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AX3002- Reflecting on my project

So I decided to do a separate post for talking about my final project as I wanted to write my thoughts about the project from the beginning to the end and how I could have approached things differently or if I think I did the best with what I knew at the time.

So starting from the beginning which was actually during the summer I knew I wanted to do the game project as it’s something I have passion for and have a strong interest into the process of making games. I knew I was going to have to learn Unreal as I had watched GDC talks in the past and I recall them most of the time saying they like to see the animation in game, so I began work to look into how the basics of Unreal worked but most of my time was spent looking into how game animation are different to film animation though now looking back I would have recommend looking into unreal more as I could have learnt about game animation and the difference between them and film during the actual animation process.

The first part of my brief was the concept generation my main worry with this was not having enough animations for my final piece and not reaching the 80-100 cycles which was stated in that brief which now I understand I was clearly underestimating how much animation had to be done because if I went with some of my earlier drafts and didn’t tweak my final one to work with some of the animations I did I don’t think I would have had enough time to get everything done. This project has really opened my eyes in terms of how much animation goes into game for preforming some actions which at first may not seem like they need that much but the further you go down you realise how much you actual need and for me that was the cover animation as I did understand the majority of the animations I had to do but when it came to the cover transition stuff I released I would need actions of the character entering cover from the side which I didn’t really consider at the start. Another example was the climbing though this was to a small extent with the climbing up with the hands close together I didn’t really take into account I was going to need to do this animation twice one for each hand going first to make the action of moving up much cleaner.

Next up was Character design which I am still happy with how my characters look as I do still believe they are different enough to stand out and not be mistaken but fit into understandable roles that the characters have to perform I am also glad I was talked into focusing on just two characters by Mario as again I had stated in my previous paragraph I originally wanted to stealth takedowns which now knowing what I know I was again underestimating how many animations would need to be done to complete this action and having to make another character would have reduced the quality of my models rigs I think as I struggle with the skinning process and while not perfect far from it I think Rogue and the Drone turned out as models/ rigs well.

Next was the animation and here I began working through my cycles and here I basically used gathered my reference and animated to that blocking the poses and then proceeding to spline and then tidy up adding more key frames as needed, though towards the end of my project I began to work more with the graph editor to achieve little changes between poses as my keyframe method I used for my films would not always work due to how quick the pose would change which would cause the animation to jump and be less smooth. Though I do feel this project has changed how I approach animation and my process for making better animation and I even learned about some tool which can help me improve my animation with the main one being the “visualise arc” tool which I used to create the AZRI sword swing seen in my showreel.

After the animation was then testing them in Unreal which for one I do believe it might have been better to instead of having a “training area” as I called it building the environment as I went showing off the animation as I worked on them which with the current map I have would have changed the order I worked on each of the animation sets. As stated I feel like more knowledge in Unreal and the programming in animation would have benefited me greatly and while I could have learnt some of the basics during the summer and maybe having an understanding/ picking animations which wouldn’t have needed as much programming as I feel like I might have picked two game functions that are difficult to program and if I had considered that I might have only focused on one and done one and doing more animations to smooth them out.

Overall though I am happy with this project and while it may not be up to the standard I wanted to be I have learnt a lot and am happy with what I have been able to achieve/ learn though in a short amount of time and I definitely plan to continue to focus more down the gaming animation road and improve both my skills as an animator and in Unreal.

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AX3002- Final Game Walkthrough

So here is my final submission for AX3002 which is shows both all my animation samples at a 3/4 view so you can see the majority of the action being performed but some animations like the vaulting animation and moving forward out of cover have a forward camera so you can actually see how the character  leaves the cover. I have added title cards to break the video ups to make the transition between Maya and Unreal less abrupt.

I was unfortunately not able to figure out what was causing that beeping noise during the climbing animation and couldn’t find anything that seemed to relate what I was experiencing so unfortunately this has been left it in.

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While looking at Jean’s other animations video this one came up in my recommendations and since I am leaving Uni soon I felt like this would be an intresting video to listen to and help plan out/ approch what I want to do after finishing Uni.

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AX3002- Showreel Update

So here is my final Showreel unfortanlly due to some issues with Unreal and having all my focus on that I havn’t been able to completely finish all the aniamtion I wanted to get finished to go along with the music which lead to me having to use some old/ new video which I didn’t plan on using to fit the gap but match the music.

Unfortunately with my final piece Unreal had some issues with the sound which has taken up the majority of my focus (still not fixed) these past few weeks and I didn’t get the other animation I wanted to do which I think would have made my showreel for the show more gaming focused though because of time i have changed that to still be more gaming focused but also shows off some cinematic stuff from my two minute film.

I also included a AZRI piece I did a while ago which was done when I was getting use to using the model with the idea behind the shot was to show expression and telling a story through the expression. Here the idea was that she would turn see someone which causes her to be shocked/ surprised before getting angry and grabbing her sword.

The animation I didn’t have time to finish was a attack combo with a sword and shield, a death animation.

In terms of what I was able to get done I think the showreel works with the brief for are project with most of the scenes fitting to the music and the transisions taking place on the beats I chose this music because I thought about the progression of the showreel starting of with a slow beat which I thought would work for walk cycles and as the song progress the beat gets faster which I thought would make it good for more of the parkour focus of my current project.

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AX3002- Game Walkthrough

Here is the current gameplay footage of my character moving throughout Unreal with the sounds added to they're respective action to be performed during the gameplay. 

Overall I think this is fine there is definitely a lot of things that could be smoother  which I believe is how I’ve programmed the actions to work and as for there sound they work exactly as they do in the previous video. 

One issue that I am confused by and am struggling to understand what it wrong is that there is always a “beep” noise during the climbing section and it always seems to take place at the second leaping animation. Which at first I thought was the idle animation for the “looking at computer” and this was being triggered due to the pause between the leaps as I have the idles on a cycle quickly so I could show them off. 

I decided to first move all the idle animation to be triggered sort of like emotes using the 1-3 keys (this was better for showing of anyway and am not sure why I didn’t do this earlier in the project) as this would mean the sounds would no longer be on a random cycle like the animations and instead would have to be triggered though this did not fix the issue and the beep remained.

I then out of curiosity backed up my files and deleted all the idle animation sound files to help narrow down what it might be and as expected the sound remained still. 

I then did a double check on my leaping sound effects to make sure the beep wasn’t part of the audio and again no the audio was clean.

Due to deadline being so close I am going to use this video for my submission for now but between the time I’ve got left I will be experimenting and trying to fix this issue and if I do I will then replace my submission video with this.

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AX3002- All Sound & Updated Animations

Here is my up to date and final render of all my animations with the sound I have been able to gather for my game project this video also include some new animations these mostly being on the leaping animations for which I used the “visualise arches” tool in Maya to make sure the hands and hips traveled in an arch to the other ledge to make sure the animation looked nice. 

As for the sound I think they work for showing off what the character is doing visually as for the quality and levelling of some of them could be better but I’ve tried to keep the sound within the 9 - 15 level mark as I seem to recall Mario telling us to aim for this when balancing audio. 

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AX3002- Emissive material Research

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/Materials/HowTo/Masking/index.html

Here are the two resources that I used to research emissive material and how I could apply these to my characters especially Rogue as I his mask is completely hidden by the hood and overall made the character look less appealing at least to me and adding some lights and colour to him might help with the appeal at least in Unreal Engine.

Here are the final results of my attempt to improve the way my characters look in Unreal and overall I’m happy with how these have turned out and it was actually a lot easier to do than I had originally thought.

All I had to do was mask of where I wanted the light to be using the characters UV map I masked of the texture image with white (areas I wanted the light to be) and black (where I didn’t want them to be) and then it was as simple as adding them to the material through a multiple and colour node and then done. 

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AX3002- How I got my Sound

So here I’ve decided to do a post showing how I went about gathering some. of the sound for Rogue and a little bit for the Drone. While most of the sound effects where found online and mix and matched to give me something that I thought would sound how the character would move I did gather what I think was a good amount of sound effects for both characters in terms of some of there movements which I think will give them there own unique way of sounding.

So the first thing I was able to gather for sound was my character walking, jogging and sprinting which I used these old boots I still had because of the weight of them I felt like they produced more noise and where also the closest thing I had that matched what my character is wearing. I did also use these to simulate some of the characters climbing sound effects though this was only a few and most of the others where found online.

Next was the coat tail I knew I needed to gather sound of the coat moving during the more extreme actions like the leaping animation and to try and simulate that cloth sound I used this leather jacket which I would shake to get for the sound of it when the character is running or jumping. I also used this coat for when the character takes cover as I wanted something similar to that of “Gears of War” were the game seems to have a sound effect to show that you are now in cover and I wanted something similar for my game. 

Next up was something for the monkey bars which I had originally planned to look for online but I wasn’t able to find one I liked and what I thought suited the game as most of them to me sounded far too tinny/ cartoony. Luckily we still had this pole that was from my brothers slide that we think is a spare and I recorded myself grabbing hold of the bar as If I was moving from one to another and as if I had jumped from one to another.

The final sound I gathered myself was that of the drone running I knew I wanted this light tapping sort of noise for when the drone ran but was struggling to find anything close for it so I decided to attempt to get what I was looking for and the way I went around doing this was using a key to tap different surfaces to see what noise they would make until I eventually got what I wanted.

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AX3002- Unreal Optimization

I recently found out about this filter in Unreal which seems to let you know if the number of polygons on the level and if you are close to reaching the max poly count. Though I didn’t think I would need to worry too much about this as my model is relativly low poly count compared to most game models from game which have been created in Unreal but I thought this was worth showing that my models and map leave the optimaization in the green,

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AX3002- Wall Run program guide

Here is a guide for how to program the wall running animations. Which was perfect for setting up with wall run for me as it was trying to recreate the Titanfall 2 wall run which is a game which inspired this project which means I would be getting the look I wanted for my wall run but the guide itself was extremely easy to follow which with what happen with the pole swing meant I was able to get back on track to getting this project finished on time.

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AX3002- Animation Mistakes

Here are some videos I watched from a serious of videos about the most common animation mistakes though due to the time I discovered these videos I did not have enough time to watch everything but decided to watch the videos with the subject that I felt I needed more help with understanding or looking into a better way to check if these elements are present or not within my work.

Overall I found these videos extremely helpful especially the arc video while I knew animation looks pleasing when presented in an arc I was introduced to a tool in Maya which will allow me to look at the arcs present within my animation. Which I will be doing as I plan to revisit my leaping animation as these animations feel off to me.

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AX3002- Unreal Engine Map

Here is how the blueprint map of translated into Unreal engine which overall I think turned out well. 

I followed the blueprint faithfully though I did have to make some changes to layout which I thought would help with the overall presentation of the piece the most noticeable being the wall run being moved to be after the cover section and before the climbing section. I did this because I thought having the wall run then monkey bars then pole swing would be too many different animations too quick together for presentation and that the walk of from the cover section to the climbing section and felt this would improve the overall pace of the final gameplay demo.

For the texture I have just used the default unreal texture which I had to turn into a material by selecting the default floor and exporting the texture. Then all I had to do was change the colour of the material. 

Since I was creating an area similar to that of low town I decided the floor and building colours would be brown and the rest of the object colours would be changed to represent different actions which could be performed on that object.

Yellow - Monkey bars/ pole swing or climbing Grey - Cover Green- Can’t be interacted with

I chose this colours as they stood out from the brown/ white walls that made the map linear but would also clearly show anyone who would play this what actions can be performed on it.

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AX3002- Pole Swing Issue Fixed

Unfortunately I didn’t get a response on the Unreal forums helping me with my issue but I was able to fix this after some messing around and research I what I found out was I hadn’t created enough variables for Unreal to properly understand when to perform the animation sequence when moving to a new pole causing it to play the swing cycle then moving before playing the kick off animation. 

I will continue to program the remaining animations before moving onto creating my unreal environment.

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AX3002- Unreal Map Planning

Here is a blueprint map of what I plan to build in Unreal and where I plan to show off each asset and how I plan to do so. 

The thought behind this map was so that the player would be able to run round the map multiple times to see each asset again this plan was something I had been thinking about before the lockdown and was how I thought it would be best to have shown off at the physical show. Though thought behind the map still works for a digital walkthrough as the map is created as if it was in low town as most of the animations are relevant there. 

Overall I do like this map though I am unsure as to whether showing off the wall run, monkey bars and pole swing all in one place is a bit too much and there is a large space between the cover steam area and the climbing so maybe one can be moved there. 

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AX3002- Pole Swing Issue

So the final thing I have left to program into Unreal is the Monkey bars, Pole swing and wall run. 

Unfortunately I was not able to find any walkthroughs for how to program the monkey bars or the pole swing, I thought it would use the same blueprint format as climbing up the wall which is to create a “trace” from the character to the object wanting to be grabbed and this would work for both the monkey bars and the pole swing. 

I believe I have got the monkey bars off to a good enough point for now though I am currently having an issue with the pole swing animation mainly with the transition from one pole to another pole animation. At the moment I currently have no idea on how to fix this though I have made a post on Unreal forums asking for help so hopefully I can get an answer but in the mean time I will continue to research and try out other methods to fix this as from my current knowledge and understanding of how game animation works this is an issue with programming and NOT the animation with how its been exported

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AX3002- All Animations

Here are all the animations that I am going to be showing off in my game narrative walkthrough though I do plan to revisit some of these animation before the end of the project with the ones taking priority being the leaping animations as I overall feel like these are still incomplete but also look off with the hand on some of them in terms of positioning but also the switching to the IK or FK causes the arms on some leaps to bend in on themselves. 

There is one animation which was on the timetable which I have decided to not go ahead with and that is because of how I currently plan to present my gameplay but also because of how it would require more programming that is beyond what I need to do to show of these previous animations.

This is the repair set of animations and I this would require an interaction between the two characters which from what I understand about Unreal I would have to set up a another collision box and program both assets into doing both of there appropriate actions at the same time and to be triggered by the same button by the right character. 

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AX3002- Showreel Research

I found this video which is done by Allan Mckay who says he has reviewed showreels when putting a team together for projects and discusses the mistakes most common mistakes in a showreel. This video is reviewed from someone who looks at VFX / design but I thought it could also be applied to my own showreel for games 

Here again like Jean’s video he also mentions about music not being important due to again reviewers most of the time not listening to the music but also says that making a story out of your showreel is not important. He also mentions about the length no more than 2 minutes which we have to stick to 1 minute for are brief so that wan’t an issue.

What was interesting is he did say the about best work 1st but then suggested putting you 2nd best work last the reasoning behind this is that this will be the piece the reviewer will most likely remember.