Projects Class Post-mortem: My work on ERIE this semester

Since I have done so much this semester :), in order to have some sort of coherency in this paper, I am going to organize my thoughts by when they happened.  From the beginning of the project I had volunteered to do the rigging and animation for everything in the game, and from right off the bat I ended up doing much more.  In the beginning I created a bat.  In order to bring life to the (literally) dead world, I decided to make some non-player characters.  Last semester I grabbed the reigns and figured out how to get a rat modeled, textured, rigged and animated and working inside of unreal.  This semester I made the rat's cousin.  The bat added a new challenge- the wings.  in order to make the wings foldable and movable without having clipping problems the skinning has to be exactly the same on the front and back of the wing.  To do this, the vertices of the wings needed to match up in the front and back, and then when the weight is assigned to the vertex to the corresponding bone, the front and back vertices need to have the exact same weight value.  When I first learned how to skin meshes to bones, I used the paint skin weights tool, which is an interactive painting tool on the mesh that is a grayscale where white is one and black is 0 influence.  That works great for most things, and is an easy way to see where the skin will deform, but in order to get exact numbers I had to learn a new way to weight.  That tool is the component editor.  In that editor, when you choose the vertices, it populates a spreadsheet with the vertex numbers on the left side, and across the top are what bones are influencing those vertices, and what float value they have.  In this way I quickly could see what value the vertex had, and make sure the corresponding vertex on the back side was exactly the same.  That way, no matter how far you bend the wing, the two layers of geometry wont overlap, causing the common 3d flaw of clipping.  The next thing I learned with the bat was about creating normal maps.  The texture on a 3d model is assigned to the surface by way of UV layouts.  The uv's correspond to the vertices, but in the UV layout editor, you can flatten by way of cutting up the model until it is all in one square area.  You can then use photoshop or another similar program to create textures.  They way I like to think of it is like a bearskin rug.  You take a bear you cut it up, and lay it flat.  That is great for making the color texture, but there are many other maps that a 3d model can have in order to give it a more dynamic look.  One of the most important is the normal map.  That map is one that takes a violet color scale to artificially create bump texture, and is much more effective than a grayscale bump map.  The problem with it is you either can make them by creating a high poly version sculpted out the way you want it to look, and then baking it out to project onto the low poly version, or you can use a program like Crazy Bump to take the color texture you made in photoshop, and it will create a bump normal map for you, as well as specular, occlusion, and a few other maps.  When I learned this process, I also went back to the rat model, and fixed a few problems it had with the seams, then I made a brown and black version of the rat texture, and used crazy bump to make a normal map for the rat.  Here are some pictures of the rat and bat to illustrate this concept..

 Bat Animations: Hang to flap, flapping loop, flap to land

Integreation: skeletal mesh, anim set, animtree.

Matinee

Next, since it sounded so much like rat and bat, I decided to go with the cat.  For this one, I wanted to learn how to use mudbox to make the texture and normal map.  For this I created a base low poly mesh for the cat, and then exported it to mudbox, where many subdivisions are added to the mesh, allowing for almost literal sculpting like you would do with clay.  Once that process is done, you can bake out a projection of these folds and bumps onto a low poly mesh as a normal map.  Here is a video and pictures of the process of modeling and texturing the cat.

Integreation: Because of the time constraint to get the main character in, once Ryan finished with that mesh, I had to stop the cat there until I was finished with the higher priority task of rigging skinning and animating the main character which we had decided to fully animate and be able to see through a first person view at any time.  After I was done with that  the monster became another priority, so the cat never received a rig, but it ended up having an unusual but entertaining part of the game.  We made the dead cat with its awful dying sound a hidden pickup collect-able, for which I was responsible for integrating, but I will go into that more when I get to Unreal Kismet, and how I stumbled into that.

Isaac/Clarke/Oliver

Clarke is the pet name I gave to the main character when we were in transition between 1940s German setting to 1960's Michigan.  I worked with Ryan to ensure proper deformations for animation were on the mesh he created, and when the file was finally passed on to me I had to build a complete rig from the ground up.  After laying out the bones, I created controllers to be used to keyframe on for the animation.  I also used the connection editor to transfer custom channel controls to those controllers such as IK switching, and Custom Channels, with Set Driven Keys.  when you create a controller, you can add attributes with a min and max value.  Through the set driven key editor, you select what you want as the driver, in the case of a rig, the controller's custom attribute, and the driven, which in the case of animation, I used the rotation attribute on the bones of say a finger.  Then you set a key at 0, then move the attribute in the channel box to -10 and move the bones in the finger into a curl, and set another key, and with 10 move the finger outstretched and up as far as it should go, and set another key.   Once you do this, the custom attribute can be used as a slider, when you slide it you will see the model moving from a curl to extended and everywhere inbetween.  In this way I created custom controls for foot ball, toe heel and ankle rotation, toe lift, individual finger curls, fist curl, thumb rotations and curl, Jaw grind, mouth open, and a few others.  I also created IK/FK functionality for the arms and legs.  IK standing for inverse kinematics allows you to grab the ankle and the rest of the leg will move with it.  FK for Forward Kinematics allows you to rotate a joint and the children of that joint will follow exactly relative to the parent joint.  Both are usefull to use, and blending between the two allows the most control for animation.  Using both methods I learned while painting the skin weights on the rat, I skinned Clarke until I was satisfied he could do all the animations I needed him to do for the game.  Then, I was off to animation.  For Clarke's animations we were not exactly sure how we were going to integrate him, so I ended up having to make 3 sets of animations for every action.  One with full body movement, one with his right arm hidden, so as to replace with a socketed arm(which didn't end up working) and another set with and without him holding a spray can.  The actions that I was able to get done were:  Idle, Idle Crouching, Turning in place, crouching turning in place, crawling, slide, jump, spraying, walking, running, opening door, closing door, and hitting a button.  Once I had all the animations, I had to hook them all up in the Animation Tree so they could blend together no matter which animation was called upon to play.  Here are some pictures and videos of all this stuff.

 

Fbx, Actor X,  weapon can problems and solutions, socket exploration,  Fixing crawling animation so the camera didn't go so far forward.  Camera sockets, Jamie integration demands and iteration for spray can.  Fixing star of david texture on arm band.  Re exporting the rig with no controls after animations were set.    Creating Materials, anim sets, anim trees: physics blending, blend nodes, slot nodes.  What I would do differently:  use slot nodes to make more dynamic movements, and possibly for controlling the arm better.  

Monster:

Coordinate with greg on rigging preferences.  Fix rig:

Rename all bones, and create an export friendly rig to animate and export with.  Change of plans with one weeks notice to add monster to game.  Create teaser trailer and temporary death cinematic:

Photoshop and monster composites, sound work, video editing.  


Figuring out integration of videos into UDK

Bink video, looping video projected on a virtual screen with camera fixed on it to fake video in unreal...Because of material changes the same cinematic was replaced later with an in game monster looping the same aimation with a camera fixed on it in a black room to fake the effect.: Idea from Arkham asylum deaths, per Chris.  

Animations:

Crawl, walk, butterfly stroke run, swing, pole flip, jump swing, hang to roar, hang banging, tear apart, roar, slash

Integreation:

Skeletal Mesh, Anim sets, animtree, slot nodes, blending.  Physics states for use with ai monster, cryo monster, and Matinee controlled monsters.

Matinee events:  triggered death events in beta, moving triggers, scare events with no death threat.

one in water crawl area, one in blocked off hallway, one with cat eating, one with monster coming at you, me and ryan figure out how to use matinee.  One with monster running accross bars.

Gold:  Original glass and pole scene to just glass smashing.  scare monster in one of the note matinees, two monster scares when walking down tunnels.  One with monter pounding on glass in lab, One with monters coming out of cargo crates: also trick with invisible beam barrier to hold back, setting path collide to false, while player collide to true.  

triggers,

Kismet webs.

Notes: Materials, mesh, matinees, problems with exiting, losing player control, etc. Attempts at swf integration.  Key card triggers, and door dependancies  Compare bools, Int counter, three switch activaion in any order.  Coordination with Robert for help with logic.  Help message integreation.  Cat pickups.  Inventory intgration and coordination with Rob.  Light switching, toggle visible, toggle,   Alarm events, helping to find custom kismet commands that the programmers could make to help me with the kismet limitations.  Ending cinematic:

Fan creation, switch creation, matinee with director camera switching.  Switch from maya to UDK for bink limitations, reusing existing animations and adjusting layout for easier completion.

Project in General

Communication between departments, finding the vision, and plan, and making steps to get there.  All nighters, working with the group in the same room.  Learning from peers, and passing on information.  Finding answers from blogs, forums, and help pages, and just trying stuff until something works.  Finding hack as solutions when development time is tight.  Stepping up and filling in wherever you can makes you learn new things.  I stumbled on matinee and kismet because I wanted to take some load off of ryan, and ended up finding it to be really fun.  Testing extensively back and forth in the game to make sure every variable is accounted for before submitting.  Making sure you cant open a door that you arent supposed to , or a message that displays when it isn't supposed to and fixing all the comparisons to ensure it all runs smoothly.  Trying to figure out checkpoints.  Functionally restarting later in the level, but no trigger states could be saved easily, so we had to abandon.  We should have looked into that sooner, or done separate or streaming levels to make it much more efficient, as well as cut out a lot of the dependancies with who could work on the level at a time.