BGP week 6 – Animation updates

This week doesn’t have a lot of very visually interesting updates. Mostly I just spent it working on the animations – small fixes as usual, like an animation not playing as it should, or adjustments to the timing. I also made a fair few new ones, such as animations for a couple of different landings, and just generally updating the current ones to be more fluid and engaging.

Since at this point we have pretty much all the animations we need, and are confident we’ll keep all that we have (a lot of animations get routinely thrown out cause they’re not relevant anymore due to changes in gameplay etc.) , I was also able to animate our player character’s clothing.

 

BGP Week 5 – Rocks

I came down with a cold this week. Fever, headache, the works, that took most of the weekdays to get through. What I did manage to get done was a few meshes for rocks to be used to add to the environment and in some cases as a part of the gameplay, where they can be moved.

I made a few models each in two different types of rocks – one a rounded, softer looking type meant to be more colourful, the other sharper and more jagged. Here’s a screenshot:

BGP week 4 – Albedos and assorted animation adjustments

This week was spent on a variety of different tasks that weren’t particularly connected to one another. I did a bit of texture work, tiling textures for the ground (which will be sand) as well as a couple of new animations for the player character. Other than that it was largely small fixes – implementing and adjusting the animations made the previous week, and fixing up the animation trees of the player character wherever needed.

BGP week 3 – Make the Enemies move now, too

Animation up until this week had been fairly simple. There’s a whole lot of support all around for making humanoid characters, but it gets a lot trickier once you start working with characters that are both not humanoid, and complex enough that they’ll have to be able to do stuff like walk around.

One of the new enemies I had to animate was easy, just three bones, one of which was a spinning propeller, the other which was the body, and a third which was the jaw that only needed to open and shut. The other enemy was a lot more difficult, since it needed a walking animations and didn’t adhere to a humanoid build. It’s just a body with two arms on either side. Motionbuilder, which I’ve been using to animate, doesn’t recognize a character (which is necessary to give access to features like fullbody/partial body keyframes, and locking a bone in place) that doesn’t have a particular set of bones, i.e., two bones in each leg, a pelvis, spine, arms etc.

That left a few options – either just give the enemy a full body of bones and just leave most of them unskinned, or create a custom rig and eschew a lot of the features I’m used to. In the end, I opted for the former solution.

BGP week 2 – She moves now.

So week 1 was largely spent reading the chapter on animations in the Unity Manual, as well as checking out loads of online tutorials and guides, some of which were helpful, most of which wasn’t. Come week 2, I had a pretty good picture of how to proceed, as well as an animation script provided by helpful programmer Johannes.

So I started setting up an actual proper animation controller for our player character, Neiva, creating new and scrapping old animations as I went depending on what I needed. The controller rapidly gets pretty messy even with simple characters like Neiva, and a lot of time was spent just iterating on the tree – figuring out, when she did something strange, why that was and how to solve it using the transitions.

She still couldn’t run the right direction when going towards -x though. It could be solved by having duplicate animations for every time she’s turned around, but it’ll be more effective to just ask a programmer to turn her around in the code instead.

BGP Blog 1 – How does Unity handle animations, anyway?

Alright so, in the previous course, in which we were to model, texture and animate a 3D character, I got to do the animations. Now, this happens to be the same character we’re using for our Big Game Project – a little, like, lava stone kind of creature called Neiva. So I did some animations in Motionbuilder for that, six to be precise. That first week, I spent most of the time adjusting and cleaning them up for use in Unity – as well as learning how Unity handles animations.

The short of it is, Unity has a thing called an animation controller, a state machine which handles transitions and blending between all the different animations. A script, provided by a programmer, gives me a set of parameters with which to control these transitions. For instance, the VelocityX float let’s me decide when the character should go from the idle animation into a run. When VelocityX is greater than 0.1, the Idle state transitions into the Run state. Then there’s parameters for Jump, Throw, Aim, VelocityY etc.

I didn’t have a script with which to make the animations functional in week one, but I did build up a prototype animation tree to figure out which animations I would need, and how they’d need to move together.

Space Dev 6 – Making friends

In an unusual sense of the phrase, as in this week (along with an assortment of random task nobody else had time to do) I made the sprite of the player thief’s friend and accomplice.

We’ve had some discussion along the road about what, in the setting, happens to the stuff the player steals. The concept doc wasn’t entirely clear on the matter, so eventually we settled for adding an additional character for the sole purpose of helping that make sense – and also so that they may provide a bit of in-character tutorial. Stuff like that.

Above is the player character probably on their way to make some crime happen, as made by Adrienne. Now, more than even the environment I’ve been making, the additional accomplice character really needed to fit in with the thief’s look. I’m not good with that, I may have mentioned. I’ve always leaned more realism than cartoony, more sketches and painting than clean, clear art. Ideally, Addis would’ve made the accomplice sprite but she’s been real busy working on Mr. von Fancy’s animations. We’ll have to make do, though.

Now, this accomplice person needed to be similar enough in design to the thief to be recognizable as an ally but also not actually mistaken for the thief. Which is why she has visible hair and follows a colour palette leaning red to the thief’s blue. It is a her, by the way. The thief’s agender, but as we were talking over my sketches for the accomplice Ellen was like ”It should be a girl” and I was like ”Yeah.”

I’ve tried for the same nice round style of everything, and emulated the look of the other characters to the best of my ability. My lines aren’t as clean or as steady as I’d wish, nor the anatomy as well fitting, but it worked out alright and you won’t be seeing the accomplice for long regardless.

Her involvement in the game will be limited to the very first floor of the game, the tutorial level, as it were. As intensely as Addis endorses Paint Tool Sai for All Things Art, I don’t actually have the program and made the accomplice in Photoshop instead. Fortunately for me, all of the animation required for her was entirely limited to blinking like a normal person, and doing the shift eyes like a criminal person. I bet she’s already given that money bag a name, way that she’s cradling it in her arms.

Space Dev 5(?) – Further Exploration of Common Household Objects

Alright kids, here it finally is: the Official Fancy Mansion Evironmental Artists’ Guide to Referencing. I suggest you guard this secret close to your heart, as it’ll prove vital to all your luxurious mansion drawing needs. This is an invaluable tool and I trust you’ll find yourself coming back to this guide time and time again for the entiriety of your career. But enough preamble, let’s get started.

First, you’ll have to decide what piece of furniture you’re drawing. Once you have, you must carefully consider if this item is something stodgy old aristrocrat scum would have in their ridiculous mansion. A rolling office chair, for instance, is a no but let’s say you pick a regular chair That was the almost self-evident part, now, now comes the trick, the path to enlightenment, the font of inspiration, the very core of the intense artistry put into this game. You make a google image search of the furniture, but you write the word fancy in front of it.

Fricking foolproof. The word ”fancy” is just so on point for the aesthetic of the game, google always returns just the stuff you need, regardless of what you’re looking for. Aside from like, flowerpots. The returns for ”fancy flowerpot” are pretty bad.

Look at this? What’s going on here? It’s handmade though, there are instructions. This isn’t even the worst result, there’s a stock photo drifting around out there of a person dressed up as a flowerpot, too. So, alright, it’s not an entirely foolproof method of getting good references for drawing fancy furniture but it’s close enough.

That’s it, that’s the guide. This means it’s time for me to segue into the true purpose of this post: talking about the some of the furniture I’ve drawn for the game. As is, and as it’ll still be tomorrow at the time of the beta, the whole mansion looks pretty… empty. Aside from a few bags of money haphazardly strewn around the level and the occasional piece of armour there’s just nothing going on in La Casa Grande de Señor Otto de Lujoso (which is what I wanted to name the game, by the way). So, having finished all my walls and floors and having put the elevator work on hold for reasons, I’ve been put on digital carpenting duty.

Seeing as we’re supposed to only be writing about one artifact a week, let’s specifically talk about the couch. We’ve got a slightly informal style guide going something along the lines of warm colours for environment, flat colours, no more than three shades of every colour and have clean lines for everything. This is pretty much the antithesis to all I know and love, so working under these restrictions has been frustrating. It probably builds character or something though. Naturally I used the guide above for finding a few references of what a good old uncomfortable expensive couch looks like. I don’t know if people even make furniture like it anymore?

I also tend to prefer to work in the resolution the final sprite will be, which makes clean lines particularily difficult on account of how every pixel becomes incredibly visible and important. Just the tiniest bit out of line starts looking off. And then you redo, do right. So the process goes references > sketch > lines > flats > shades, and lands looking something like this:

 

 

Space Shooter Dev. 4

This is undoubtedly the worst Thursday of the year. Thursdays have a tendency to be Slightly Worse than other days of the week in my opinion, by no fault of their own but because Friday brings deadlines early in the day. So Fridays are really at fault, but you feel the pain of the deadline on the day before it, so Thursday takes all the blame, and Fridays get credit for being the best day of the week. It’s unfair, really. This is only tangentially related to the artifact I’m writing about this week, I just felt like venting.

The artifact of the week is, in fact, an animated elevator. A scrapped animated elevator, a now outdated animated elevator or to put it simply: work down the drain. Still, the methods and choices stand true for the new version I’m in the middle of creating so it’s not completely meaningless.

In our version of the Fancy Mansion concept, the player drops off their ill-begotten goods in a handy old elevator which they send down to their accomplice for pickup. The elevator’s probably the most modern thing in the entire mansion, and thus undoubtedly viewed with great disdain by Mr. von Fancy.

It’s still very old though, so instead of nice smooth metal with proper doors, I started looking up references of the old kinds of elevator – you know, metal gates, creaky, the kind of thing a young child would be hesitant to ride in. Then I made an interpretation and painted/drew the thing. My version required significantly less detail than the original, on account of size.

For once, I decided not to live dangerously and actually paid proper attention to what layers everything was on, for the sake of the next part of the process.

Which is, of course. Normally this will be the cause of great agony during the process followed by great satisfaction at its conclusion, because it’s just sincerely cool to see something you’ve drawn move about. But an elevator with sliding metal gates and a sedate descent into darkness isn’t very difficult to animate. I just moved a few pre-existing bits horizontally on each frame, copy-pasted even, and then grabbed the entire interior of the elevator and gradually moved it down on the image to simulate descent.

While I have tried out the video layer timeline animation system for Photoshop, I prefer the regular layers and frames deal. This might very well be because I haven’t really given the video layers proper consideration and effort into learning it. However, there’s a time for learning and there’s a time for doing and these last weeks have largely consisted of the latter (there is some incredible fake wisdom going down in this post).

It turned out fairly nice, I thought, so I’m a bit sad I’ll be making a different version. The reason I’ll be doing so, as well as remaking a lot of other art, is because the style of the environment didn’t exactly fit with the style of the characters. I’ve been feeling like this a very long time. When I started this post I’d half a mind to write about the importance of trusting your aesthetic doubts even in the face of encouragement from your peers, but that’s not strictly speaking an artifact so I guess I’ll have to leave it for a different post.

It’s exactly the same lesson I thought I learned from remaking the walls.

Space Shooter Dev. 3 – Pattern

I’m starting to think there are more than one Thursday in a week with how often it feels like I’m writing these. Reflection’s good for the soul though, and since I’ve been going on and on about walls for two weeks I think it’s time for another must-have in any household: floors. Exciting, isn’t it.

Now this being Fancy Mansion I’m on about, there have to be at least three different kinds of floor to produce three different kinds of sounds. This is so the player may locate the enemy NPC by way of being a really good listener, which is an excellent quality in anyone. And this being Fancy Mansion I’m on about, one of the floor types had to be a really pretty carpet.

Most modern rugs in my experience tends towards the monochromatic, but Mr. Otto von Fancy’s tastes lean distinctly old-fashioned. For me to paint something like that up, this meant Googling the words ”old rug” and marveling at the previously unknown (to me) complexity of the patterns. Unfortunately, I’m no master artisan like the people who wove the carpets I looked at and as I started figuring out how I was going to make the tile, I settled for something a lot less complicated. Not to mention all that detail would be lost on an image that’s all of 128×128 pixels big.First off, I put down a rough idea of what i wanted with pen and paper. By now a few pages of my notebook is covered by almost incomprehensible abstractions of tile after tile after tile like some kind of code. After that, it was just a matter of replicating my idea digitally.

Im fairly certain Photoshop isnt the ideal software for this sort of task, but lacking other options, we all make do.

There was a lot of flipping and copying and turning everything. It wouldn’t do to make an uneven pattern, so I had numerous guides laid out over the image, and every line was really only ever drawn once. After it had been, I’d simply copy it and rearrange it however the pattern demanded to make everything more or less symmetrical. Then I’d slap both bits on the same layer, and duplicate that, increasing the speed of each rearrangement exponentially as the patterns were built up.

Then I coloured it all. Easiest bit in practice (just locking transparency on the layer with the pattern and going nuts with the brush) even though I’m still agonizing over colour choices. No real rug I’ve seen really looks that vibrant, but I’m nothing if not a sucker for red and gold-ish colours. And maybe the fact that it’s from a game will allow for a lack of realism, yeah?