Month: October 2017

 

I reworked my project so it was closer to the beginning where the mice began hoarding all of the food from the village, so there’s still a ton in the village but also a ton in the mice hideout.

Area where the mice started taking the food; there are multiple animation scenes in here!

Firefly and fog particle systems that I made.

Cute bridge scene (also fog and fireflies here, just not visible in this screenshot).

Tower entrance.

Marketplace scene.

The house you can go into and explore!

House interior. 

Another mouse scene within the village.

Village shot.

I reworked my mouse animations so that they’re longer. I want to make one or two more in addition to the ones I have though, probably mice interacting with food. I also am going to make one more house version with an animated door; this will be the house that Max can actually go into (assuming I can get the camera to be friendlier with odd angles instead of clipping into the ground).

{I’ll upload the animation videos on here later once they’re all grouped together.}

The biggest thing I did this weekend was getting my Max rig to work. I definitely need to go back and tweak some of the animations, since it seems like they all got cut slightly in Unity. I might add one or two loops to each of the baked animations so that it has less of a chance of getting cut off. (You can see what I’m talking about with the animations clipping in the build I posted earlier this morning.) If anyone wants the rig, I’ll happily share it, but I do have to note that you can only animate it in 3DS Max (can’t figure out how to transfer it to Maya), which might not be too friendly for most people in this class since we haven’t worked with 3DS Max.

Otherwise, I made some more progress making clutter and some stone wall pieces to surround the town, as well as a picket fence to border most of the rest of the level.

What I have to do for Thursday is make a few more clutter pieces, mostly food items, implement the rest of my animations, fix Max up a bit, make audio and particles, and finish placing everything! Exciting exciting.

Here are 3 of the 4 animations, I’m working on a walk cycle for the last one but it’s not done yet, I’ll upload it later today when it’s done.

Here’s an impatient mouse that gets surprised when you draw close enough

Here’s an elderly mouse who yells at you to get off his lawn

Here’s Max sleeping, he snuffles and stretches when you get close :3

Jump

Run

Taunt

Taunt2

So, i’ve fallen a bit behind because of my attempts to texture the level with substance painter. But that’s done! Planning on doing animations this weekend along with the other assignment, but I’m happy with how the objects turned out.

 

if anyone was curious substance painter makes textures using node-based coding to create maps for color, height, normal, roughness, and metallic.

I also want to figure out how to export a baked emissive map

Walk cycle

idle 1- mainly for 3rd person mouse

idle 2- could be for main mouse or npc

I still have more animations to do: interaction with weapon and objects.

I animated a maid who is cleaning the thrones. She will jump and run away when she sees the player.

(Unfortunately, I couldn’t upload the videos because they were too big for this site.)

This mouse is hiding and will come out when the player approaches.

I also want to animate a swinging chandelier that they player can use in the level.

For the animations I used the stock mouse rig. To record I used the playblast feature in Maya.

The first NPC animations are for the mousehole I made. When the main character approaches, the mouse comes out to join you.

The second interaction I made was with the cheese wedge I made. There isn’t a smooth transition between these ones; one is just an idle, and the other is an action for running away with part of the cheese.

The last NPC animation set I made was for a mouse chilling in a goblet. He is too lazy to aid you and just waves.

My main character is going to be in third-person, so I made idle and walking animations for them.

{EDIT: Oh god so I was so stressed this week that I completely spaced on the fact that it was supposed to be 10 – 30 seconds and not 10 – 30 frames (even though that’s short as heck and doesn’t make sense), so my animations are not even close to complete and I did everything wrong this week 🙂 }

So I ran into problems galore this week; nothing too terrible, but definitely all setbacks. Actually, the only thing I didn’t run into major problems with were the animations. I made the three “scene” animations and have them split up in my timeline as the three idle animations, then the three response animations (I can set this up differently if need be). The way they’re supposed to be paired is first idle goes with first response, but honestly the poses for my idles are all pretty similar so it would be easy to tweak any of them together.

Then there’s my rig (which I focused on instead of the third-person walk cycle since this is what I want my walk cycle to be on). Setting up the skeleton went pretty well, but I’ve been running into a lot of problems with the skinning process. The base/default skin is really sloppy looking, and when i edit envelopes I can fix a decent amount, but there’s still more distortion than I’d like throughout. I was going to have Farley help me with it on Friday so that I can hopefully have the rig up and accessible by Saturday or so, since the rest of the process after skinning is just adding handles and making sure you can’t directly mess with the bones (easy stuff).

Then I couldn’t get the build to work since my computer convinced itself that I didn’t have the ability to make a WebGL build despite the fact that I downloaded it (I might not have done one important step though? I really don’t know. I have no idea what it wanted me to do), so I’m going to try building my level in the labs after class, because it will definitely take a while (one word, trees) and probably have the computer make scary jet plane noises.

Not as good, but here are screenshots of the progress. I threw out the fog altogether because I couldn’t get that to cooperate, so I switched to nighttime and am way happier! The town is way farther along now, and I’ve started trying to flesh out the other areas a bit too. I still need to add a ton of clutter elements, and also need to make some wall/ fence pieces to border the playable parts of the level more. I’m also going to see if there are any trees that I can get rid of to save some resources.