Drawing Drawing Drawing

So, we're back on to pre-production now, with yet more drawing. Not my strongest suit, but so long as it helps me think about poses then its not too bad. I've been doing a few for each, but mostly been focussing on the attack animations for the player character, since they're the most fun.

Christmas has somewhat slowed my progress, but I've also started playing around in Unity, the results of which are looking promising (if a little freakish). I'll post that stuff here when its in a more developed state. But until then, drawings!

Death Cow

A brief interlude between now and finishing Major Project pre-production, part 2 of the specialist animation module. The first week of this module's been to do with scheduling and agile scrum development, and its had us refining the GDD for Echoes.

But now we've moved on to more practical aspects, and started scripting in Unity. We've also been using Playmaker, a visual scripting tool available on the asset store. I got on quite well with Playmaker, its essentially like working with pseudo-code. That said, when we actually dived into javascript I found I wasn't too thrown by it.

We decided the project would best slot into Echoes if we used it to make puzzles. Fortunately this also gave us a good scope for stuff to do in this module too. I used a mix of Playmaker and scripting, and came out with a few decent results.

The most complex was perhaps the psychic death cow. I scripted a small AI which wanders the environment till it sees you, then attacks. I'm mostly pleased because I got it not to walk into/through walls without using a node system. The lack of nodes does mean that it can't pathfind, just wander randomly till it gets lucky, but its workable as a relatively thick AI.

Majorly Projecting

Okay, so we're back on to Major Project Pre-production. I've been mostly working on thumbnails and rig setup for this, though progress has been slow, as I've not got a great deal done over reading week.

I've got lots of thumbs to do, with a centaur, a humanoid faerie character, a dragon/lizard, a little girl, and a giant crab monster.

Here's a few of the thumbs I've been doing today for an idea of what I'm up to.

Specialist Animation: Part 1 Complete!

This is my marking reel from Specialist Animation part 1. There are elements I like and elements I dislike, but overall I think it went fairly well, considering the three week time-frame. Having not had much experience animating in Maya, I found there were some idiosyncrasies that took some getting used to. Though overall I prefer the package to Max for rigging and animating (my artist colleagues disagreed with my software preference).

MotionBuilder was a tricky one. We had to learn and use the package in under a week, so I wasn't able to really get to grips with the program and learn all its ins and out. I found it quite difficult to work with, but I suspect that was more a fault of my inexperience than any failing on the software's part. That said, with just a little more time, I'm sure I could easily grasp using MotionBuilder a lot better.

Back to Project Development for a while now, till we start Specialist Animation 2 in 2-3 weeks time. I'll try and keep the blog updated with my progress in pre-production.

Feature Feature: HumanIK

Seeing as it's topical with regards to the MotionBuilder assignment, I'll continue the blog-a-thon. I found the basics of the HumanIK system, and thought I'd share for anyone interested.

HumanIK is basically a character setup that puts Inverse Kinematics across the whole body, a-la MotionBuilder control rigs. If you create one in Maya you get basically what you get in MotionBuilder, but with the added bonus of viewport selectable controls and the general Maya niceness for keyframe animation.

So to create a HumanIK rig in Maya, we have to make sure the plugin is loaded. If its not, you can activate it by going to Window > Settings/Preferences > Plug-In Manager. Then scroll down and check that mayaHIK.mll is set to Loaded. If its not there, probably best to check the Autodesk site for a download.

With that loaded, we can simply go to Skeleton > HumanIK... to load the HIK plug-in.
















This will bring up a control box in place of your Channel Box. Basically we have the same thing here as in MotionBuilder, and it's pretty intuitive. Hitting either Create Skeleton or Create Control Rig will do the same thing with nothing in the scene, as it needs to make a skeleton to control to start with.

Hit Create Skeleton at the top, and one will pop up in your viewport. Then go to create, under the blue button, and hit Control Rig. This will build you some controls.










Voila! You can select controls via the panel, or in the viewport. Play around first, as HIK rigs work in interesting ways compared to our more regular animation rigs. The advantage here is easy importing to MotionBuilder, and the knowledge that the proportions are all exactly the same as the MotionBuilder rig.

Once you've animated a sequence, you can simply use the Send to MotionBuilder option in the File menu to switch it across. If you prefer you can export it manually, but the Send To feature tends to be the easiest way for me. 

Hope this helps someone :) 

Emotion Builder

This third week we're working on adapting and cleaning up mocap data in MotionBuilder. Its pretty fun, and the package is quite nice. Intensive though, so my laptop currently hates me a little. We have to edit a few pre-recorded motion clips, blend them together, and then add some of our own keyframe in for good measure. All in all a pretty fun bit of work, but with less than 72 hours to deadline, we're a bit pushed for time.

No renders for this week to show yet, so I'll just put the project reel up at the end with everything in it. In the meantime, here's some pre-prod GIFs.

Feature Feature: Buffer Curves

I thought I'd start blogging any useful little tools I find, just in case any of my colleagues dropping in find them useful. 3D software tends to be so ridiculously vast that the little handy tools can get lost in the mix. Anyway, here's a feature on a feature. So, Buffer Curves!

Cool little feature I found whilst poking around the graph editor: Buffer Curves. These are like alternate versions of your curve you can use to make changes, if you want to experiment without losing your original data.

To see them, you have to go to View > Show Buffer Curves. Like so: 


You probably won't see anything for now, but if you start to move keyframes or adjust tangents, you'll see a dark grey curve in the shape of the original. The nice thing about this is it lets you strip out or add keys to your new one, without messing up the old, which is great for experimenting with different overall curve shapes.

To switch between them, just go to Curves > Swap Buffer Curve, and it will invert which is the active curve and which is the buffer. 

Handy stuff. 

EDIT: Forgot to mention, the buffer curve won't show unless you have the curve selected, to stop them cluttering up your Graph Editor.