27th-28th May 2015

Most of the time spent during this 2 days was to get the basic animation for the game out. I started with making a "test" animation just to make sure nothing is broken or any skin weight going crazy for future animation. I used the dance reference from PSY gangnam style and some pictures to did this test.

I also tried to tidy up some other stuff from other team members like checking on their object models, texturing just to make sure it fits to my initial concept design. This seems to be harder than I anticipated.

Since the programmers were busy as well and I could not wait for them anymore I manually set my own mock environment in order to test if these animation actually work in Unreal upon baking.

Have a quick meeting with the programmers as well on how they want me to design my animation and presented it to them for easy coding.

This week target animation are as followed:

• IDLE
• BLADING
• JUMPING

Managed to squeezed a WALL GRIND animation as well which as shown below.

During these time I was actually looking and playing with lighting in Unreal as I really wanted the AO effect to appear in the game (as mentioned in previous post without knowing, Unreal actually support this, I actually bake my AO light to my character). Have not really go in depth to it but I will surely do to understand it better this week.

Reflection Segment: Working in a team with diverse background experience is pretty hard and refreshing at the same time. Personally if things go well, i really think this could be a good game..but that a big IF...as we have a few issue within the group itself...

26th May 2015

With all the previous mistake made, I am pretty careful in setting my joints LRA in the correct manner.
Following Laz target that I have to meet before next desk critique:-

1. Get the character in the game
2.Character movement and actions animations

While getting the character rigged and skinned properly another issue that I am still wary off those rigged and animation will work fine in Unreal.

Took me the whole day to finish up both the rigging, controls and skinning. It might not be perfect but it seems to work fine.

Control and rigged

Did a short  animation such as waving the character hands, exporting it out and reimporting it back Maya...it turns out fine. Still waiting for the mock enviroment from the programmers so I could test it in Unreal


Reflection Segment: Feel pretty good after making all those mistake at the early stages.

22nd May 2015

Things did not go as planned for today desk critique and we were bashed really hard. Firstly we have not really prepared as a group on what to present, yes, as individual each of us had did a certain part but as Laz mentioned we were falling way behind. In due honesty I have never thought we were the few "good" group as  Laz pointed out; it is easy to fix a bad group compare to fixing a good group.
I am unsure about the others but it is the wake up call I needed.

Reflection segment: Laz and Alex was pointing out how i did my workflow wrong in terms of exporting and importing of those animation to the game. Surprisingly I am really annoyed at myself for wasting too much time in fixing those controls and orientation but at the same time I had pretty much  understood what is the limitation in Unreal.

23rd-25th May 2015

Had the same issue involving  some joints orientation that peeves me off and decided to re-rig everything from the ground. While researching I came across the ART rigging embed in Unreal for Maya.
The good thing: Instant Rigging and controls.
The Bad: Shit ass buggy and no way in hell i could even get a rigged done to it (cause i am using maya 2015)

Took me awhile to get things up and also I was waiting for the programmer to set up a "mock" world in Unreal so that I could test if my fbx file actually work in Unreal.

Finished and cleaning up a simple script that will allowed me to set up control easier for future character.

Reflection segment: It was a frustrating process especially while using the ART add in Maya. Things keep crashing in weird manner without any backup which resulting in time lost and repetitive actions and workload. Realizing this will not work and to avoid more time lost I decide to work back the joints traditionally.

20th-21st April 2015

With the UVs out of the way I still had the baking of light issues I had to take care off. Again most of the research had been done way earlier and countless of hours was spend in trying to get the settings right.

AO map

This what has been bugging me while I managed to get those AO map out rendered there seems to be a hole plunging out around the area of the faces which giving me a nasty result when i slapped it in to photoshop.

The process here is pretty much tweaking and returning to photoshop to make it right.

Initial Concept color

This is what i get when slapping both the AO and paint textures together, the blending of the "fake shadows" make life a little easier for me.

Work and more work

At times it does feel as if I am going around in circle throughout the whole process. The repetitve actions of going back and forth to PSD , Maya and 3d COAT is kind of vexing. Still, as hours and days goes by i found myself pretty accustomed to this which at certain point of time i was actually coloring the OBJ model in PSD itself!

Pretty much done

 At the end of the process i added few more textures and colored to the character face. Did a minor tweak as well  to have his jaw and mouth look more defined!.

Minor tweaking make alot of different

Reflection Segment: Moving along these process constantly make me wonder would there be any "correct" method in getting things done more systematically. Which pretty much none, while there a few pipeline that artist have to go through the order of moving along that pipeline is up for an individual. While this is really an audacious and time consuming I am pretty sure my next character model for the game would't take me this long at all.

18th-19th May

During these 3 days it feel the longest and tedious throughout the unwrapping and texturing process. Why? I know i had to get the AO light bake to my character but Maya doesn't really support that. Given there is a "default" AO materials to be slap to the model but upon trying to bake it gave out a really ugly process.

Enter 3D max! With skylight light reference all those settings that I suppose to set in Maya could be thrown out the window. Still it took me at least three quarter of the day to find this method and get it right !

I was actually doing both UVs and researching the baking of lights to the model simultaneously throughout these 3 days.

working on it 1 by 1

After hours....of non dota days...it is DONE!

Those crazy Uvs

Feel pretty good once the tedious part is done and to have a little fun i started to add a little color to the character head.

Show it to the other team,,,well they pretty much hate it...why those ungrateful !@#!#$@#%$#...lol joking

17th April 2015

While some of the dates were not recorded it does not mean I am doing nothing. Most of the time I had been doing research for the model in terms of getting an ambient occlusion method to the character and environment.  I was also worried regarding the smooth section in Maya as it will increase my faces to double the figures that i currently had right now!

Reflection corner: Upon doing some of this research (as Laz suggested) I began to realize that i should had approach the modelling method in a total different way rather than going by the animation modelling pipeline. While these method are pretty similar (especially in terms of smoothing the character) it could save me a lot of time which sadly as if now; pretty much I had to retopology the character in some of the "smooth" area.

The next stuff that was needed to be done was the unwrapping of our protagonist. Frankly this is my least favorite segment as I am not really fond of unwrapping UVs; still that doesn't mean I am unable to do it!

YIKES....rubbish ahead..this is why i hate unwrapping UVs

headache

Patience ....patience

I first started unwrapping in both Maya and Max which i find really time consuming so I switch to another software called 3D Coat. While it is not officially used for unwrapping model (it is pretty similar to Zbrush)It makes unwrapping a breeze compare to Maya or Max.

16th April 2015

I make a few mixed up to the date on the blog regarding the date entries of my journal and had to be fixed.

Yesterday desk critique  turn out better than I had expected. We as a team manged to deliver in respect to the question that has been posted to us from Laz and Alex.

This includes those question regarding level to game design, the look and feel of the game and individual contribution.

Sadly we are still missng Ryan whom had gone missing. MIA.

Laz was asking me a question on why I had actually modeled the character earlier than expected well this is because I always have the hunch that this wouldn't be an easy ride for me in terms of 3D and I am pretty sure I will meet some "wall" that requires time to be able to tackle that issue.

Once the desk critique was over we have a short team meeting in the next targeted task for next week.

7th April 2015

Work on the concept that was needed for tomorrow presentation. Since i do not want to do the similar concept i did previously i soar the internet for some ambience occlusion look. The point here is to convince Laz and Alex the style we are intending to do.

Once i found the right image to work with I re-concept the background and add our character, blending it in to the enviroment.

Not for any commercial used.

With this combination I hope the team able get the green light as well erased any doubt to the other team members on how the game should look.

4th-6th April 2015

This get a little tricky. Spend the past 3 days trying to build model by model. It goes from the body to the hand and i had forgotten how much i hate doing fingers in modelling.

I even had this thought of making just the hand a big pile of cube and texture it accordingly later on but then that will not help me in the future if there's ever a need  where the fingers had to be animate individually.

The character starting to take shape.

I decide to go for the "cut a hole" method where the model did not actually have a constant edge flow to it to save those polygons usage.

The roller blades was designed next. Hit a few bummer while doing the mirroring of  the object where the x-y axis does not really work correctly. Managed to fix it due to the mesh history going crazy.

Adding the leg and footwear

Took a break and found a new kickstarter game that has been released to steam HOVER: Revolt of games which have similar kind of concept to our game. YIKES. Looking at some of the gameplay that was uploaded it feel really similar except that we had the grapple mechanics. Informed this to the other members and they were shocked as well.

Luckily we did not go ahead with the initial concept of making the game style in neon and futuristic kind of look. Still it's quite unbelievable to have an idea and someone beat you to it!

Completed the model! Technically not,as i still have to do some optimization to it as the polygon reach to 2.2k and i want it to stay in the range of 1-1.8k area.

3rd April 2015

Had an extra time before my freelance work and dished out a quick colored to the concept. Have to say the first style was horrendously done by me. Decided to go to a different approach and really focused to get this 2nd concept art better. Still in the holiday mood thus i feel my standard dropping for a moment.

Overground 2nd concept

Still this doesn't really tell the team nor the lecturer what i had in mind. I could sense the team still do not understand by the term ambient occlusion style. Just need to find the time to get it done and showcase it to them.

While working on the concept I was working slowly on the model as well. Didn't get much on it today tho.Fixed a few tapology here and there but that pretty much what i get today.

Working on the body

1st April 2015

Had our team meeting on the easter break today. Everyone came back with their part that need to be done and at the same address some minor internal issues between members.

Ryan was not around today. MIA. Unable to contact.

The meeting sort off setting up the final target for this semester for the game and what need to be done in collaboration for the assets to be place in unreal for the artist to work on. The programmer on the other hand is figuring the concept of all those movement, mechanics and camera.

Assets and animation needed for this semester target

We also discussed a few things altogether such as what is needed in programming that had to be translate to animation action. The "+" sign indicates this collaborative assets.

Right after that we go straight to the level design and experience discussion. Really like this updated level design collaboration from the 3 designers (Joey, Johnson and Mingel) compared to their previous design.

We end the day highlighting what is needed to be done before the next presentation to Laz and Alex.
My part is to get some of those top level design look and show the team the look and feel of the game.

31st March 2015

Still figuring out how i could approached the issue in getting the side and back part of the hair fixed and i had promised myself not to play any dota game till i had this problem fixed (well actually it is more due to the fact we had a group meeting tomorrow and i pretty much have to show this to them)

In a strange turn of events found myself chatting with my previous groupmate on facebook. All these while i had her on facebook i didn't realized her profile pic was actually taken upside down (i actually thought  it was some soft of cute character with weird design), with both maya and facebook site up i found myself playing around with my laptop screen and rotate it to 180 and then only then her profile pic make sense (it was actually her face in an upside down manner!). While making this useless rambling discovery for ( laz and alex to read ) something else caught my eye, my character model, with the viewport upside down i found a way to actually fixed the issue that has bugging me for 2 days!!

Strange indeed aye.

front of view main hero

The side and back finally fixed after 2 days!

30th March 2015

Start the day playing Dota again with the ritual of an intention pawning noobs but was backfired as those noobs were in my team. Not even i have the most kill and the richest man alive in the game; still i end up losing the game.

Dota rant

Well why was that important? Well it pretty much mess my day after that. Tried to continued with the modelling, it doesn't work i end up creating pile of rubbish of vector and polygons. This happen when you extrude a face double time without checking and yeah it pretty much "break" the model apart. On the positive insight since I discovered it early enough and refixing it is not an option, i choose to start it all over again.

Start of the hair

Actually this was the 2nd attempt. Throw the old polygon to the bin where it belong.

The challenging part of the model. Due to the character spikey and messy hairstyle it is really hard to keep the polygons in control and shape it to my liking(why the hell did i draw this in the place).
Keeping up with the extruding of the faces and again i fall back to the same issue where i have to vertices coming out in weird areas...arrgggh
The other issues was trying to figure how could i enveloped it around the head with the spikey hair still look as what it should be.

28th -29th March 2015

Started my research on low polygon modelling. Seems that I could actually have more polygon usage that I initially thought off if the game was done for the PC. Most discussion on the  web was saying it should range between 500-5000 polys.
Give a skype call to my friend (who is working in ubisoft singapore) to ask him for his opinion on how to tackle the polygons issue which pretty much a bad move cause we just start playing Dota for 6 hrs after that.
Well it wasn't really a waste he did tell me about it; just that it only took us less than a minute.

His advice was to keep my poly in range of no more than 3000. 

Back to lynda.com for more tutorials video after that.


30th -31st March 2015

I am ready to embark the journey to model again. Its been ages since i model stuff which go back all the way to 2011 so I was quite worried that i had forgotten some of the stuff. Once maya launched, looking at its UI scared the shit out of me-well not really. Still it took me a few hours to remember those shortcuts, script, tumbling around the 3D space which at time, frustrating.

Oh well. Time to pawned noobs in DOTA due to release the frustration

Started to "boxing" out the shape using the model sheet did earlier

Getting a hang of it after killing some noobs in DOTA

Half the head done!

25th-26th March 2015

During the presentation, the feedback we gotten from Laz and Alex highlighted a few major components to our game design and mechanics. This include of player experience, HUD etc and the most major component was the cooperation system we had for our game.

After those short presentation we went straight to talk about the issues highlighted, it get pretty tense as each of us had a different idea to tackle it but none of those solution provide to the answer to the issues we facing. I suggested that we should revolve our game towards our grapple mechanics due for it to be the core of the gameplay. I explained my reason and why the gameplay should not be an open world due to the grapple mechanics, after a few more hours discussion the team agreed to it and we proceed forward in tackling other issues that had been highlighted by Laz and Alex.

Other discussion includes:

1. Player Experience
2. Path and movement of player in the city
3. Level Designing
4. Game look and background
5. Assets

With Easter break around the corner I don't really feel like drawing or coloring any stuff and instead found myself watching tutorials and playing the best game in the world DOTA 2 for hours and hours. Once i actually try to color one of my sketches it look so shitty that i almost puke; still i will put it up here for you guys to view.

NICE DESIGN RYZE U DID IT!!-my team members comment before i start dota-ing

WTF IS TAT?-the team comments once i'm sucked to the dota world once again. GG

Have to admit that a little irresponsible on my part cause i just want to get the bground done and well played...