Leaving hands behind, starting making props.

With the hands finished I started helping out making props. You can really feel the end of the project coming fast, everybody is working hard to finish things and to make the game be as good as possible. We are trying to produce as many props as we can to decorate the levels with.

I’ve made a number of props this week, to mention a few: a lamp post, a shrine, a lock for a door, crystals.

I think it is really fun to make props. It can be a bit tricky at times, making sure to have the lowest possible triscount and still make a good looking prop.

Texturing the hands

Texturing the hands took some time.

We had previously decided the colors for the hands and the gloves but not for the device.  The device is something that Vale finds there so the colors of it needed to be consistent with the environment that uses warm earthy colors. It is meant to be made of metal, which is used a lot in the level. I looked at the other metal textures to have a reference to how it should look.

The environment uses a lot of brown, red and yellow and Vale’s colors are meant to contrast that with shades of green and blue.

When designing her gloves I had in mind that she is an adventurer and that she climbs a lot, so I researched how climbing cloves looked and used that as inspiration. When texturing I went back to those photos to see how they have been worn and dirtied.

 

 

 

Animations and UV mapping

This week I’ve been working hard on animations. I felt a lot more focused and productive this week compared to last week. With no problems slowing the workflow I got a lot done.

I had talked to my team mates previously about how they imagined the animations should look like  so that I had some reference to work after. We had established early on that the character would never physically touch anything with her hands so that making the animations would be easier and go faster.

The device that Vale picks up works like a gravity gun. With it on her hand Vale can lift up robots and throw them together, making  new robots. She also uses the device to push buttons, pull levers and break robot fusions.

I haven’t really animated much before and it was kind of difficult making the animations with just arms and not a whole body as a model. There was a lot to think about when I animated I went back and forth between Motionbuilder and Unity a lot. With every animation I had to make sure the arms moved inside the frame of the camera, that they wasn’t too close or far away, too high or too low and making sure I didn’t spend a lot of time on moves that didn’t show in front of the camera.

I finished all of the animations this week and now I have to wait and see how they look implemented in the game. I’m sure I’m gonna have too make some changes and tweak somethings.

I also did the UV map for the hands and device this week.

Too save space I put everything that would look the same over each other on the map. For example, the arms are going to have the same texture so I made sure that the seams on both arms where identical and placed the different pieces over each other. When I relaxed every piece they did not look identical with the one that the would lay over so I used the grid snapping tool too snap each vertex  to the exact position.

With this I saved a lot of space, especially considering how much space the arms and hands take up.

I made a test texture to see how it looks on the model but also to make it easier to remember which piece is which when I start texturing it next week.

Hands everywhere

So these past weeks I’ve been working on the hands, that is: the mesh, the rig, and the animations.

The design of the hands and the device was finalized early the second week of work.

 

Making the mesh for the hands went pretty smoothly. I worried that I couldn’t make the hands look good and function well with a limited triscount but when I was satisfied with how they looked the tris count wasn’t really that high so I worried over nothing.

The device was more difficult to make then I anticipated. My sketch of it was pretty inaccurate and the front view and side view drawing didn’t match. When I used them as reference I ended up having to change a lot in order for it to be placed believably around the hand.

I jumped back and forth between 3ds Max and Motionbuilder a lot at this point to make sure that the device wasn’t cutting into wrist while bending it up and down.

The total triscount of both the arms is 2912. With the device it’s 4540.

 

Rigging and skinning the hands, that took time. I do not know how many times I’ve skinned those hands. There where many times where something on the rig was wrong or having to make adjustments to the skinning.

 

I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to put animations into Unity. Once I thought I had it figured out but then the next time I tried it did not work.

But now it is all working nicely and I’ve been working on a base for all the animations and I feel like I really can start animating the hands now.

 

 

Week 1 of Big Game.

So Big Game project has finally started, in which we are to make a game in 10 weeks.

This first week was pretty event free. We spent a lot of time talking and discussing. Originally we were going to make a game with third person view, but we were thinking of changing it to first person to minimize the work needed for the main character. After some time we decided to make the game in first person view. We started assigning tasks and I’ll be in charge of making the model and rig for the main character.

I feel fairly confident in my abilities to make a good hands. My only experience in 3D is what we have gone through in earlier courses. I spent some time this week researching hand topology to make sure I make a good hand from the start.

The main character, Vale, picks up a device which she uses to lift up and fuse robots. In the game world the device was designed to sit on machines and used to move robots. When Vale picks it up she makes it fit on her hand.

So designing the device was a bit tricky since it had to fit on a human hand but not look designed to do it.

The first designs that I made where a bit too glove looking. At this stage we hadn’t really discussed how the glove worked, for example, what powered it and how it was used in the game world.

 

So I spent most of my week drawing designs and researching how to rig hands for first person view games.