Particle Graphics Conor created the particle graphics which fall from the trees when the player attempts to pic up fruit. There where a view iterations to get this looking right but the final result looks well in game.
Final Assets in placement & Lighting
At this point in development a lot of the work going on with the project is user testing or technical bug fixes. Gavin has been busy working on the user testing with Garreth, which has left Conor and Nicola to put some finishing touches on the level. Conor added in a big Sun with a Lens Flare and moving clouds which project shadows down onto the level. Nicola has added in the last of the scenes models (the coniferous trees and the ships interior).
The team has also been preparing the trailer for Haven which will be shown at the Beta presentation. The final version can been seen below as well as some extended Oculus footage showing how the game has progressed in that space. The Particle Effects on the trees also comes across really well on the Oculus. It is hard to describe how nice it feels to stand under a tree and watch the leaves fall down around you.
The team was fortunate enough to get a chance to enter int the universal design challenge, but this meant that we had a lot of documentation and technical development, didn't leave to much time for visuals so this week was mainly Nicola getting the interior textured and Garreth making a collision mesh.
Texturing the Interior
Nicola started off by unwrapping some of the interior models again to a more texture friendly format, some pieces had been slightly stretched and hard to paint having not unwrapped them herself so this took up more time then expected but they are finished by then end of the week and were ready to be added into the ship.
A Mesh for Collision
Garreth made a framework in 3DsMax which ran the entire way around the walk-able areas of the island, this would be brought into Unity and used to create a Collision Mesh. Making the Mesh in 3dsMax, meant that we could make far more efficiently then placing lots of collision boxes around the level.
A very busy week for everyone of the design end of Haven, models where unwrapped, animations created and Milo truly started to come alive.
Texturing Milo! Nicola spent time texturing Milo this week which which made a huge difference to him. we realized that the big eyes where defiantly working in making him much more like able. Milo was textured according to Milo's concept design with some tweaking where needed.
Level Population & the Texture Atlas
With most models textured Nicola remapped them to use the one texture map and started bringing them into the game. we where all glad to see that the texture batching was working to reduce our draw calls. The game was starting to look better and we felt confident to present it for alpha in its current state.
Unwrapping the ship Interior
Conor spent some time this week unwrapping the ships interior models to speed up the process for Nicola who was busy on Haven technical end. each model was unwrapped and their texture sheet and max file sent on to Nicola for texturing the following week.
Animated Poly-Art Water
Garreth spend time this week trying to implement animated poly art water using his research from the following week, sadly this did not turn out as we'd all hoped and we ultimately decided to leave it out of the final game , choosing to stick with the Unity asset Nicola had been using.
Animations
Animations are very important for our creature and Gavin worked really hard on them during the week. It is what is going to make the player engage with creature the most. These are what is going to give the creature character a personality. It is also what is going to allow the player to differentiate between emotional states ie happy, sad.
So first up we have the sad walk. This happens when the creature is walking while sad. Notice the slow movement. The creature keeps its head and tail down to portray its sadness.
Here we have the happy walk. Notice how the pace is faster than the sad walk. The creature also sways its body more while keeping its head and tail up in a happy manner. Also notice how the eyes are wide open and not sluggish like the sad walk.
This animation occurs when the player pets the animal when they have gained enough trust. This is meant to give up a happy feel towards the player. Notice how it lifts its head, closes its eyes and moves its head, similar to that of a dog or a cat when they are pet. The creature also wags its tail as a sign of happiness.
This is the neutral feed for the creature. The creature lowers its head and eats the food. There is another feed animation where the animal eats the food it prefers. In this case the creature will show a happy animation after it eats.
Floating Creature UI
Towards the end of development, when all the major elements of the game were implemented, we found the time to implement our particle effects. We felt these, while not being necessary, would add a lot to our game. We intend to use these particle effects to portray particular messages to the player. These messages can vary. One particle effect tells the player if Milo is sad, and another will tell the player if he is happy. Gareth and Nicola drew designs for these particle effects which varied according to feedback.
Conor then implemented the particle effects in Unity using the Shuriken system. This system allows a high degree of configuration by changing the variables for physics and appearance of the system.
This week a lot of the unwrapping and texturing got done. This added a lot of color and personality to our world, and it was great to be able to see Haven in a different light. The compiled results can be found here: Texturing for Haven
Researching Animated Poly Styled Water
Another task this week was to create low poly animated water to use in our game. This would add a nice boost to the aesthetics of our game. The compiled results can be found here: Low-Poly Animated Water Ship Interior
Finally this week we added the interior of the ship. This added more character to the ship instead of having it as a hollow shell. We played around with placement and scaling of objects until we felt good about our results.
Companion Changes
A lot of things happened regarding the character in our game. After receiving feedback from lecturers we decided to get rid of the deer creature we had intended to use. This meant that the companion creature would become the level creature. We felt that the companion creature would be easier to relate to and more widely accepted within out target age group. We also decided to drift away from the poly art style for the character, as it did not seem to suit him. This also made him much cuter, which is what we were going for. We then added eyes. We felt that with eyes, it would make it easier to convey emotion and also make him more approachable.
This week we designed the interior of the ship the player lands on. The interior was designed in Photoshop, and made to look as futuristic as possible in order to keep in line with the narrative of the game. This will help a lot when it comes to modelling the interior at a later date.
Ship Interior
Animal Emotion Animations This week we also looked in to the movement of animals. We need to make the animations of the animals as realistic as possible in order to get an empathetic response from our users. This involved researching books, photographs, and documentary's. The compiled information can be found here: Animal Locomotion in Animation
Final Menu Designs We also made the final designs for our menus. This involved taking the designs we had made previously and refining the best ones that the team liked. The main issue was the shape and color to use for the buttons. The colors that worked best for our game are shades of blue, so it was important to try different shades to get the right ones.
During the process of Team Project 2, it was advised by our 3D Lecturer J.J. Quinlan to make a distinguishable environmental feature to tie in with the narrative. He gave us examples such as an Aztec building or a statue. The feature we have decided to create is a Spaceship. The Spaceship fits in with the narrative as how the player came to the island. The spaceship was made to act as a central hub to the player too, a type of home-base. This would mark the start of the game and the end. It also acts as a good focal point. If a player gets lost, they can use that as a marker to return to familiar ground.
Ship Design
As we chose a ship as our distinguishable environmental feature, Nicola designed a template design so that Conor could use when modelling the ship.
Below is the design we used:
Creating the spaceship - V1
Upon creating the spaceship for Haven, the spaceship was designed in
Photoshop. Using this design the spaceship was created using a box
object in 3dsMax and was edited in the Editable Poly modifier to get the
desired shape of the design. Thrusters where then added by using the
extrude modifier and they where then beveled to get a vent like
appearance. The door was then detached from the rest of the ship by
selecting Polygons where the door should be and then in Editable Poly
with polygons selected, clicking detach and naming it as a separate
object.
Problems:
There were various problems with this
approach, one being the normals inside the ship where not present. This
would mean we would not be able to see the inside of the ship.
Originally we were going to do this, but later on decided on having an
interior. The options where to use the Shell Modifier to add a layer to
the inside, but this raised the poly count and created a weird lighting
deformation in Unity. The other option was to model the inside by
hand, but this raised the poly count significantly even without the
interior objects.
Creating the spaceship - V2
There was no choice it had to be created again. Using the same technique as the
last time, a created a box object in 3dsMax and was edited in the
Editable Poly modifier to get the desired shape of the design. To make
the Thrusters, they were modeled separately as the bevel in the last
version didn't look very neat on the inside. Pro Boolean was then used to
create a doorway. Pro Boolean subtracts an object from a selected
object and leaves the shape of the picked object in the selected one. The door was then modeled separately and a walkway was placed.
Final Renders of the Spaceship Model:
Spaceship Render - Side View
Spaceship Render - Three Quarter View
Testing the Creature Rig Another task that was completed this week was some animation testing. We wanted to make sure that the models were ready and suitable for animating. This was not to be our final animation, it was simply a test of the rig and skinning.
To achieve this Gavin created an animation sheet in the aim to get a correct animal walk.
Below is Gavin's Animation Sheet:
UI Design Continued This week, Garreth continued to work on some UI Designs for by adding in prompts for Spawning Fruit and Petting the creature. The aim of the prompts is to alert the player when they come in contact with an object. A Ray Cast is used to determine the distance between the players look vector and the object. Below are the latest UI elements:
Refining the Island This
week Nicola refined the shape of the island in 3dsMax and Mudbox to be
more suitable for the game mechanics of Haven. After achieving the
desired shape, Nicola gathered resources such as brush, grass, rocks and
trees from Conor and began populating the island with these assets. As
Gavin had made a creature model, Nicola then added the model in as the
creature companion. Previously, we had been using a dummy object as a
placeholder. Now we have an interactive create. Texturing and
animations will soon be added to the creature companion. Below
are renders of the island during week 4. You can see the progression
of our game visually as the island was previously bare.
Creature Detection Rings
Over
weeks 4 & 5, Conor created Detection Rings for the creature. The
Detection Rings coincided with Nicola's AI code for the creature. The
Detection Rings which use a Torus (A doughnut like object) as its mesh
transition between colours depending on the creatures state. The
creature states include Happy, Sad or Indifferent. When the creature is
Happy, the ring change to the colour Cyan. When the creature is sad,
the ring colour changes to Red and when the creature is indifferent, the
ring changes to the colour Yellow.
The
focus for having the Detection Rings is to alert the player to the
change of state with the creature. With this feedback, the player can
then decide on how to gain the trust of the creature.
Unwrapping and Rigging Level Creature We have produced a number of environmental models for the game and for Proof of Concept we wanted to show them so we spent some time adding them into the level. A few were picked and very quickly unwrapped them. This was because we wanted to be able to test out Unity's batching capabilities. This means that if multiple models are using the same texture unity will be able to save draw calls by keeping it in memory. So for the few models that were unwrapped we set their UV coordinates to different points of the same texture map, which is just a selection of colors for now. We also made each model a prefab (instance) so we could also save a lot of loading time. When running the game batching saved us up to 80 draw calls in some places and we experienced no long loading time. We will defiantly be batching our textures.
We also unwrapped and rigged the level creature. While we weren't going to texture it until alpha, we find it best practice to unwrap anything before you rig, if you don't it can lead to unnecessary complications, and while we know how to fix these complications, we would much rather just avoid them all together.
Finally it was on to rigging. Rigging quadrupeds is still relatively new to us. We are using the CAT system, so even if there was no decent preset rig, we would be able to adjust ones there or make our own. We tried one of the preset rigs, it was a horse one. After rigging that up to the mesh and skinning, it looked a bit weird. Parts of the mesh were moving that we didn't think should. It wasn't a skinning problem, it was just the CAT rig had parts that we didn't really need. So we decided to build our own one. CAT rigs aren't too complicated to make, this is one of the reasons they are so powerful.
Skinning was a long process. Thankfully the creature modeled nicely so bones had little influence over parts of the mesh where it was obvious they shouldn't. After a few hours of adjusting the envelopes we got it to a stage where we were happy with it. UI Design This week Garreth done some research on adding UI elements into Haven. UI will be an important element in Haven to give feedback to the player about the game mechanics.
Some preliminary designs for the menu which underwent peer review by the team :
Below is an image of the first iteration of Menu UI:
We began this week by creating environmental assets to populate the relaxing island of Haven. Using designs previously created by Conor, we modeled smaller environmental features such as brush and grass. The focus of creating these assets are purely for aesthetic purposes.
As Haven uses Poly Art Style, we have the advantage of having a low poly count for our objects. Although the polygon count can rise with the amount of detail being added. When modeling the grass/brush it was important to keep the poly count down and not get carried away adding detail as these objects are going to be heavily used around the island. It is important that our assets keep a low poly count due to Haven using the Oculus Rift. The Oculus Rift is a Virtual Reality headset. The headset looks similar to a goggle. Using the Oculus in our game we render the scene twice. Once through the Oculus device and another on the computer, which will view the rendered scene of the Oculus.
Below are initial images of the first iteration of grass and brush models:
These models where then reviewed by the team. Feedback from the team suggested trying different shapes and maybe adding more variation to the strokes.
Keeping the Poly count down was easy, when creating the cubes the segments were kept low and the desired shape of the objects where created using a minimum amount of segments. There were normally 3 height segments per grass blade. Here are the final renders of the grass/brush assets:
Final Concept for the Deer
Nicola took the designs Gavin had draw up in week one and made a coloredamalgamation producing a final concept for this creature, this was to help Gavin to model it later in the week. This was painted in Photoshop and presented to the group for peer review.
Modeling the Deer Creature
This week Gavin started modeling the deer creature from the game, this went through several iterations and was peer reviewed by the group at each stage. This model was created in blender and was also made to conform with the chosen poly-art style. it was a challenge to make the wreath around the deer's neck in this style as it would be pulled and distorted during the skinning stage. the silhouette of the creature also looked wrong with this addition so it was ultimately removed.
