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:
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