Getting to grips with animation & Motion Graphics.

Since my synoptic pitch I have strongly come to grips with how to use animation and more of the fundamentals such as squash & stretch, composition, anticipation etc.

Wednesday just gone, I was to create a birthday celebration template like that of Facebook’s, but obviously with my own twist.

With my laptop being able to only handle 2d motion graphics, I seemed more comfortable with the task I was given. Firstly I started by setting some placeholders to figure out where the rest of the assets will appear at the end of the animation.

But it’s not just about coming in and starting a piece requested by a client, it’s also following through with the client on a project to make sure their views are being visually shown to their standards. This also links in with Pre-Production and I will touch up on this on another blog relating to the upcoming Synoptic project.

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My pipeline of working on 3D models…

Coming to the last year of college I have come to think about how far ive came in terms of 3D modeling, from my first ever 3D barrel to an entire game filled with clusters of assets and they all in themselves help me progress further in my specialisation.

Over the past two months of making assets, my modeling development pipeline has become ever more structed in what application I carry my asset over to for further texture or modeling altercations.

Alphas, colour & normal – Substance Painter

When I open up substance painter, I get all my default assets such as: Brushes, Alphas, grunge, procedurals etc..

But what if I want something more, something accustomed towards that object?

Take the grandfather clock for example…

Not much of a clock without the layout of a clock on the front, right?

Well it was possible thanks to the power of Photoshop. Now when I consider the advantages of Substance painter, it takes out the tedious task of having to re-update texture maps and then re importing them over and over again. I can now make brushes with Photoshop that I can import into Substance Painter making the whole process so much easier.

How to import textures into substance painter:

‘Open Substance Painter’

1. Select the Import resources button in your shelf.    
2. In the pop up box, click ‘Add resources’   .
3. Select you files which you want to import.
4. Apply your textures to a specific category

and finally import.

The textures you have imported should then be in your shelf under project.

Game Project: Victim of Valor (Update)

Easter is here and after a long and stressful time working throughout the college term, I thought it would be a good time to take a small break (Playing battlefield 4 for an hour). Anyway, I have just came back from a long day with my girlfriend and now writing to update you on my current project named Victim of Valor which i have been creating for 2/3 weeks now.

Last time I spoke about this game I included that i had a team brought in to give a hand in the development process which was kinda hard considering there was a debate on names and where the story would progress from where we left off which obviously i cant tell you guys yet due to any spoilers.

On Wednesday during 2D lecture, my tutor told me about something called the Bafta YGD (Young Game Designers) which is basically a competition where you sign up your game project and could possibly win a Bafta in either the Young Game Designers category or The Tutors award or something like that… I’m still taking this into consideration because the game can only be entered if I have a team of 3 or as a singular entrant. Therefor I can either enter myself and take the “Possible award” for my team or wait intil next time and develop the game further.

Back to development of the game, It’s coming along fine. Just tweaking the last mechanics of the UI (User interface) then start creating more harder, longer and even enemy infested level’s. Also asking other peers of friends what they would like to see in the game. I get feedback such as, “Add boost during game-play” or “Have a twist so the player feels more ‘tied into the story line'”. I can find all feedback good even if there is something i come across that is totally irrelevant.

For now I can balance my time with coding my game then create some picture based scenes like in Diablo 3 but obviously not a awesome haha

I have some extracts of the scenes from the games story.

Spaceship Model Assessment/Flash AS3 Game (Dodge)

Maya Spaceship model

After many weeks of theory in each aspect of games design Level 2 which was painstaking mentally, we have managed to start creating something. For 3D lessons, we started to gather concepts pictures from different types of sci-fi related TV shows, blockbuster movies or video games both old and new. Then we had do draw up and illustrate a spaceship draft which all had a specific feature that we grabbed from each of our concept picture research. I have made a powerpoint presentation on each ship i had chosen, then proceeded to explain why I chose the ships i did for example, I like the Light jet from TRON: Legacy because of its thin and elegant design followed by the inverted tail wings on the back of the ship. Moving over to the drafting and drawing side of the project, I have already drawn up a ship for one of my 3D models. I now either need to apply this to a physical 3D model constructed in Maya or draw up more designs to branch out my options.

Flash AS3 Project

Following on from that week, we had got back into the world of C# based code in Flash AS3 only this time I actually improved on my coding skills, these are mostly more knowledge of terms, animation and timeline usage & how to add different features by recycling the code I either used in previous projects or in the current code I was using. For example:

I had the player movement written down, but also wanted the player to know how many lives he/she had left, therefore I had to find out how to apply the dynamic text to the player or make it follow with the same speed or movement.

I firstly looked at the PLAYER movement and thought ‘what if I copy the movement of the player and change the instance name to the name of the feedback?’. Bending the rules by asking a question to myself until i found an idea… a little something from industry class I learnt.

Secondly after copying the player movement, I had to change all of the asset names but make sure that the movement of both the feedback and the player were exact. This would, therefore follow and move with the player but only when I control the player.

When I finally written the code in the right way and tested it, I was jumping for joy of how I had done this without any help. i then thought if I can do this with health, imagine what other things I could to make this game better. I followed the same method and tried to create a multiplayer… shamefully this was proving to be with more of a challenge because when I tested the game, the camera was still following the first player and leaving the other one behind.

Typical Geek Studios

As I’m using flash more, it gets easier to create a more complex animation, we started making our own logos a week ago to animate how we wish. At that point i made an immediate decision to go for the Typical geek studios logo therefore I don’t need to make a completely new logo from scratch… there was only one problem overall about continuing with my work and that is the animation would restart to where I was a few hours before I actually saved the work.

I didn’t have much time to continue with my work but when i did, i took it upon myself to make improvements to the animation such as motion path and character movement.

2D Design – Coding

 Wednesday 22nd October 2015

6th week in and I’m still struggling to code my game through the actions module on adobe flash. There was a video placed on before we got to code, teaching us the basics for starting to code the game from the ground up. We therefore applied these set of skills to our own individual projects. at the start I found it easy, but then suddenly became intertwined in problems with naming different actions and events in the code itself, this lead me into many problems. Even though I asked for help, I realized later that there was a flaw in my skills as a game designer.

In contrast the art of the project was coming on great, considering that I lost one of the main fonts used in the games main navigation system, this lead me to believe that I would have to re-shift all of the necessary assets to make the game seem simple to the user/Player.

overall the week has been pretty interesting, improvements are being made in my knowledge about the games industry and the 3-D art of Modeling. I will move on with this in another blog but for now, getting the code mastered will bring me a huge advantage in my efforts to be a better designer in the 2-D area of game design and maybe other areas of game design, VFX (Visual Effects) and Animation.