Battle Maiden Part 2

Day 2: Saturday

Fixed shoulder joint twisting.

Had to leave early because like mentioned, it suddenly turned out to be cleaning day.

It turns out Saturday was also when the meetup for the Game On! Philippines 2012, a game development competition for students. Me being one of the mentors for the participants, and that day was when the participants would meet with the organizers to show progress on their game, I attended the meeting to talk with the participants.

I'll talk about that some other time, but long story short, I wasn't able to do much progress on day 2.

Day 3: Sunday

Got things set up back at home. It's kinda hard to get back to the rhythm since the 48 hour hackathon didn't push through.

Suddenly I'm having crash problems with my Unity.

Every time I click "Apply" on changed prefab settings, there seems to be a 2 out of 3 chance that Unity will crash.

I guess it's because I'm using an old version, 3.5.5f2. So I tried finding 3.5.6, the latest one in the 3.x versions.

The official Unity site, for some reason, doesn't show the links to older versions of Unity. Since Unity 4 is out, this means there's no links to any 3.x versions.

I had to find it from the forums, and even the site had problems.

Dark forces are at play here.

When I finally got to it, the download is slow, as expected. Oh Asian Internet, you so crazy.

It would have been nice to just press Ctrl+S in the Unity editor and be assured that everything was saved in case a crash happens again.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case. When you change settings in prefabs, or GUI skins, or ScriptableObject files for example, Unity holds off saving the changes to the disk until you quit Unity. So I find myself closing and opening Unity after every significant change I make.

Meanwhile, I got the Locomotion system working a little more smoother and I got to test the player model in the game.

Times like these I wish we had motion capture studios. I heard you can use a Kinect as a low-cost makeshift motion capture device.

Day 4: Monday

Have I mentioned that I go to the office only when I feel like it? Yeah, so Monday will be devoted to finishing this, because I say so.

Day 5: Tuesday

Have I mentioned I rarely ever get any work done while at home? Yeah, so I slept all day long yesterday. But I was able to test attack animations today.

Also, seems like the version update for Unity got rid of the crashes.

Day 6: Wednesday

I did a few thumbnail sketches so I wouldn't forget what animations I wanted to do. I should've done this earlier.

Right now the game is sort of on-hold as Wednesday is usually the time I go to the office.

Battle Maiden Part 1

In the small game development studio I work in, I wanted to have what we ended up calling "Free Fridays": Every first Friday of the month, everyone stops doing work for clients and make personal projects. At the end of the day, you show your work to everyone.

This was an excuse to find the time to do crazy ideas that we get every now and then.

One such idea came to me when I was about to sleep, I just thought all of a sudden "Damn it, I want to play Assassin's Creed style combat right now on my Android tablet."

I thought, yeah that could work. I actually like the easier, free flow approach in Batman: Arkham Asylum. Batman can dart from one end of the arena to the next so easily, hitting opponents here and there.

H-Here We Go

So when our Operations Director mentioned we forgot to do Free Fridays again for this month, I thought I'd do that idea.

I also requested that Free Friday be lengthened to 48 hours (up to Saturday), since the idea I had was a lot of work. Game jams are mostly 48 hours anyway.

Even with the extended duration, I knew I had to cheat a little. I'm only one guy doing both code and art so 48 hours was probably still not enough.

Day 0: Wednesday-Thursday

I stole some time from work to prepare the 3d models I'd use. For the enemy I used the soldier model I already made from before.

For the player, I used MakeHuman to create a base mesh, then added hair and clothes in Blender.

I did this with the understanding that I'm making a throwaway model just so I can finish this as soon as possible. While her face shouldn't be anime like my old sketches, it shouldn't be the one that MakeHuman comes with either.

I downloaded a bunch of Assassin's Creed 2 and Batman Arkham Asylum YouTube videos for reference.

The idea was that we'd start at 00:00 of Friday and end at 23:59 of Saturday, to really squeeze the 48 hours. It wouldn't be wise to extend to Sunday, and the higher-ups didn't want us to start earlier than Friday.

So by about 1 AM of Friday, I was still preparing the player 3d model. I had a headache and felt like vomiting (as always when I stay too long in the office), so I had to sleep it out.

Day 1: Friday

By morning I was ready to tackle it on.

This was my first draft for the ideas.

I thought I'd try Unity 4 with all its fancy new animation systems with the blend tree. Hopefully that would make my work easier.

As I tried getting myself accustomed to the GUI changes in Unity 4, this happens.

I can't rely on a tool that crashes, given that I have a tight deadline for this, so off I went back to Unity 3.

These were my first few tests:

I wanted a way for the enemies to figure out the path to get to the player's backside. I also wanted them to move in an encircling fashion. So I made a simple waypoint system to track the player's front, back, left, and right sides.

Next I had the enemies actually follow that path.

By afternoon, I swapped in the enemy 3d model. I used Rune Johansen's Locomotion System to make the walk animations look better. Props to Rune!

Unfortunately we were suddenly told that Saturday can't be used anymore because the office will be cleaned. I guess I just have to take my work home or something.

To tell the truth though, not a lot of people in the office was taking Free Friday very seriously. Some understandably still had deadlines to meet and some were just playing videogames.

I actually still needed to fix the player 3d model. It wasn't even rigged/skinned yet, so I ended up taking too much time there.

I wanted a lot of fancy physics effects on the player. The skirt and ponytail should sway, and her boobs should *ahem* move naturally.

For cloth swaying, Unity has the built-in Skinned Cloth component for that and it works as expected. The interface to configure it isn't exactly great, but it works as advertised.

Doing the same thing for the ponytail would be overkill, and besides, it should move more like linked pieces of elongated chains than like a strip of cloth anyway.

I found a link in reddit that explains a simple trick, just use rigidbodies with joints on them and add some swaying motion: http://www.farfarer.com/blog/2011/07/07/unity-skeletal-ragdoll-jiggle-bones-tutorial/

The only problem was that the tutorial needed me to configure my 3d modeling software to specifically disable keyframe animation on the bones that need to jiggle. Unfortunately, no such option exists in Blender, so I just did something quick to fix it.

I made a script in Unity that detaches the ponytail's bone from the skeleton then reattach it again quickly. This would cause it to stop being moved by the skeleton's animations, while still being connected to it.

For the boobs, the wiki site has something just for that: http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=JiggleBone

The code for that needed some cleaning up and it didn't seem to work reliably at all for a 3d model created in Blender, so I took some time to fix it.

The day ended with me staring at bouncing boobs.

While I feel a little stupid for doing this, I made pretty sure the physics don't go so far as this:

Damn, I haven't even added combat yet.

Death Zone Zero: Sign 3d Model

Here's some artwork to help fill the lack of posts lately.


Its an old 3d model I plan on using for Death Zone Zero, perhaps I'll animate the sign swaying back and forth a little.

Made in Blender and textured in GIMP.

Death Zone Zero: Minor Update: Creating High-poly Version of the Rifleman

So I decided to give up trying to use Sculptris. I guess I'm not good with 3d sculpting programs. I'm modeling the high poly version of the Rifleman in plain old Blender instead.

Death Zone Zero: Minor Update: Rifleman 3d Model Test

I'm working on the graphics right now, after having coding in 5 different units for the game.

gunner weapon and run animation

Took me this long. His weapon's textured completely now, and I've made a looping run animation test of him.

Gunner Rifle Weapon

I finally decided on the gunner's rifle weapon. Not textured yet. He'll also have a pistol as a secondary weapon.

wrist rot problem fixed

After a long time, I tried working on the gunner's wrist problem once more. I bothered downloading The Mancandy FAQ only to find out it didn't explain how the rigging in the wrist worked.

I tried searching in BlenderArtists and found a solution in a thread. It was this blend file in particular (made by doncuan) that gave me the idea. However, I did realize that I had modeled my character's mesh without giving forethought to wrist rotation. This other blend file (made by Vertex Pusher) demonstrates a much better forearm mesh designed to twist properly. I'll study it in detail when I make a new character.

I also modeled and rigged the gunner's weapon. Its not textured yet. After looking at it, I decided it looked too much like a fireman's hose, so I'm going to make a different model.

wrist rot problem

See, this is the problem.

Its like you take a piece of paper, roll it to a tube, then twist it. It'll lose volume and shape. I need to make a way to have a wrist bone that will deform the mesh properly. I've looked over Mancandy and it uses an approach I never saw before. I'll try it in the weekend.

Monday, 4 February 2008 20:16:25 PHT

Got sick. Hadn't done much. I was also trying out homebrew dev on a Nintendo DS.

Sunday, 27 January 2008 23:38:35 PHT

I hadn't expected painting textures would take so much time. Two days and this is the only thing I made. Still not used to it. Nevertheless, its good that I've made something close to average quality considering its been a long time (2+ years?) since I did CG.



In other news: ಠ_ಠ

Monday, 21 January 2008 21:19:33 PHT

Not much work was done.

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I spent the Saturday buying a new 400 GB hard drive (which has practically only 372.61 GB of space). It turned out to be a Western Digital Caviar SE.

The only problem was that the store had no stock of SATA data cables, so it took me quite a while scouring shops for one. I got one for PHP 30.00 (roughly USD 0.75).

Then I tested the new hard drive for defects, reorganized my files, made some DVD backups, and that was it. The weekend was over before I noticed.

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Changed the inner shirt's color. I think this one suits him better. His color scheme should be monotonous and unextravagant.

I realized I made the mistake of giving tiny objects (the belt buckles) more UV texture space, which was practically useless since they're only a few pixels big compared to the other parts of the gunner 3d model.

Even the head's UV texture is using up too much space. The glove's texture is the one that needs more space, so maybe next time I'll readjust the UVs.

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In other news, a man's family was involuntarily abducted by 14th century feudal Japanese assassins. He is currently seeking ways to finance a rescue operation.

Saturday, 12 January, 2008 21:55:27 PHT

So I heard over here that keeping a journal about the stuff that you do helps to force you focus on what you're doing. Well, I was getting lazy, and I thought to myself, instead of continuing to spend weekends just fapping to porn, this'll be what I'm doing.

I still have no Internet connection in my home computer, so updates will be slow. Weekly, probably.

The gunner model is the first task. I'm working on the textures right now. I figure buying a Wacom tablet would speed up the process (after learning how to use it), but I just don't want to spend right now.

After that:

• fix wrist bone
• model/texture weapons
• idle and move animation
• off to coding
• ???
• PROFIT
  

Not necessarily in that order.

I just found out that Blender actually does allow textured meshes to recieve lighting, and the feature was there, ever since the ancient 2.2x versions. The only problem is that the lamps should be in the same layer as the mesh object in question. Nevertheless, this thing should have been on by default.

In other news, King Leonidas of the Spartans announces his next preferred place of dining.