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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:

Women in Games?

I recently had the pleasure of attending a talk by David Smith, founder of Women in Games Jobs, a not-for-profit company which describes itself as working to "recruit, retain and support the progression of women in the games industry by positively and actively promoting female role models and giving encouragement and information to those women seeking to work in games".

Ignoring the incongruity of a man establishing an organisation for the promotion of women, David made some interesting points.

According to David, of the 9,000 highly skilled workers supported by the Games Industry in the UK, only 1 in 15 is female; a staggering ratio, even for an industry that has traditionally been associated with young males.

 

But is this association valid? According to a report by the Entertainment Software Association in 2008, the ratio between male and female ‘gamers’ is around 40:60, with almost half of players between the ages of 18 and 49, and the average age of gamers 35 years old. Although this was a survey conducted in the US, it is logical to expect similar results in the UK. While this ratio is not consistent across all game genres (web and phone based games feature the highest proportion of female players) overall it is impossible to ignore the fact that women are a sizeable majority of gamers.

So how do we account for this discrepancy? According to David Smith, the history of video games has been that of ‘boys making games for boys’. If we look at who ‘blockbuster’ games are aimed at, this certainly seems true. The almost universally poor portrayal of female characters in games shows exactly who developers assume their biggest market is: sexually frustrated male teenagers. 

Game director Hideki Kamiya claimed that the core theme of the game Bayonetta was intended to be ‘sexiness’.

However, the statistics show this is quite clearly not the case: games are not just the pursuit of young men. In catering only for an elusive, stereotypical market developers will ultimately fail to find their audience; they risk alienating the very people whose business they need to continue. In such a hit-driven industry, where companies fail regularly, developers cannot afford such a mistake. Commercially it makes little sense, so why is such unchecked sexism especially prevalent in the medium of video games?

The character Samara from Mass Effect 2 must get cold while walking about in space.

The most obvious answer is that with so few women involved in creating games, the patriarchal attitudes and male sexual fetishes we see are left unchecked. Without the voice of women (or even non-straight males), is it really surprising that female characters are primarily used as window dressing? Something pretty to drape around the DVD case. 
 

It is also worth highlighting that minority groups have a worryingly small presence in the games industry. As David Smith noted, around 3% of those working in the industry in the UK are members of an ethnic minority. So perhaps a more accurate analysis of the history of games is that of ‘white boys making games for other white boys’.

Certainly the ingrained sexism seen in the artistic direction of video games must be challenged, from all sides, but primarily from within the industry itself. I believe video games have the potential to become the medium of our generation, but for this to happen we must see a radical shift in the people who make them. We must see more women and members of minority groups making the creative decisions in games companies, in order for the medium to adapt and ultimately to survive.

2d Walk cycle

Informed by the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge (below) I have made my very own homemade 2D walk cycle.

First of we have the steps planned out. I've chosen to use four 'frames' over the course of 1 second.

If I animate this walking past it looks pretty legit. Obviously there's only one foot, but it does look like it's walking.

For the purposes of video game animation, I will be animating the walk cycles on the spot - Moom will not move around forwards in Maya. So first let's show this in my 2D animation:

Yep, definitely looks like a single leg on a treadmill. If I add in a second leg behind the first (greyed out to distinguish it) I have the whole set.

Just to check this still looks right when moving, I've moved the legs forward each time:

Well this looks pretty good to me. now I know where the feet will be at every quarter of a second I can transpose that into Maya and hopefully let the computer fill in the majority of the movement for me.

A Different Kind of Animation

I thought I'd throw this into the blog, since it counts as 'animtion'. I fancied having a go at redesigning the ident I made for Jack Brindelli's Youtube channel.

Original:

I made this one about over a year ago using Flash. Although I was happy with it at the time, I felt I could do a better version now.

New (WIP): 

 

Using After Effects instead of Flash means I can go crazy with the blur. Gotta love some of that blur. In seriousness though, it does make fade transitions more convincing.

I'm going to go back over this later on and probably change the timing so it syncs up with the audio better.

Walk cycle - First Attempt.

Using the 'Moom' character rig (http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/moom-v4-0-3-by-ramtin). This cycle is 40 (39) frames long.

To be frank, this is pretty rubbish, but that's to be expected considering it's my first attempt animating a 3D character. I think I have the basics of how to actually move the rig about sorted in my head now, the trouble I've been having has been knowing which parts to move, and how.

For instance, in this cycle the legs raise far higher than they should do while moving forwards. I tried to emulate the secondary motion (movement of the head/hips/etc) but this has come out rather exaggerated. In my future attempts I need to be more subtle.

I'm going to reduce the cycle down in  4 frames, and draw them out in 2 dimensions first, then take that into Maya.

Bouncing Ball II: Bounce Harder

So the next step is to make this cheeky little ball bounce forwards as well as up and down (this is the part where it gets complicated).

I improved on the earlier ball animation in a number of ways: the ball actually rotates as it falls, and the point from which the squash and stretch occurs rotates with the ball. There is also I more subtle amount of squash and stretch. Maya can loop the animation with values offset, meaning the up/down motion is repeated while the ball moves forwards continually. I couldn't find a way of reducing the height of each bounce each time without changing the keyframes manually, so in this animation the balls heighest point remains consistent. Also (although barely noticeable) the rotation is not offset with each repetition, meaning the ball rotates back to its original value directly after each bounce. But I only noticed that after I exported this lovely .avi.

Bouncing Ball - Part 1

So the first thing you're going to be doing in any process of animation is making a ball bounce (I certainly did it in 2D years ago). I present: my first attempt at making things move about in Maya.

At the time I recorded this I had no idea how to export video in Maya, hence the cameraphone video.

There's probably a bit too much squashing going on here (although that depends on what type of ball this is I suppose!).

Life Drawing - 16/01/13