Cross Discipline Project: Titan Tussle

Several weeks ago I attended the games student’s pitches for their project and decided to join the Paper Titan team, who were working on a top down 2v2 party game called Titian Tussle. As the name suggests, the game revolves around wrestling titans, and it was our job to model, texture and animate those characters along with assets and an environment.

To begin with, we were tasked to create concept art for the characters and environment. We were brief that there should be two different kinds of characters: Large, slow titans who charged at enemies after a delay, and smaller titans who were faster and could stun enemies.

These are the rough concepts I made for the characters. I tried to make them all very unique but also recognizable as being from the same game.

I was also asked to make a title/logo for the game and provide the layers I used for it so it could be animated, which I made sure to do.

About two weeks into the project we had a meeting on Skype to decide on what characters and environments were going to be used in the project. Initially, the games students wanted 8 characters in total (2 characters for each animator) ready for a play test in 6 days, but I expressed that I thought that would be completely out of scope seeing as we had our own projects to work on, and thankfully they cut the amount of characters back to 4, so we had one character each. I assigned myself to the titan with the tree on it’s head. We had a few technical specifications we had to adhere to: the models should be under 1000 polys and have 1024×1024 texture maps. I was also asked to create portraits for all of the chosen titans.

I made sure to keep the colors bright to suit the desired feel of the game, and gave the pairs contrasting colours in signature elements of their design to indicate the teams.

Having completed and animated characters by the play test was still a bit of a stretch, and we only managed to have the models ready. My model had 631 polys at this stage.

Over the next few weeks I worked on polishing my model, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning and animating my character.

This is the refined model that was used in the game, with 845 polys, nicely below the limit. As it needed to be animated, I made sure to space the polys appropriately and added extra topology on the elbow, but I got it backwards on the knee and only realized when I started skinning! Typical me. I made sure to disguise it as much as possible while I was skinning, anyway.

I must admit (and I’m sure it’s clearly evident) I rushed the UVs! Seeing as we were using fairly flat colors to texture, I thought this stage would be the best place to save some time. I had a few issues with the automatic seams/edges, however. When I quick-peeled an island I manually created a seam for, if there were automatic seams within that island they would flatten as two or more separate islands. I worked around this by selecting the unwanted seams and trying out the stitch options and found that the custom stitch option worked the best.

The textures were pretty easy, as we only had to provide a flat colored diffuse. I added a speckled texture on the titans skin and painted the limbs to look like wood.

Next was creating the animations! We had no idea how to animate for games, so we asked a few of our facilitators and the game student facilitators who all gave us a few resources to look further into. After looking into these and consulting with the games students, we found setting up one scene with all the different animations along the timeline was the best way. Kynan organised it with the game students to film reference on the different movements they were after. These were put up on our dedicated google drive and I found it incredibly helpful (and entertaining) 

I created (in order for below)  an idle, impact reaction, impact, dizzy, pushed back, fall, charge, and channel animations with the help of some documentation for allocating task and for indicating what frames each animation is on.

These are a bit faster than the actual animations used in the game because I got the frame rate wrong when exporting the gifs from photoshop.

I found it difficult to apply the principals of animation to the movements as many of them had to be very fast or start immediately without slowing in as to not interfere with the pace of the game. Even so, I tried to included follow through and secondary animations on the limbs and head where appropriate.

Last of all we were asked to create some portraits for the credit screen in the game, and these were my two!

I am so happy with how the game turned out, it looks great and is really fun to play! We were really lucky to have such a good group of game students; they were really accommodating and gave us heaps of creative freedom as well as keeping us on track and aware of all the upcoming play tests and due dates. Not to mention they actually got it to work somehow! While stressful at times juggling it with two other projects, it was a really rewarding experience and I’m super proud of what we accomplished.

Rapid Production Project: Post 2

Back to the Future & Typomad Title Sequence

Faffing around in Flash

In this post I will mainly be talking about what I did to create the animatic, as well as the feedback we received for it during our week 3 presentation. I managed to use up 8 hours doing this animatic, as a considerable amount of this time was consumed by was experimentation, learning stuff, and trying to fix issues in Flash.  I feel like the end product is just a series of somewhat-disguised quick and dirty workarounds, but it serves it’s purpose! I really learnt a lot about Flash and it’s capabilities (and shortcomings!)

The first scene involves the hoverboard, which the camera zooms in on. The text Hover Board is wiped off to be replaced with initials, an the same happens again with another set of initials. To begin with, I had no idea how I could achieve this due to one main factor: The hoverboard must be opaque/solid so the schematics can appear under it for the transition. The reason the opacity of the board was an issue was because I was planning on having the two strips on the hoverboard transparent so I could animate the initials underneath it. So I did some research and decided to use a mask to solve this problem, so the layer with the initials was on top of the board, but could only appear on the two strips.

Red indicates where the mask is

The animations of the initials sliding in were done with a classic tween. It was super useful and time-saving throughout the whole of this task thanks to it’s simplicity. I also used a classic tween for the zoom after scaling the three layers up, and then again for when it flies off screen.

I was starting to get the hang of things in this scene! The ‘written’ initials were done frame by fame but working backwards- I drew the whole set of initials first and then erased bits frame by frame to make sure they turned out how I wanted them to. The initials that slide on through the window were again done with a mask and a classic tween. The blueprints rolling inwards I had quite a lot of trouble with. Actually making the scrolling up animation was as straight forward as the previous ones, but it was hiding the blueprints behind them that had me scratching my head. I considered continuing the trend of using masks to solve all my problems, but I came up with a lazier faster idea of just adding a solid shape behind the scroll in it’s symbol so it covered what was underneath it and I didn’t have to do any extra animation. I did the initials that meet in the center of the scrolls frame by frame but it happens so fast you can hardly tell anyway.

This is where I included Pats suggestion of using the scrolls to transition to the flux capacitor.

I immediately regretted the idea of adding solid shapes behind the scroll when I got to the beginning of this part. When the other scroll rolls quickly in, it’s supposed to wipe to the flux capacitor, but because I used a solid shape to hide the blueprints, this now got into the way of the transition to the flux capacitor if it was on a lower layer. Masks came to my rescue again, though I feel this was my most abusive use of them yet.

Check out this monstrosity

So again, I put the flux capacitor on a layer above the scrolls and added a mask which covered the entire stage, then tweened the mask to animate in time with the scrolls. I had to add the extra part on top because when I tried to pan upward to the clock, I discovered most of it was missing, and eventually realised it was because of this mask. For the speeding up lights in the flux capacitor I made a long line of blue dots that got closer together at one end to form a line, then applied a mask to it on the the glass tubes, then tweened the line moving toward the center. I repeated this for the other two tubes.

The lights without the mask

Next I tweened a pair of initials to ‘charge’ into existence by editing its opacity in the keyframes. My team leader wanted the flux capacitor to spark, so I added a semi-opaque white shape to fill the entire screen for a few seconds as a kind of lightning, which then fades out to a pair of new initials and a sparks, which is just two keyframes switching between each other.

This is where I used Ben’s suggestion of having the clock hands continue spinning after the the wipe to the logo.

The last scene is the clock, which after ticking forward the hands wipe backwards quickly to reveal the Back to the Future logo on the clock face. I couldn’t think of a way to achieve this effect without revealing the logo frame by frame besides shape tweening a mask, so I decided to try that out after animating the hands of the clock.

I learned that shape tweens are very… interesting. I played around with them a bit and found out I got the best result when the keyframes of the shape tween didn’t have a drastic change between them and also when the shape itself had fewer nodes. It still came out pretty wonky.

Overall my team was happy with it which was good! Unfortunately I forgot all about adding music for our presentation on Wednesday but we got some really good feedback. It was suggested to us to include more motion/panning in the shots and to make the sequence slightly longer, both of which we have done since! However, this makes the animatic slightly obsolete, but we have stuck for the most part with the animations for the initials shown above, while the shots and layout were set up in a 3DS Max scene file by Ben, which is available to all the team members.

On an unreleated note I now know how to import an image sequence into photoshop and export it as a gif thanks to having to learn how to do that for this post.