weekly update 3

Time for a new update on the project. It's been awhile since the last update and a lot has happened  So here is a overview of the different things I worked on.

Coral
To make the scenery a bit more interesting we need quite a lot of decoration. Since yesterday the main focus lies in that part of the project and the first results are these (together with some other props for the pike):

The textures are quitte interesting. We used grayscale maps with a gradient to help blend the models better with the seafloor. Also in unity we are able to give custom colors to the models.

Seafloor
We desperately needed an update on the seafloor. The first mock-ups were really bad and boring. So a spend one and a half day on some new tiles as a start. We can easily expand this set to give some more variation if necessary.

These parts are created semi-procedural. I used GeoControl2 to procedurally create a landscape I liked.

Next I exported a heightmap from it and used this in zbrush as an alpha-map on a brush to sculpt the details on a tileable base shape. This way I had some control over what parts got what details. Next step was to use decimation master to get the polycount down to around 16.000 tris which will be manageable in Unity.

The last step was in Maya to clean up the edges of the tiles to make them tileable again. The brushing step in Zbrush messed this up a bit so that needed to be fixed.

Book
This sunday I found myself close to the University library in Utrecht so I thought I should visit and check if they had a book I wanted. To my surprise they were actually open and they also had the book! It's called Texturing & Modeling; a Procedural Approach. I haven't really dived into it yet but i'm really excited to see if there is something usefull in there.

Implemented the music player
There is also some news on the music player from last post. We fully implemented it in the game already. So now you can go and find a LP somewhere in the ship and use it to play music on the music player.

Filling the rooms with water
This part gave Martijn and me some real troubles. We needed some kind of mesh that would fill up the rooms when needed. Though we couldn't just scale up some kind of shape to fill it because most rooms had strange shapes in the walls. Especially the bridge had a strange shape. First we tried all kinds of blend shapes. Even though that worked like a charm in Maya, we couldn't use it in Unity. Next we tried to use some bone animation, but that was hell to animate in Maya. We tried some other things as well, but in the end we found some custom script for Unity that could make a kind of blend shapes. The script uses the different shapes needed and blends between them. Though we still got some trouble with vertices that disappeared when clustered to close. In the end it worked. That was a real eureka moment!

Little fish
And to end this post I like to present a little fish I made to represent the lost Royal Carp of the King:

Until next time!

Rick

new substance - lp player

I'm going to write a little piece about a new asset I made yesterday. This is the first piece I made totally using Substance designer. We made some other assets using Substance as well  though these also used some Photoshop textures as basis. This asset was the first done using only Substance. 

Anyway, here is the total graph and the outputs it produces: 

Also, the color of the emissive map is interactive and thus can be changed on run-time (it also adapts the diffuse map accordingly) 

Weekly update 2

Last week hasn't been very interesting, so i'll be posting a really short post this time. Hopefully next week will be a bit more interesting.
This week I spent almost all my time working on gathering resources for my supportive narrative. I found out there are almost 0 books written on the subject. I did manage to find one book on a semi related subject though it's quite old already. So my sources will probably be mostly internet related.

Weekly update

So this week was not as productive as I had hoped it would be. I spend this week working mostly on the hand animation. Next to that I worked a bit on a small prop on which I would like to test some texture mechanisms.

The hands.

Working on the hands this week was horrible. Somehow everything inside Maya broke and I just didn't know how I could get it to work properly again. This cost me so much time in the end. Eventually I just made a small animation for testing purposes. Even though there are still some troubles with the rig I at least can produce some animation clips now. This week we hope to be able to merge the animations inside our initial Mechanim animation blend tree. Once this works we have proven we can work with all the functionality we want to incorporate inside our final game.

The disco-jellyfish.

Halfway through the week a came across a fun BBC video on Youtube showing some strange deep-sea creatures. There was this Disco jellyfish and I decided at once to go and try to recreate its strange bioluminescence effect inside Substance Designer. It's not yet finished though I'm quitte keen on getting this to work shortly because the effects will be re-usable for other parts of the game.

 Hopefully this week will be a bit more productive. I aim to get some work done on my proposal.

Startup on the project

Hello world and welcome to my graduation blog. Here I will show you my weekly progress for the coming months. In this first post I will give an overview of what I have done the first couple of weeks of the projects.

But first a small introduction to the project. Together with two other students, Martijn Postma and Peter Klijn I will create a co-operative submarine simulator called ‘Submersion: The Adventures of the Pike!’. An adventure in which the players must work together to plug the leaking holes, wrestle numerous octopi, avoid giant rock formation and narrowly escape a host of different and exciting dangers! The end resulted is expected to be a playable product and a master thesis.

My role in this project will be that of lead 3D artist. I will focus mostly on the pipeline and try to work with some, to me, new technologies like the Mechanim animation system for Unity and Substances for interactive textures.

So what have we done until now?
Martijn managed to implement a first working prototype in the first week or so. It is still all just mock-up, but the main gameplay is already working, although still very rough.

I worked mainly on the 3D mock-ups of the ship and character.

Next to that I made some tests in Substance designer so we can see how it works exactly in unity and how the performance is (which to our shock was exceptionally well)

And finally in the past week I’ve been working on a mock-up for our character, and getting Mechanim to work inside our game. We have some starts on the animation though it still need loads of work. The principles do work though.

And that's it so far. Next week will be more focused on getting some order in my planning and supportive narrative. Also of course some more work on the mock-ups.