I was chosen for a 4-week project for work experience in association with a company called Real Media Now. Daniel is the director of our project and sees how things are going throughout the stages. Then our producer is Izzy who was in charge of programming and giving us things to do. For the set task and objectives, we're working on a game prototype. Our game is called Technocide. Synopsis: Technocide is a 3D third-person Metroidvania game where you play as a space ranger. In Technocide, you discover rooms, fight enemies, and look for an escape route.
Level design: I and Archie worked on a level design concept. The level concept I made was scrapped so we didn't use it though I wanted to show this off anyway:
Then a few days after, Archie made a level design in which would the design actually goes well and provokes this monetization that Daniel is going for. Video walk-trough is what they specialize in monetization. Therefore, going with a Metroidvania design will provoke the player to watch a walk-through of Technocide or use hints. Without further ado, here is the final concept of the level design:
We threw ideas at each other for the project in pre-production and did basically what anyone would in pre-production. Come up with ideas, character concepts, and level designs. Furthermore, others worked on different things such as UI, blackouts.
Then came the production phase which lasts about 2 weeks. During those 2 weeks, I had been given the task to create the enemy. David created the boss, Archie created the player character, Eduard created the level and Izzy was doing plenty of coding. There are 4 modelers and 1 programmer in our group.
So I opened up Maya and created the project for the robot. I modeled the Robot which was the simplest part and then came the rigging. Tedious and difficult part personally and I was stuck on the skin weights, curves and nurb controls as three teachers gave me different methods to rig the robot.
The method that Leigh gave me was the one with the least resistance. For rigging, once I bound the skin with the joints. I would get a joint and then poly surface. Following on from that, I grouped the poly surface with the joint in the most appropriate groups.
Then came the animating phase. Less of a hassle compared to rigging although made plenty of tweaks throughout.
I made 4 different sets of animations. 1. Idle 2. Walking 3. Walking + Shooting 4. Death The animation I enjoyed doing the most was either walking + shooting or death. Whilst they needed more tweaks and changes to animate. Those animations gave off a personality. Especially the death animation. Edgy I know but why? For the death animation, you have a robot spinning their head round twice, the arms and legs go haywire, and the robot malfunctions resulting in falling down.
My next step is to texture the robot. My friend Eduard, helped me out with UVs as my UV layout had blue or red UVs. In order to fix that, the UVs had to be wide. I used to cut and sew and layout solutions to fix this.
After the UVs were done, I exported my mesh from Maya to Substance painter. From here I created textures with materials. Mostly plastic and some steel for it. The easiest part was that the UVs could tell what most of the body parts were and the UVs had appropriate names for them. The head, feet, and right hand, however, were in a UV group called 'initialgroupshading'. I logically thought that all the body parts that weren't in the initial shading groups had to be the others were in the shading groups! With all the texturing out of the way, the next step was to export the textures into PNG files. These files would then be used later on down the line as a material in Maya.
After texturing was done, I went back into Maya and assigned a material onto each body part. The material I used was Lambert. In the attributes area, I selected the chess box in the color area. Here I could give myself a choice and chose 'file'. File lets you chose the textures you want for the models you want it to be in Maya. With each body part, I selected 'Robot Texture V2 [certain body part] base color.PNG
Once the process was complete I exported the base model without animations. Then I went onto export each animation by themselves.
To export animations into Unity I had done: Select > All by Type > Joints
Edit > Bake Animation
Export Selection
I had to make sure that animations were off for the base model due to the animations in Unity will be read from the base models than the separate animations themselves whereas the separate animations (none base model) themselves needed to be on alongside baking animations (if you had not followed the baking animation method already) that's an option.
I had tried to test the animations in the console via Unity. The furthest I went for the animations in Unity was the previews themselves. Unfortunately, they wouldn't the animator console although I was told not to work on getting the animations to function in Unity as this was Izzy's specialty; Coding and programming the game.
On the last week of Wednesday, I was told by Izzy that the animations don't work in Unity when playing on the console tabs EVEN though on the animation controls it shows that it's working!
So on Thursday I opened a Unity Project and implemented every animation. With the RND phase, I had downloaded a model which animates just for reference and figure out what goes down in 3D animation.
Unfortunately for me and my other teammate, David, we couldn't get our enemy models finished on time. Meaning that Eduard and Archie did us the favor and helped us greatly. Which I highly appreciated.
The experience overall was quite a ride. I had a lot of fun with the project despite the flaws and incomplete asset. Incomplete because I couldn't get the animations to work in Unity. During the project, I experienced meanings and life lessons 1. Work smarter than harder
A word of advice I was given to. Working smarter is more efficient than it is working harder. If you too hard you're going to be drained out. 2. Thinking in a linear process is not ideal. Think outside the box! Instead of taking the linear steps. Look at the process as a whole and step outside. There you could find out what really went wrong with it.
3. Being pessimistic is not a good thing
Rather than feeling down on yourself and trying to fix the problem but can't. Try and explore different ways. Personally, I had tried to attempt this but couldn't fix the issue with the enemy robot in the end.
Comments