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Reflective Journal - BA3

Making a rudimentary level in Maya.

I decided to base the work in this project on the actual architecture of NUA itself. Many of the buildings are old and date back several hundred years, with modern renovations creating an interesting juxtaposition – metal and plate glass against non-uniform brick, ect. Also many of the shapes are relatively simple from a 3d point of view, and I’m not yet experienced in modelling.

I collected a bunch of reference photography of some of NUA’s buildings.

I decided to create an original environment comprising various parts of the NUA buildings cobbled together, with the tunnel under the bar as the central focus. I made a rudimentary Maya model, using a figure exported from Mudbox (.obj) as reference for an average human’s height.

I quickly decided this would be too complex an environment for my first proper go on Maya, and so chose to focus on a smaller element to practise on. The main entrance to one of the buildings caught my eye, as it’s sandstone blocks would be easy to replicate as a repeating texture. The blockiness of the entranceway felt like the perfect structure to practise my 3d modelling on.

Again I constructed a simple maya model to get to grips with the shape, and how I could construct it digitally.

I placed a reference photograph on a flat plane in Maya to use a template in getting the right proportions. The orthographic view from the front has no perspective, so it’s important to use that angle. For lack of a human body model (I don’t have Mudbox on my laptop) I used this orange cuboid and scaled it to the average height of the figures in the photo. The figure guide and reference photograph are put onto separate layers to the actual entrance work, so I can get rid of or hide them later on.

I did try to keep the structure relatively simple and blocky, so as to keep unwrapping the UVs simple.

Planar mapping is particularly useful while unwrapping, as it can be used to join several adjacent faces together early on in the texture editor.

The checkerboard texture is used to make sure the scale and orientation of the UVs is correct across the model. Once the model is properly textured, it should look something like this:

However, applying a placeholder texture to the entrance shows that some UVs do not reflect a consistent size across the whole model. This could be fixed at a later stage via subdividing large faces.

The metal railings can be made using a single face which is semi-transparent. I used a photograph of the bars and erased the background to get the required ‘diffuse’ (colour) map.

I saved the bar diffuse map as a PNG, which when imported in Maya grants the required selectively transparent effect. I could do something similar using and independent alpha channel map.

The stairs only really need a grey stoney texture, sourced easily enough off the web.

I used the program Crazy Bump to make a rudimentary bump map to give the stone a bit of depth to it.

As it turns out, UDK doesn’t like already compressed image files(something to do with recompressing them in the import process) so I’ve had to resave the texture files as TGA or BMPs. This had the added complication of meaning that I had to add an alpha channel to the metal bars, as opposed to simply using a PNG. Applying an alpha channel is actually rather simple, and can be done quickly in photoshop.

Changing the texture filetypes succeeded in allowing me to export the model of the entrance with the textures attached. This speeds up the import process in UDK, as I would otherwise have to import and place the textures separately in UDK. A successful UDK import does this automatically for me, however.

Here is a test of the entrance as it appears in UDK:

A minor issue I have encountered is that the glass door texture appears on the wrong side of its face. This is only observable in UDK, as Maya shows textures from behind the side of the face they are mapped to. The easiest way to fix this in Maya is to spin the face 180 degrees.

Added wall behind entrance and ground to the environment.

The model looks pretty good in UDK, but again some of the textures are projected on the wrong side of their faces. This will need correcting in UDK.

Changing the side on which the textures are projected is done by inverting the normals of the faces.

The ground texture is made from my own photograph of the paving at NUA tiled together, with a grungey texture sourced online to add asymmetry.

I applied an ambient occlusion map to the brick wall, importing it into the diffuse map in photoshop and choosing the multiply blend mode.

Contextual Studies Research - BA3

Ken Levine (Creative Director of Bioshock/Infinite) talks about the political inspirations for Bioshock, characterisation of Andrew Ryan (main antagonist) and storytelling in games in general. Brilliant quote: “Cutscenes are a coward's way out.” Levine talks about the trope of the ‘unreliable narrator’. When applied to games it means subverting environment design to account for player character’s subjectivity. A very obvious example if this is given towards the end of Bioshock II, where we see the game world through the eyes of a little sister. Although gameplay-light, this is my favourite and most memorable part of the game.

http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/Andrew_Ryan

 

I argue that Andrew Ryan is a direct reference to Aryn Rand – similar names, background (both born in Russia during socialist revolution and emigrated the US). There are other references throughout Bioshock to Atlast Shrugged, Rand’s infamous book: Ryan burns down a forest he owns when forced to nationalise it, in a similar way to the character Ellis Wyatt burning an oil field in Atlas Shrugged. The ‘captains of industry’ that Rand portrays as being pivotal to the continuation of society strike and retreat to a hidden Atlantis-like city, an idea that Bioshock takes to its natural conclusion.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/criticalintel/10133-Corvo-Is-Not-An-Honorable-Man

Robert Rath of the Escapist looks at Dishonored through the lens of C18/C19 English honour culture. His observations lend context to the actions of the characters in the game, suggesting research into traditional conservative idealogy was done while making the game.

http://www.shacknews.com/article/48728/ken-levine-on-bioshock-the

The juxtaposition of the two religions in Dishonored takes multiple inspirations from existing sources, and helps to make a believably functions society come alive. The Abbey of the Everyman is intertwined with the governance and law enforcement of the Empire. The very naming of the religion alludes the historical role of religion as a means of controlling the working class. However, while the Abbey is the official religious institution of the Empire the majority of the population (particularly the working classes) worship the Outsider, a trickster god that appears to the player character and grants him his magical abilities. This relationship of an official religion imposed by the ruling class versus an official but more broadly believed one, with religious persecution reminds me of the relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism during the Reformation.

The Outsider, however is an unconventional deity in the Judeo-Christian sense, but seems much more familiar through the lens of Scandinavian mythology. He does not seem to crave worship, and is not portrayed as omni-benevolent. One collectible source within the game (a book called ‘Spirit of the Deep) alludes to the idea that the Outsider is one of the whales (or leviathans) and appears in human form to converse with other humans.

http://dishonored.wikia.com/wiki/Spirit_of_the_Deep

In striking opposition to the Abbey, worshippers of the Outsider do not have an organised structure, or community. This may be simply down to the threat of persecution by the Abbey.- the Abbey was formed after a mass killing of Outsider worshipers (the ‘Litany on the White Cliff’).Especially odd is that the Abbey does not have a designated deity. The core scripture (‘the Seven Sacrements’) dencourages self-discipline.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY6bpf3Oy30

The actor who played Vaas in Far Cry 3 (Michael Mando) talking about the motion-capture performance process

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTL9kzcUuvA

Another interview, Mado talks about how his performance influenced the design of the story and how the character of Vaas was created for him.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/9276-Context-Challenge-and-Gratification

Ben ‘Yatzhee’ Croshaw talks about his theory of a 3 ingredient recipe for game-design: context, challenge and gratification.

Run Cycle all Animated

I made sure the body is leaning forwards to suggest momentum, and added secondary animation in the bobbing of the head. Lifting the whole body away from the ground when the feet are apart turned out to be important - when running a person 'jumps' forwards between each step.

I could add in more rotation to the body as the feet reach forwards and backwards, at the moment the body is a bit stiff.

My own Run Analysised

Now we come to the 'run cycle', the second of the three animation cycles I will be making using Moom. I've already recorded my own run using the same technique I used for my walk.

I marked points at similar intervals to the walk - 4 frames per cycle. Each cycle will need to be faster than the walk for obvious reasons.

Extracting these points as still images has proved more tricky than with the walk. This is probably because the run is faster and the feet are both off the ground at two points in the cycle. I've made a gif to check my reference frames are accurate. It pops slightly at the end but I do still think it will give me a good enough reference to begin animating from. At any rate, I'd quite like to have a crack at it and see what happens! There are 8 frames in this, I found I needed to add in 4 more frames between the first 4 to capture the motion of my legs moving.

Walk Cycle Complete!

Well I say complete, but animation is probably all about the minor tweaks/details!

I'm pretty happy with this, I think the hardest part of animation is acquiring an understanding of how the body moves. Walking is an action we do not have to consciously think about as we do it, but as we de-construct the many smaller movements that make up a walk we begin to see how complicated it is. I'm glad I started by analysing my own walk, I feel that I understand the mechanics of the process of walking better now.

Along with the obvious movement of the legs and arms, I added a 'bobbing' of the upper body (drawn from my frame-by-frame analysis). As the feet are farther apart, the legs are less perpendicular to the ground, causing the distance between the waist and ground to decrease at points 3 and 4. I also added a slight bobbing of the head to suggest that the momentum of each step travels up the body. This is an example of 'secondary animation' emphasising primary animation.

If I were to add to or remake this walk cycle, I would add in secondary movement to the wrists and fingers as the arms swing back and forth, and perhaps record myself walking from the front, to greater capture the angle of my feet. I suspect in this animation the feet face forwards more than is realistic - people's feet normal bow out the side, away from their torso slightly.

Analysing my own Walk

The most obvious thing to do to help me with creating a walk cycle is to record my own walk as reference.

Isolated out, confined to move on the spot and turned into a gif, and we have this:

I'll be using these images as a guide when I animate Moom: