1080p 60 frames per second video at the MP4 format.

From here it was the case of taking the Unreal matinee movie and importing it into Adobe Premiere Pro and adding visual effects such as the transition to white in the title and credits scene and adding the soundtrack Floating Home over the video.

Within Adobe Premiere Pro I also compressed and rendered the video from its initially slow speed Unreal video file, and from here was able to acquire the smooth flow of movement visible in the video above.

I am very satisfied with the final version of the reveal trailer for the whole low poly environment scene, as it has allowed me to develop my 3D modelling, environment art, and Unreal materials skillsets.

One of the design challenges I faced within the video creation process of the project was creating the right visual effects for the video to make it more professional, as my creative milestone aim for this video was to create a fly through that resembles that of an actual game reveal trailer.

Over the past ten years or so, Hip-Hop seems to have settled into its place in modern culture and as such its influences have become less obvious and more diluted.

A recent example is Watch Dogs 2. The game features a cast of quirky youths and embraces a number of various cultures and styles. The Hip-Hop influence is undoubtedly there but it’s mixed in with some more retro and techno punk aspects.

InFAMOUS: Second Son is similar in this regard. The game isn’t as in your face as some older examples but has underlying tones of Hip-Hop culture. Spray paint is a large part of the game and a large part of the character also.