levels.

Below is the two initial ideas for the jungle level that i thought up before i looked at other games for reference.


Below are the rough sketches i did for the levels. I used the moodboards as reference for the kind of layout and building types and objects that i wanted within the levels. It took some time as on the jungle i had done a few varients with to much going on so i looked at other games level design to see how they balance the multiplayer maps and what amount of objects they put in the maps and the location and amount of hiding places, vantage points and flanking positions put in. The levels are as follows; Yukon, Wild west, Urban suburbia, Farm yard and last is Bananaland (Jungle).

weight painting!

The other thing i did for the crew project i just realised was to weight paint the map for the instructions booklet to a simple skeleton so it could be folded neatly for the character to unwrap.
This didnt take to long as im fairly familiar with weight painting. The map can be easily folded and opened as shown below using the joints themselves. See below.

ik_fk_fail

For the arms...well dont get me started on how annoying this turned out to be, the reason why i didnt blog for so long on this was the sheer amount of problems i was having with my rig while working on the arm ik and fk joints, i think i spent about 2 weeks trying to get the arms working properly and i still think i have a few problems maybe. I originally got one arm working but it wasn't freezed properly and the pole vector wasnt in the exact right place i ended up with the problem below, this took a lot of trial and error to fix. I first tried lining it up and constraining the pole vector to the elbow but this didn't work at all. I then tried to point constrain the pole vector to the shoulder and to the wrist and then aim constrain it to the elbow so that it would be positioned equally but this only seemed to work for one arm and not the other. I ended up fixing it by using a rivet script to line the pole vector up into the right position. And i also used the comet snap tool to make sure everything was lined up this particulary became helpful with the manipulators. I went through more trial and error at this stage than i can remember but what i learnt from this is that you need to do everything in very much a specific order when rigging and remember to freeze things where appropriate and make sure the right constraints are used for the right joints and manipulators ect.

The playblast below shows the ik_fk blend working.

knees and toes!

In this week i had concentrated on working on the reverse foot of the rig, this felt a fairly simple task but constraining appeared to be the bain of my life for this week as finding the right constraints to attach the reverse foot to turned out to be a nightmare. Here is a short playblast showing my reverse foot working using a footmanipulator with set driven keys to control the joints.

snap flag flap

here is just one of the 3 uv snapshots i did for the 3 different tents, was all straight forward once i got the hang of it all. The next task adam got me to do was to animate 2 flag shots of his for 2 different scenes. The first shot i had to get the fag to look like it was being pulled out the ground and then pulled down at a angle from a up shot angle. This seemed easy enough but i wasn't experienced at all in ncloth apart from making the previous flags blow in the wind. I animated the path it needed to go and fiddled around with the wind nucleus properties till it looked nice. Below is the resulting short animation shot.

Next shot was a flag being slowly waved back an forth in a crowd which seemed easy to but again i had difficulties with the wind nucleus properties and i tried many different ways to get the flag to go round in a figure of 8 smoothly. I first tried using a motion path for the flag pole but this didnt work resulting in eratic movement and the flag tangling round the pole. I then tried to simplify the path and i got it keyframed so that it rotated round in a circle but this was to slow an the flag kept on catching when i tried doing it this way. I ended up whipping the flag over to one side and around and down and up over to the other side and this sort of seemed to work.

See below for an example of a fail.

Below is the one that was to fast.

Below is the one that finally went round.

pitch project level design

Later this week we sat down again and drew up which of the characters we decided we wanted to use and came up with some new characters from which we all gave input into what they would look like, act like, weapons and clothes and acessories and their backgrounds which was a lot of fun doing. Then we decided on what each person was going to do. I was left in charge of developing the maps. For this i made some mood boards of the kind of environments in each level. See below for mood boards.

The moodboards below are for the following maps as follows; yukon, wild west, urban suburbia, bananaland(jungle) and farm yard.

Pitch Switch!

Since i was so uncertain about my own idea i decided to work on a project with tom about an adult animation called bandits which featured a bunch of crazy racoons and there crazy antics. I was something similar to mine but i felt it had more scope than mine for humour so i offered to work on this with him i did a image board for a crazy ganster stoner hiphop racoon called terry baised on what came up under those kind of searches. see below.


Though when we sat down for a team meeting with everyone else who was getting involved, Me, Tom Dowler, Emma Taylor, Simon Acty and Matt Luxton we decided that a better idea as we were considering developing this pitch through to next year would be to make a shoot em up adventure style game using different animals in a fun yet slightly adult humourous way. We each decided that we would rough out 2 characters each and think about different abilities for each and there strengths and weaknesses and a backstory for each. These are the 2 character that i came up with through moodboards. The eager beaver and the dosy otter.

The dosy otter was going to be a chilled out chap who just likes to mong out eat fish and ride the rapid river waves and have a few beers. He would be very fast in water but slow out of water.

The eager beaver loves water too and loves to eat wood and fashion them into tools his favourate thing is to be building thing especially dam forts.

Negotiated brief!!!

For my negotiated brief i decided i wanted to make a rig that could be used for a animated walk. I had previously made 3 simple rigs for my fish on the chew tv project in the first year and i had modelled and made a skeleton for a penguin in my spare time and also weight painted this. Other than this i hadn't really done any rigging. I decided in order to maximise time spent on the rig i would make the model very basic out of shapes and i would only bind the geometry to the skeleton just to show the movement of the rig. I got stuck straight into making the skeleton and this screenshot below is what it looked like in the first week i was working on it.

After making the skeleton the first aspect of rigging that i undertook on the man was the ik_joints in the legs, this was fairly straight forward but i had to make sure that i had attached everything in the right order, this was something that i soon had to make myself familier with throughout the rigging process. I then started to work on the basic foot setup and this is a short clip i keyframedof the first few steps of my character.

pitch project

For the pitch project i was originally going to do an idea called a day in the life. Which would feature a surf crew going about their daily antics involving there preperations for epic surf sessions, ensuing antics during the sessions and banter that other surfers and people can relate to when out in the water surfing with other people and the tightness of the lineup sometimes. The main characters would have all the flair of crazy surf bums and their undecipherable lingo. I didnt really know were to take it other than this and i couldnt really form a story that i was happy to work with that would go much further than this and i also wasnt sure if it would apeal to anyone other than other surfers. There would be surfing, lots of ridiculous surf lingo used, crazy nightly randon antics like cat in the bag, fireworks and dodgy bbq's, wheelbarrow pool, fancy dress. In the surf there would be tandum surfing, wave ettiquete attitudes, amazing wipeouts, riticulously cold surfing conditions that they contend with and mudfights on flat days, river skimboarding antics, tandum downhill skateboarding and lilo golfcoarse riding on the snowy days. These were a few of the different ideas i had but this didnt go much further than this i may take this idea further at another time but for now this is one of those ideas that hasnt made the cut for me which is a shame as i do like it. I just dont think there is enough to it. I did however have an image board to sum up some of the kind of characters and antics i was going for.


And below are a few sketches i did for 3 of the characters Big A, big Rich and wizard. They were just to get the feel for my crazy characters so they are not particulary well done.