Pixel Pals cutscene video pt2 the 3D world.

Our groups second part of the video which was mainly me apart from the modelling and texturing of the Racoon companion, the rest was all me, which is very good in my eyes because it will help me in the future which CGI and other VFX video I will make.

Quick time version of the video as the backup incase anything happens to our Unity project.

Unity character Turntables

I had some real troubles with this because my Alien tut character didn't work and I was left with only his eyes and tablet which was a real shame and I couldn't work out why the body didn't go though???

This then lead onto the Characters which we made for our cut scene and at this point I was fearing the worst that they wouldn't transfer correctly, however to my surprise nothing went wrong at all...

Here they are in the turntable set sadly without textures because this was not my area/job to do for this project so I decided to leave them out this leads on to the racoon floating next to the human, which is not mine but is the companion to the human female which I did create!

Next was to upload them so they are stand alone and don't need Unity to play them, this will be very useful for my portfolio so show I can model and Animate figures for CGI work.

Showing off the turning aspect of the models.

Cut Scene quick video edit!!!

I've returned back to the comfort of the video side of things which makes me happy plus the cut scene needs a back up to the unity file so there is a second copy and even if its a small section it has made me realise Games is not for me but film defiantly is!!!!

Not much editing just sound and cropping the image so nothing extra is involved.

Unity Final cut scene

So now onto the final stages of the in game cut scene Placing the cameras was easy and adding the slight bit of animations such as follow character, pan and track to give more effect to the scene however the script writing was hard due to if there was little mistakes, it was noticeable but hard to find in the script.

Now the script is complete and without glitches all I have to do is line the Camera switches to my time which I've recorded down and play test the animation due to different frame rates and processing speed of the unity game, because of the amount of assets/objects within the scene.

This is now running really well however there is a slight problem as my Camera 6 is from the looks of it being forced moved/being shunted, this is being a real problem due to the fact it's the last shot of the cut scene, my tutor has looked at it and so far cannot establish why it's doing this because we moved it to a different location and it was completely fine and recored everything fine so why was it that one area which is affecting the camera so much???

Left:Camera is looking at the characters with the splash art(not my job sadly) but in the bottom middle of the screen you can see it's just blue which makes no sense??











FIXED THE CAMERA.
It seems the reason why the character wasn't showing up was because the cam switched too early therefore didn't know where it was and when the scene was paused you could see them, so Unity is a strange, annoying fun thing, very similar to Maya when I first used it, but nightmare over and shall upload the video when i'm finished.

Real time cut scene with the characters, happy times:)

Creating the City PT2

Sadly haven't blogged in a while due to focusing on making the city and the route for the characters to take along with the realistic textures.

This is the final City ready for the characters to be imported and then for me with the a new role of animating the scene/ chase though the city.

All assets within this city.

Fences are just one plane with a fence alpha map, so you can see though, then just a pole with a metal texture, then copied and pasted.

Air Ducts simple boxes with a texture plus a separate end vent/grill so I can copy and build a lot of vents with different connections and then place at the end the vent to say it's finished.

Textures where all found on CG textures, but these ones are just references for the texture to finish her textures and then to simply replace at the end.




ANIMATION of the CHARACTERS

Firstly to say this was really hard to do because of all the jumps I wanted the character to do and followed with the second Character which floats which is fine but I would like to show a bit of character interaction.

Opening where the characters land from the 2d world into the 3d one and have a look around.

The chase has been restarted and the parkour though out the city starts.

Here she is jumping off the post to the next building.

Influenced by Prince of Persia  the classic wall run on the building to the next roof top.

Adding in the character Interaction to attain new heights within the run

Landed with a little celebration then continues the run.

Slide over terrain slight influence from the game Brink which the game mechanics worked like this however the game was a bust but useful research.

Showing off another ability Ex Wall Run, this is where she scales the building all the way to the top into...

... the Freeze frame similar to borderlands 1 and 2 intro title.

and that is 40-45 seconds due to frame rates.

The music to go with this is a 8bit remix of Iron Maiden's The Trooper.

Here is the music.

All there is to do now is place it all in unity and set up the cameras to film this intro to our game.

Creating a City PT1

Over Easter break this is the city for the Game Machinima. This city isn't complete due to the textures missing and the lighting on the buildings being affect creating really black shadows.

This is a sky view looking at the possibilities of a route for the characters to run along.

Putting the city in Unity to see what it would look like.

Note: Make one thing in maya and then copy and paste it as many times as i like to make a city, nice and easy.

I haven't thought about making a road below, because in my mind it was rooftops and we won't see the floor however I will be careful when the path is chosen to make sure the city floor is not noticed.

This looks interesting but sadly it doesn't feel like a city so going to have to change the size of the building within Unity to make the scene look like a city.

Maya Tut Making the alien

As a mandatory part to this project is to make and animate a Character and place them onto a turntable.

Starting off Mat(tutor) gave us concept to use as a reference for our modelling, this is very useful because I'm not good at designing characters.

After the first hour this is as far as i got

I really enjoyed modelling this alien from the concepts

Creating the base look of the alien but not fully finished, and doesn't have my own little spin on him to make him mine and not just a copy.

This week we talked about rigging, this  looks very complex but I have done rigging before however the controls is something new so the rig/skeleton was very quick but the controls where very complex, especially with the setting up on the limiters so the model hopefully wont mess up or distort in odd ways.
However I came up with a problem.

I had created two hips within the rig this means when i was using the limiters to fix positions and lock off some rotations, it did apply the locks however when I moved the second hip which I didn't know of it really confused me and I was left on this little problem for a while until my tutor found it and old me what went wrong this was easily fixed but did set me back to reset the rig.

Note must check over rig before setting limiters on the rig with the controllers.

This week IK handles something complete new to me and having to reset the leg rigs and change them to the IK handle and they work amazing well especially with a controller on the foot. Here is just a example of the controls and the limits which effect the base of the foot and adding set controls such as ToeTip I can easily control the foot without much trouble.




WEIGHT PAINTING, this was the bane of my life! With the tutorials from my tutor this was still a nightmare and was the worst thing in the world because the very time I painted some stupid reason it just kept on resetting every time but found ways around this now but is still the worst thing i've come across in maya!

Note: Give plenty of time if I ever do this horrible thing again.

Final alien complety finished and has a animation, ready for Unity and creating the turn table for this guy

Overall really happy with this guy, main problems were the weight painting, and setting up controller limits less so.

Animation for the dude :)

Concept for City

I'm using all of these images to get inspiration for the city however I will need to research into game developers on environment, from game companies.

Japan, A really good source, because a lot of their builds are compact together and will be good for a roof top chase.

 After looking at some Pakour viideos on youtube I created my comcept with a city scape in the background to begin to get a feel for world which I'll create.

Created a small roof top Based of this image but making it using basic squares and then a limited colour uses age like mirrors edge.

Game Machinima building ideas

For this module we have to be in groups of three for the game brief, so I decided to go with Liam Cooper and Sacha Frampton and their Idea of making a type of pixel style game.

I really like the idea of doing this module in a team because it will give an idea of the work flow in the gaming industry.

PIXELS.

This is the main area which we wish to focus on followed by the preset theme.

So the first thing we did as a team was to go on pinterest.com and create a board of art which we could all see and review on it.

http://www.pinterest.com/iambambiwillow/pixel/ (Sacha's account)

Quickly going around the group bouncing ideas off each other to build something that we will all enjoy build together as a team!