Update (Text Form)

This post is here just to keep interested people up-to-date with what has been happening recently. As you can see, the blog has been slightly less active recently due to the nature of the work we are currently undergoing.

Basically, to date, we have our main character; the cat burglar Maxwell Winters in game, fully textured, rigged and animated. We also have the Guard player fully modelled. Guests are still undergoing custom animations and textures, but are expected to be complete for the coming presentation. We also have a custom HUD working in game, as well as a togglable map and a warning meter for different situations. Also of the HUD side of things, we have the main menu working, including the level in which it is set; the wine seller under the house poorly lit as a 3D backdrop with Maxwell Winters hiding behind a pillar in there.

The level is also being rigged up with the current game mechanics ready to demonstrate at this presentation, along with the presentation itself being created (roughly 60 slides, lasting for 1 hour, 30 minuets).

Presentation #2 Coming Up!!

Presentation #2: Interim Submission - Final Product Demonstration (worth 45% of the overall mark) is soon to be upon us! We have been booked for 11:15am on Wednesday 28th March 2012.


With this brought to light, its full-steam ahead to get everything done to a presentable level while we still have time. After this stage, we will have one final presentation to show the final, polished version of the game demo, along with how it is being promoted and advertised at our end of year show in June. (More details about the date of our end-of-year show will be posted here in the near future for those that are interested in attending).

Render Pass #1

These are some screen shots of our level so far. I have learnt much about controlling lights so far, and this is the result.

(God-rays will soon be altered or removed, whichever looks best in the end)

New colour scheme

New sketch of the main lobby presents it in much brighter and positive colour scheme, resembling Mediterranean architecture.

Environment Progress

The past few weeks have been aimed towards simply creating assets, unwrapping them, and texturing them, then implementing them into the map for in-game use. Although this process is proving to be slow, often with a fair amount of trouble-shooting in terms of texture quality and scaling, it appears to be going well. We have 24 days left until our next presentation; the interim submission.

Now we just need to keep going with this process while rigging the level up for the game mechanics to work as we need for the demo, and we should be on track.

Character Issues Solve!!

After about a week and a half of troubleshooting, re-binding, re-skinning, and constant failure, we have finally resolved our issues we were having with our main character not deforming properly in UDK where Maya saw no fault.

Despite our resolve, we still are unsure as to what exactly was causing the problem, and now in the background of work we are slowly trying to recreate the problem to see what actually causes it for future reference, and to help people with the same issue on this blog.

We have our character in, deforming *as it should* (not as we want, but that will easily be rectified once we apply our own animations). I will keep this brief at least for now. Should we find the actual cause(s), I will post them in full detail on this blog at a later date.

Exporting our fully rigged character does this when brought into UDK for animation.

This is using the old format from Maya 2011, .psk. Works perfectly.

FBX has has this bug reported hundreds of times throughout the internet it seems, and has been around for a while.

Another problem we had while trying to fix all of this was parts of the model were pointing in the wrong direction. We figured this may be linked to joint axis rotation, but changing these manually appeared to have no affect, so we were unable to confirm this outcome as of yet.

Character Problems....

So we have found various problems trying to get our rigged character into UDK from Maya 2012. It seems that Maya 2012 has general great difficulties in managing to export an FBX holding a rigged character. The problem arises when the file is saved in Maya 2012 before exporting, at any stage of rig and the skinning process.

Taking the plain geometry data out as an OBJ and bringing it into a fresh file in Maya 2011, then rebinding the rig seems to fix the issue; the character now fully works in UDK without problems other than those to be expected of un-weighted geometry. This will all need to be done again as soon a possible to meet our end of February target to have the character fully done.

Further development of the level

This week we have been split between character work, asset modelling and texture creation. We have also spent time to begin to light the level roughly to get a feel for how the environment should look later on.

the foyer

The Bar

Dramatic lighting on the house

The Garden hedges

The Statue and fountain

Dining hall

Multiplayer Working

What should be our last milestone in terms of game mechanics, we have multiplayer working on a fully packaged, installed version of the game. This is between two players, myself and Will, set up on a LAN connection through our router.

There are some problems between the host commands and our own local commands, which result in only the host being able to do certain things such as run. (This video is from the perspective of the Host). While Will's character would jitter on his screen when told to run, and to me just look as though he is walking.

Character in Game

Maxwell Winters is now fully rigged, and working in game. We ran into some scaling problems at first but is now sorted.

The guard

Only hair is left to be modelled on this character

further progress on the level

This week has been largely based around asset production.

UDK Normal Map Research

When importing Normal Maps into UDK, and even between programs such as 3Ds Max, Softimage XSI, and even Mental Ray Render Engine, we found that they all act differently. To solve these problems, I needed to conduct some research to finally figure out what needs to be done to Normal Maps for each program, especially between Maya 2012 and UDK Sept 2011. This research will be submitted as a separate research document with the main body of work for the game demo at the end.

The two images above show what happens in UDK when a Normal Map is simply applied to a static mesh once the channels have been flipped in Photoshop to turn them the correct way around. The quality, as you can clearly see, has much to be desired, and also clearly shows the texture seam which appears seamless in Maya. This was in fact an old problem we had during the creation of the 'Sun City' game demo last year.

These images show the Normal Maps after they have been correctly imported into UDK, and we can now see that it is of a much higher quality, with no visible texture seam; just as it should be.

Ornament Statue

Another small asset created for the game is this small statue. Much like the garden statue, however this time I started from a base-mesh in Maya as I would normally with characters because this seemed to give better results and Normal Maps in the end instead of having to project the ZBrush topology to the new low-res mesh as before, resulting in quality loss.

The result was an Adaptive Normal Map, creating much more accurate seams and data overall. Hopefully this will appear sharper in game as a result.

Assets

We have started creating low poly assets for the garden
and testing them in the engine

The level so far...

We have been hard at work beginning to populate the world with our assets. We are concentrating on the main functionality of the level at the moment and as such have been working on the basis of the building and garden.

An overview of the level so far

The boat jetty

Outdoor staircases

The 'angel' fountain

The entrance hall

The concept we are working from was created by Artur back in the early stages of design.

Guest characters inside the house

The beginnings of the grand hall

We have also been working on many more meshes that will be added to the level once the basics are in.

Guard progression

I have begun to model our 'enemy' character, the guard. He is designed in the style of a well known French actor Vincent Cassel. Their uniforms are based on research into Monaco guards and French police uniforms.

Finished boat

The boat is now finished and uv unwrapped ready for texturing and implementation