Hearing the Call

This is something that I have been working on in my spare time for a while now, and I think I am about ready to call it done. With this I mostly wanted to work on my colour skills and apply some of the ideas and techniques that I learnt while working on my sword and dagger that I made previously. (Finished pics of the dagger will be coming up in a near future)

What I wanted to portray was the moment where Tamarrion decides to leave her life as she knew it behind her to hear the call of the gods and accept the challenge to become their champion.

I have all these half-finished stuff laying around, so it feels good to getting things done again as I have finally finished both my dagger and this painting. Now I am trying to figure out what I want to do next. Perhaps I will create the character that the dagger belongs to, or maybe something else, not quite sure yet (should probably make a plan, plans are good). :)

Nihteana: Animations

A while ago I finished Nihteana's animations, at least up until a point where I could do no more before I could see all of them implemented correctly in the engine. Fortunately the coders have not found any issues so far.

Nihteana out for a walk, testing the rig and skin in 3Ds Max

I had all my mocap data cleaned since before Christmas and the frames which I was going to use selected. As expected her animations were like a dream to clean up, since I was completely still apart from moving my upper body when doing the shoot and how she always keep her arms apart, there was barely any occlusion. I had hopes that Nihteana's animations would be less of a problem than Tamarrion's had been.

Elbow bone not matching fold in 3Ds Max

 I soon noticed that there was an issue with her arm, as I could not get the elbow to fold properly. It turned out that I had not aligned the fold and the bone well enough, meaning that I had to return to the high poly sculpt to fix it and then readjust the lowpoly and re-skin the model. So Tamarrion taught me how not to make a shoulder and Nihteana how not to make an elbow. This was a setback, but it also gave me a chance to go back to the highpoly and make her hands bigger and have a better-looking bend, pushing their quality further.

Channel spell animation, before animating fingers

The experience of animating hands which I had had before was that it was not that big of an issue. The difference between Tamarrion and Nihteana is that Tamarrion always has one hand firm on her sword and the other slightly closed, all fingers moving simultaneously while Nihteana's animations are all about the movement of her long fingers. I hoped that they just might not be a problem although I had a feeling deep inside that I could be terribly wrong. That feeling was right. The fingers turned out to be a complete pain, and it was seriously tricky to figure out how they would move in relation to each other. What I did was film my own hands, trying to move them as I wanted her fingers to move and then take keyframe screenshots to see how the fingers should be positioned at different stages of the animations. This was something that I had to redo several times with various animations, since they did not want to cooperate. I had to be really really careful in which order I applied the poses on the fingers.

Screenshot used for her finger animations

Motionbuilder was not always cooperating either, causing additional issues with the key frame animations for the fingers. Apart from the fingers, my biggest problem, which I have never come across before, which occurred in almost every single animation was that there was twitching in the upper body flowing all the way through the arms and hands. This meant that I had to go and look at the fcurves of every single bone to find and attempt to fix the problem. It took me a great deal of time and I am still not completely sure of why I had this issue. Sometimes the animation had seemed fine while working on it and then all of a sudden there it was. I believe that it might have something to do with which frames you select when you choose your looping sequence, but I had been really careful to make sure that the first and last frames matched as close as possible in position.

Trying to fix the fcurves

I also got this weird bug in Motionbuilder (2015) it took me days to find no answer at all until I finally found someone with the same problem. The problem I had was that the bones were invisible even though the xray mode was activated. I tried sending the file to a friend and he could see the rig, so I knew it was not the file but the program. To fixed this I did a complete reinstall of the software, which worked, for a day or so. This is when I finally found the answer, it seems as if Motionbuilder remembers this "setting" for the file, so you have to open Motionbuilder by opening an uncorrupted file and from that open up the file you want to work with.

Skinning below belt is not perfect, but it does not matter since

 we use cloth physics

Animating the shoulder pads was another challenge, which I had to redo a couple of times. I needed to readjust the rig slightly to get a better pivot point, but I believe this is something that can still be improved. This was also an attempt to fix an issue with the feathers which seemed to have a life of their own. Somehow the feathers moved from there position in the keyframes when I added new ones. Since I had to move the shoulder pads with the arms my greatest fear was that they would twitch between animations since I was unable to use poses on them for some reason. The programmer who is working with her has not noticed any problem with them so far though.

Feathers no longer wanting to follow their bones

There was another great issue with the shoulder pads however, which caused a great deal of stress. Once I had redone all their animations, since they would not follow when I transferred the animations to an updated version of the model, everything was working fine in Motionbuilder so I sent it to my colleague to test in the engine. Everything seemed to be working fine, apart from the small detail of the shoulder pads and skulls hanging from the belt were flying around in a complete mess somewhere in the vicinity of the character model. I went back to Motionbuilder to find what could be wrong, but did not find anything. I tried creating a clean take and import the animations to a new character but there was no difference. It was only the .fbx from Motionbuilder, one that was rigged and skinned but not animated from 3Ds Max was perfect. I tried to find an answer if it could have anything to do with the character extensions but found nothing. To test if it might be something with Unity I opened the .fbx in Unreal and all animations worked perfectly.

Dance dance, Underground Rave test in Unreal

 






This meant that whatever the issue was it was something that only Unity reacted on. The solution turned out to be removing the skinning of the shoulder pads and skulls, luckily they were skinned as separate objects, reset the xform and re-skin them. This time when I imported the animations, expecting to have to redo the shoulder pad animations, everything seemed to follow and I could send it to test in Unity again. This time there were no problems that we could find before seeing how the animations blend between each other when she behaves in the way she is supposed to in the game, meaning that my work was done for this time.

Nihteana UV-Mapping

Before moving on to the rigging and skinning of Nihteana, the character I have been working on, I UV-mapped her. Doing this I encountered something which I have not before. Max just did not seem to want to relax the pieces properly, even though there should be no problem with the seams and all the pieces would just shrink and shrink until manually stopped.

 

Eventually I managed to get the pieces to where I wanted them but Max thought otherwise and rearranged some parts of a few pieces when packing them into the UV space. Meaning that I had to re-relax some pieces and try again.



It took me some time and a lot of fitting the pieces together in order to have similar pieces close to each other while leaving as little space as possible. Another issue that I faced was where to place the seam on the arm. There did not seem to be an obvious place for it. Based on the character's behaviour, where she will always strive to be facing the player character and hovering above the ground, I decided to take a risk in its placement and put it on the top back of her arm. After discussing possible solutions this seemed like the lesser of evils as it is the angle which will be seen the least by the camera, although it will most likely be seen.

 

I have to be very aware of this in the texturing process and be careful when I paint around the seam so that it will be as invisible as possible. Working on Tamarrion I managed to make her seams hardly visible at all, but that was probably largely due to the fact that I had polypaint as a base and tried to avoid colour shifts on the seams themselves. I know that it might become a problem, but being aware of it will hopefully help me make the seams look barely visible.

Nihteana High Poly Armour

Last week I finished the high poly model of Nihteana, the first thing I did was to complete the shoulder pads. These skulls were also used to hang from her belt, but without the decorations.



I had a basic skull/shoulder pad that I made in 3ds Max, from that I dug out the shapes more and sharpened the details. Then I added the decorations by drawing the on by hand. I would have used a pattern to do this but I did not know a way of doing this on a surface that curves on several axes, or curves at all.



This was also a problem when creating the bracers, I had the shapes and edges complete in order to maintain the hard edges. To solve this I tried adding a sketch that I had made to test the placement of the pattern in 3ds Max through adding the texture as polypaint. There were some issues getting it right, but in the end I used spotlight to paint it on and get a general idea of the placement.



When I had it placed I used the pattern as a guide to carve the decorations into the bracers by hand. As I mentioned I could not find a way to draw the larger patterns onto the curved surface but the flowers were small enough to use the image as a brush. Since the bracer is not completely symmetrical I was also unable to use the mirror brush, meaning I had to carve the entire thing by hand.

Back to ZBrush

Since we finally got our release out I have been able to get back to working on Nihteana. There were a few things that needed fixing but most of the work was to create the missing pieces, such as armour and belt. I had not prioritised them earlier since I wanted to test the main body in animation before completing her. In case there were any problems it would be easier to adjust before adding details. Once I got to that point however, I had to switch tasks and work on environment assets and the release that was made in early January.

My greatest issue with the model was the elbow, I had problems trying to figure out exactly were the muscles should go and how the skinny dead arms would look. I figured out that I had thought right but executed it wrong, meaning that I needed to move the muscles on the lower arm to match the "elbow bone" better and create more of a crease. This meant that I had to go back to ZBrush to adjust the Highpoly model.

This is how it looked before, the elbow bone is at the back side on the bottom of the arm, while the fold is on the front side of the arm.


When fixing it I moved the fold to the upper part of the arm, so that it would be in a straight line from the bone of the elbow.


I had also decided to enlarge her hands, to achieve a more stylised and creepy look, again this meant making adjustments in the Highpoly. The hands were also a bit flat so I rounded the hand, lowering the sides with the pinky and thumb and raising it around the middle finger. Even though I thought I had adjusted where the fingers start on the hand (they do not start from a straight line) it was also looking too straight so I pushed it towards the hand between the pinky and ring finger and away from it between the ring and middle fingers to make the silhouette more interesting.


Because of making these adjustments I destroyed some of the details, meaning that I had to re-enforce the knuckles and sinews. As I had to to this I tried to emphasise them even more than I ad before.


 

I was planning on showing the armour pieces and belt that I have been working on, but this turned out pretty long so I will save that for the next post. :)

Nihteana Timelapse

I had a go at rendering a timelapse video of the concept art painting I created for Nihteana. I had not thought of taking screens until I had already started and painted in base colours, but I had not spent much time on it until then.

Anyway here it is!

Release

We have been working hard both before Christmas and over the last few days, but now we are impatiently sitting at school waiting to make the release that is required for the course we are currently taking.

We have a build that is complete and we are just now starting to upload everything and getting ready to send it out! We are super excited and hope that you will like it! :)

Texturing

Recently I have been serving as the assistant of our environment artist, helping him out with finishing the environment assets for Lord Valac's new room. I have done a few sprites that he will use for spell effects, but mostly I have been working on painting textures.

When we felt that we were falling too far behind schedule, due to all the things we have had to redo or had problems with, we decided to write down every single asset that we need for the area that we are currently working on and organising them on a priority list. We realised that we needed to change up the way we work in order to push things out so the coders have something to work with. We also need to release builds as soon and often as possible due to the course that we are currently taking.

Modifying the work process the way we have, with letting go of our own tasks and instead working together on the same assets has really sped up the process and it feels as if we are starting to get back on track. For now it is working well, but soon we will probably need to revert to the regular way of working, in order to get assets out simultaneously. When we start working on the next area of the level we cannot work on separate assets one at a time, but rather need to work with all lowpolys simultaneously and then all high polys and so on in order to maintain consistency.

Since I had already painted Tamarrion's new textures and found a new way of working on them it was easy for me to help out with the environments. Hopefully this will even help create a more consistent level of the art in the game. It was still a challenge though, as I had to find a way of painting surfaces that are new to me, most of the textures consist of only stone which cannot be found on Tamarrion's textures obviously.

The trickiest part was figuring out how the light would hit each tiny surface from the high poly, since we want to paint in more light and shadows into the diffuse maps in comparison to the old ones. Painting the banners was more of a straight forwards process that was not too difficult with a little help from references.

The carpets were another story though, we needed them to be visible and interesting enough while still not taking over the room. They are probably, up to this date, the most well worked textures that we have in the game, apart from Tamarrion's. It was a process of trial and error, pushing the level of contrast and details further and further until we found something that looked good in the engine, but still not being overly visible so that they distract the player or create crazy bouncing lights on the characters. In the engine we have also added clipping masks to make the edges look broken and give them more of an old and worn look.

In comparison to the textures that we created during the Big Game Project, I would like to say that they are now of way higher quality. I feel that I have developed a great deal since then as a texture artist, as well as in other areas. Back then I am still sure that we did the best we could with what we had, in the time we had. That learning process combined with studying the way others work on their texture after have really helped me level up my skills and ability to create the visual style that we want to achieve in the game.

Traveling

We recently got back from DreamHack Winter 2015 in Jönköping, it was the last time this season that we will be showing Tamarrion at show floors.

Our booth at DremHack Winter

It felt as if our booth was quite small and perhaps did not have the best placement, so there was not really that much traffic passing through. We did have some players that seemed to really enjoy playing Tamarrion in spite of that and we handed out quite a few business cards.

It was unfortunately not possible for us to be present at the booth all the time as we shared the space with three other teams and split the time of "booth duty" between us. This meant that we do not know exactly how many who actually played the game and only got a chance to speak with about half of them.

The three of us who went to show the game did have a lot of fun and we all want to go there as visitors and actually play some ourselves. :)

My teammates at DreamHack Winter

I have already spoken about our other trips, but we have been around the country a few times this semester, starting with DreamHack Stockholm and Invest in games and then Comiccon and Finally DreamHack Winter. We have had many people playing and really enjoying the game, gotten valuable feedback and chances to place our game in the spotlight.

One of the highlights from these trips is probably when I was told that someone high up at Avalanche that complimented our art and had been really impressed by the animations since it was unexpected from a student project.

Players at ComicCon Stockholm

Overall it has been tiring with long days of standing up and speaking with people and it has been a lot of fun. I am happy that we can now relax and just focus on the game, but I am also looking forwards and hoping that we will be able to show the new updated Tamarrion at show floors next year!

Mandatory team selfie at DreamHack Winter :)

Nihteana

I have previously posted a sneak peek of the new boss that I have been working on, I have already written a long blog post about her on our devblog which can be seen here, but I thought I would just show some pictures of her character concept here as well.

 

The initial thought was that the first boss was supposed to be a lower ranked male general in Lord Valac's army but we wanted the prototype to show a greater range of what we had planned for the game and wanted to create a spell caster rather than another sword fighter. We decided that it was supposed to be a necromancer and sometime while drawing character thumbnails we decided to make it a female instead.

I had to rewrite the character story completely, but I think that Nihteana, which means "bird of the night" will be a much more interesting character than what we ad originally planned.

I am still working on her model, nut had to take a break from it as we decided to reprioritize and work together on finishing Tamarrion's updates and Lord Valac's new room. Instead of working on her I have been helping the environment artist out by painting textures and visual effect sprites. I did however find the time to finish her concept art, so here it is!

Motion Capture -Tamarrion

A few weeks ago we had a motion capture shoot, this was necessary as we are switching to PC controls and needed new animations for Tamarrion to fit the new movement system and to record animations for the new boss that I am working on.

We had some problems setting up and our first attempt failed as something went wrong with the files that did not know where to search for the markerset. For our second attempt we got some help and after some additional problems we did manage to get it up and running.

Last time that we had a shoot we had two male actors, it meant unfortunately that the run animation could not be used and had to be hand made. This time we knew that we needed a female actress and with no one else available to fill the part it had to be me dressing up in the silly suit and doing the acting.



There were some problems with that though, one being that I am not a professional actress or have any real knowledge of how to wield a sword, and, frankly, I am about as agile as a bathtub. But the biggest issue was that I was unable to see myself what we were recording. I am the one responsible for how the animations are supposed to look and the one who will be working with them later and not seeing what the takes looked like made that impossible for me to judge.

Instead I had to rely on my fellow artist, our hired in mocap operator and our designer, who all had opinions. The biggest problem with that was the people who have no experience in working with animations telling me to move my arms more, which meant that when I was working on the animations I had to reduce the arm movement significantly as it looked far too busy.

We did show the entire shoot on my art stream and had quite a few people watching and asking questions. This also means that the entire shoot is now available to be seen on my youtube channel, here is one part of it.

It was a three hour workout and I was quite sore the day after, but we did have a lot of fun. One thing that we could improve on is planning the animations better in advance. I got a tip recently of doing thumbnails for all our animations and I think that might help us knowing better how they should look and work. We did have a general idea of what we wanted but we could probably save us some time by doing this in the future.

Texturing

This week I started working on a new and updated version of Tamarrion's texture maps. I had to redo parts of them due to adjusting the model but we felt that we wanted to take the texturing to a new level and decided to redo them completely. What we want to achieve is higher quality textures that has a more hand painted look than I managed to achieve on the old ones. It is a challenge, trying to level up on my texturing skills, but we plan to paint more details and light into the diffuse maps to create the style we are going for.

Basically I want them to look more hand painted and have a higher level of detail and quality. It is still a work in progress but I have completed half and still have the armour to do.

More Fun with Animations!

Working on Tammy's rig

I have been tweaking Tamarrion's rig to get better results when animating the shoulder, as an extension of the work that I have done with the edge flow. I am still unsure about the best way to place the rig, but I am hoping that I am better on the mark this time around. On the left side I have moved the shoulder and arm bones to where the actual bones should be. The reason for them being where they were was a process of trying to find what looked the least bad when animating the shoulder, as we had lots of problems. As mentioned before these problems were the result of a combination of the edge flow and the rig.

I have also started working on the skinning, I had to redo it completely although hoping to be able to copy at least parts but hopefully I have learned something along the way and achieved a better result this time. Again I am not one hundred percent sure of my abilities and the result. I guess we will have to see how it goes with the animations.

I'll end with some pics of the result when trying to copy the old skin layer to the new model, I hoped that at least the legs could be partly intact since they had not been touched, but here is what happened.