Grimm news

I have news and it is grim, Grave Runner that is. This is going to be an update on my school project

A week ago we were making our game in jmonkey but with every progress we made there was always a brick wall stopping us. For example, our animations didn't work due to the fact that I made the animations in Maya and  jmonkey can't or won't accept the fbx format but I solved that by using blender for animations and exporting it into a .xml file but it worked but  when we tried it on our tablet it didn't work because the tablet can't run an xml file or it just crashes for reasons unknown to me.

Anyways long story short we changed development kit to unity and and everything is going good. Progress with Unity is so much faster that what it was in Jmonkey. But thats what I thought,  I'm just the artist in the group but i have some experience with unity and how its coding works. The fact that our communications in the group is really low makes me wonder what the programmers are doing because I don't see any results on their part of the job. One of the programmer is complaining that unity is crap but then again he's always complaining that every development kit is crap.

But yeah I just feel that I need to get that out of my chest. Sorry about the rant, now on to the eye candy!

I've done a lot of texturing animating and other stuff like implementing all the models into unity and making prefabs (pre fabrication) and here's the result

The player is animated as well as the tree at the back.

This was just a quick set up in Unity and i did not have all the assets with me because i forgot to transfer them from the schools Pc to my USB but pretty much everything is there. Ohh the moon on the background is on a skybox so ive got that going for me.

Right now I am around 75% of all the assets that we need are done. All i need to do is to design a GUI and refine some other stuff   

Jmonkey Animation Trouble

The Story
  So still working on the Grave Runner project, all was going well but then I hit a brick wall. I have made an animation complete with rigged bones and everything. The problem was I should have researched which files I have to export them in. Heed my advice this is a very important thing  to do! trust me because apparently Jmonkey is not compatible on with Maya because maya is not able to export objects or animations into xml files without pro scripting skills.

The Problem
  Yeah apparently Jmonkey only takes in xml files when it comes to animating meshes (simple .obj are ok if you are not going to animate them). I tried to solve the problem with maya for three weeks looking at old outdated forums from 2008, desperately trying to find a solution. The whole class is counting on me to solve the problem and if I can't solve it we would be forced to change our UDK and that would set us back five months in developing time. No one wants to do that!

The Solution
  After hundreds of forums, twenty different downloads and thirty times of backtracking I finally solved the problem! And the solution was... switching to blender and that solved everything mostly everything animation wise. Hello Blender my old friend.

Epilogue
  Now i'm back on track with animating but in Blender this time. the only small problem i ran into was importing the mesh with the Uv mapping intact but the solution was very simple just export the mesh into an .obj. Not .fbx because that's what i did at first

(I added some Ik handles after i took this screen)

As you can see Grim is fully imported in Blender and it is rigged and ready to go (animate that is).

Grim textured

Well our main character of the game is textured and I dare say that he looks adorable! Even though I did not realise it but he looks like a cross between  jawas and vivi in final fantasy 9.

Here's the UV-mapping and texturing of Grim

I could have made a better mapping by setting the both of the arms and wings together so that i could have more space and better resolution on both of them. i did that to the horns,hands and feet i don't know why i didn't do it on the arms, oh well there's always next time.

 Heres the model without bump mapping

Here is the model with bump mapping

as a bonus a mental Ray rendering of Grim

Next thing I need to do is to animate this cute little thing. I'm gonna make him fly!

Animation

I am supposed to chose which area of 3D modelling i am to focus on but seeing that i haven't learnt anything in-depth about animation. I decided to take animating instead of focusing on modelling which is what i really wanted to do because I think it is much better to have a well rounded skill set than to be focused one skill in this case.

At first glance it looked hard very hard to animate things but in reality the hard part is actually setting up the bones on a mesh and assigning the weights on the individual joints.

Here are the most basic terms of which you will need to know to understand what i am talking about

 As far as i know there are 4 types of skinning (applying weights) a model.

• Wheight painting - Is the old school method of skinning where you had to apply the weights onto individuall vetecies
• Smooth bind - an updated vesion of weight painting. You no longer need to paint in the weights indivirually and it binds the mesh and the bones smoothly. It doesit automatically but you might not get the wanted result
• Rigid bind - same as smoothbinding but more rough on the binding
• Interactive bind - This is where you can individually determine in what range the joints of the bones are going to affect the mesh

Maya's automatic skinning is ok and is really useful. I have also tried to manually apply the weights which gives you much better control over what part of the mesh is going to be affected by the joints and bones.

I managed to make my character do a posing animation using bones

I also made an animation sequence but i have no idea how to either export it in to a game or make it in to a movie... yet

Uv Mapping, My Old Friend

So we have started working with Uv-mapping in school and if you have read my posts on UV-mapping then you would know that UV stands for universal view. Simply put you have to layout you 3D model to a flat layer so that the parts of it would be distinguishable.

At start your UV mapping will look like this. A bunch of wires bunched together in chaos but soon when you will be able to tame and make everything distinguishable.

So since I have experience with mapping I'll show you the most basic tools that you will use while mapping.

1. Is the fancy unfold tool. It can only unfold one shell at a time and but the good thing about it is that you can see how the UVs become unfolded, right before your very eyes. (Thank you Joel for showing me this tool).

2. is the flip horizontal/ vertical tool. Best done when selecting individual shells.

3. The cut UV edges tool. this tool is crucial when you have a complicated shape like a character or something in with complicated shapes.

4. a less fancy unfold tool but you can unfold a lot of different shells at once.

5. level the vertices in either way the images is kind of self explanatory.

Lastly you should use the checkered texture to see if you have unfolded the UVs properly. The checkered texture should be evenly distributed.

Schools back!!

And that's why i haven't have the time to post for a long time. Homework and many stressful days has gone by since school has started again. But the good thing in my school is that  I am going to make a game in one of my courses. Naturally I am chosen as the designated 3d modeller, texturer and eventually animater.

Having this project will give me a clear set of goals on what to do and make. Also this forces me to go into areas of 3d modeling that I am not particularly familiar of, such as animation, rigging and rendering. Even now I continue to learn about modelling. 

Remember this; I'm not just saying it to you I'm also saying it to my future me incase I forget:

I solved the problem when scaling an edge loop in a special duplicated object. It is as simple as moving the pivot to the center of the body and viola! No more overlapping mirrors when scaling. 

When you are done with an object try the 'merge vertices' option It makes duplicate special ten times easier to finalize it also gets rid of all unnecessary/duplicated faces. 

I don't know how I have missed bit there is apparently a coordinate modifier where you can individually edit the coordinates of each vertex. It's the top left of the main window hiding somewhere in there

I'm really looking forward to learn everything that has to do with modeling... I just need time. Anyways. I've done alot of models during this past month and hopfully all of them are going in the game.

also I've been playing around the rendering options as well and this is what i came up with the help of mentalray .

So much for the Game-Jam

Last Monday two of my friends and I decided to enter our schools game-jam where you only have 12 hours to come up with a game concept produce a game with the Game Maker.

The Game Maker is a program is an easier program to develop a game, compared to C# or C++. anyways when we started we just blurted out a lot of crazy ideas. Some included hobos and then progressed to cyber-hobos that went back in time to kill everyone. I forgot to mention that one of the concept is that the setting is in the past (middle ages or pre-historic). We sat there babbling about ideas and.. Nothing, we couldn't decide on what to do... So we made a Cyber-Cupcake that was supposed to be the player. Half way through the Game-Jam we decided to scrap it and just cut our loses and do something else worth doing.

Our programmer, Dogge tried to make our side-scroller into a top down with no avail and started playing League Of Legends instead. Our music guy, Leo fell in love with his music that he made. He continued to work on it till the end of the Jam. Me? Well I made a concept art AFTER I made the sprites for the game, yeah i know so stupid. But i had a lot of fun being there even though we weren't able to produce a game. I learned a bunch of things too, like it is a hundred times easier to paint with a digital drawing pad, and to never dive in on one concept and hoping that everything will solve by itself.

Here is the concept art i did with the drawing pad

behold the Cyber-Muffin aka Zombie-Muffin

A blast from the past

While rummaging about my old USBs i found my teams old project and some old 3D meshes that i have made. Surprisingly I have actually made a bad ass castle but did not finished it and a bamboo shoot with a small bump mapping on it

Also here are some videos that I made. One is from a school project about making a small city district and the other a small running animation i made during my time in blender.

City District

Running Animation

Edit: here are some more stuff I've uncovered from my files

Sword is finnished

after many hours of blending and asking the teacher i am finally done. I had to take down the number of polygon count but that did not take so much time. i think it really looks good. I have learnd alot on how to make models, how to conect faces so that they will look good... It's realy har do write down everything that i have learnt but I think i covered most of it on the last posts. 

Danial said that the next time we are going to work in 3D is going to be on Maya so... Maya here I come. ^^

the first one is flat shaded and the second is smooth

Just Couldn't Wait Till Friday

I couldn't stay away from blender I just love making 3d models. I worked on the handle and i think I'm am done but that doesn't mean that I will stop working on it. i'm going to ask my teacher; Danial if there is anything that I can improve on the sword on Friday.

here is the hilt and the whole thing. please I like to hear what you think, if there is something wrong or doesn't look good just tell me so i can make the sword better :) also here is the concept art if you want a compare them

The Hilt Is Done

Finally after hours of working on the hilt i have finished it... for know, I think i'm going to make more faces and vertices to make it smooth when i have made everything. While i was working on the hilt I found out how to use the snap to grid function also just right now i found out how to separate vertices by pressing V. ^^

Going to start working on the last part; the handle, tomorrow. so i'll post it on Friday or later.

Blending

still getting used to haveing a blog so i am sorry for not updating. so here is what i did first i started of with a cube and extruded it to the same length but of course after a little while i found out that i could just push CtrlR and it would automatically devide it into equal lengths. after i have done that i then added a curve modifier. you can see how i have done it on the screens

i have to apologize for forgetting to take screen shots on how the sword developed but i promise to take more frequent screens in the near future.

it was easy to make the blade of the sword, i think i am finished on working on it. But i am having some trouble on the hilt it seems that what ever i do it always seems to be so boxy

i will try to post more frequently.

any ways this is how my sword looks like now

Concept Art

The sketch is done. it was kinda hard coming up with a new sword design but here it is

kinda blurry as i made it by hand but i hope you can see it. I have already made a sword on blender before so i chose to make a curvy one to make it a little bit hard for me. tell me what you think of it, good bad what ever :)

School Project

Ok, Hello i gues. my teacher said that we should make a blogg to document the proces of makeing meshes on blender, but i have never made, read or seen a blogg so please bare with me.

We are going to make a sword in blender but first we will have to make scetches of it. the whole thing is going to take  about 2 weeks, anyways  i'm going to start scetching now so. the scetches should be uploaded soon.