Thursday, August 13, 2009

3ds max animation export hell

11 more days of hellish work! Yes, I am in 3D Studio Max hell right now, certainly on my way out, but not just yet..

So last month my contract was coming to an end at the game company, and I had it renewed by offering to solve the animation problems they had with their 3DS Max animation files... things got to a late start so I've only been on it for a week now, working on only ONE animation, which lasts about 30 seconds... It has about 100 objects in it, most of them animated... and half of them have one kind of problem or another... With 90% of this scene done (and I will finish it today), here is the ONE thing 3ds Max animators out there should know, specially if you are animating for a game engine or exporting your animations to another program:

NEVER EVER work in the View Coordinate System. This option should simply be destroyed and deleted from the program all together, BAD IDEA Autodesk! Why? First of all, there are about 5 other coordinate systems you can use, all of them perfectly fine, such as World, Local, Screen, Parent, etc... These other modes will leave all your objects transforms and rotations as you expect them to be. but View mode... WON'T. So when you export your objects, they will probably be facing the wrong direction, now imagine what happens to 50 animated objects when you are using the View mode constantly... A big time consuming mess to fix... How do you fix this? Briefly put, you will have to reset the pivots to correctly match your World Coordinate system, reset any transforms and or scaling, reset the Xform (collapse too) to set it all down and then check out how your animation is looking. If it is still messed up you will have to change the animation axis in the motion panel (just flip through until you find the one that looks right). I advice you to work on a duplicate of a scene if you are making repairs of this sort, so if things get ugly you can always re-merge the object you are working on. Sometimes it will be best to make a fresh dummy, copy the animated keyframes to it, delete them from your object, align it's pivot to the dummy and then link the object to the fresh dummy. Of course, if you never export from 3D max, you'll never know what is going on, everything will look ok in Max...

And guess what? view coordinate system is the default! Yikes! And since 3dMax remembers which system you are working in for EACH kind of transformation, you have to be careful about this. The best thing to do is to start up your scene and select each transformation tool one at a time and set the Coordinate system to World for each tool, then start working. Oh yeah, and this is also important to watch out when you move your textures around (UV wraps and stuff), because the texture transforms also are set to View Coor. system by default...

Thankfully I started with one of the more complex scenes... 9 more to go... and finish in 11 days...-___-

And here is another tip for any 3d animation software, which should be obvious, but yeah, easily overlooked as I have experienced:

If you will be exporting to a game engine, please find out what the limitations of the engine camera are and how to set up your animation program camera to match it.... BEFORE you start animating! This is specially vital for realtime cut-scenes! (it's not so relevant for in-game animated objects).

Your technical artists will love you for it! `__'

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Scrum

At the moment I am part of a 15 person team, working like maniacs to get a video game to Alpha state. Despite all the hard work, communication issues keep slowing things down.

Enter SCRUM, a set of management techniques for complex software development, that can be applied to other kind of projects.

The idea is to gather the team together and set up short sprints of goals which will bring a set of features of the software to a finished state. One of the main tools in SCRUM is the daily 15 minute meeting, where each member of the team tells what they achieved the day before and what they will work on today, plus any obstacles that might be in their way. There is nothing like transparency to get things moving and to spot problems before they become catastrophes...

We've only started to implement this last week, but I can already say that it has affected the way people work and communicate, for the better. This works well for teams of 5 to 9 persons.

So if you have a project involving more than four people (and specially if they don't know each other well), I highly recommend you check this out. It's great for projects were different departments have to coordinate their efforts in a very specific order and time(in our case the art team and the coding team).

Some links:

what is scrum?

scrum in under 10 mins. video

the swedish version of the other video... note the difference in presentations!

Monday, July 27, 2009

Surreal Animation

Very different style of animation. A team of 6 people created this in six weeks...

Muzorama from Muzorama Team on Vimeo.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

The force behind the will

Here: The Strangest Secret is a link to an mp3 file, some sections of which were recorded in the 50's. It's about the most useful and concise recording I've heard about why so few people achieve what they want in life.

Ignore the annoying guy trying to sell you stuff at the beginning, the middle and the end of the recording. Just forward or skip ahead, there are three sections were Earl Nightingale speaks, very simple yet dense, priceless.

Total life changing stuff.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Times....

I started capturing reference material for the animation and realized that it's going to take some intensity to get this movie to look like I want it to look... mainly however, it will take TIME. Yup, no matter how much I simplify the images, the story or the style, I will need a lot of hours to get it to the right point of expressiveness... And that is fine with me, but I admit it's kind of scary because I like to finish what I start and this will mean a commitment of over six months... perhaps up to a year or more... It all depends on whether I continue to work full time or not, but even if I can get by without working, this won't be a quick affair... no sir... And as I was reworking the storyboard I had my doubts on the order of the scenes, particularly on whether the opening scene works with the rest or not... so there is still stuff to redo for now. It looks to me like the movie will be more of a visual poem than a traditional narrative, so it's very important for me to ensure that all the parts are as cohesive as possible with each other, otherwise there is a big risk of it turning into a senseless muddle. It might already be confusing enough even if I manage to get it as clear as I envision it...

The job with the videogame continues to get interesting, I'm done with the storyboard and will get started on animating 2d bitmaps inside the game engine. It looks like soon we will also enter "crunch time" so I might also get to work on 3D stuff sooner than expected. Weeee!

It's nice to have some positive things going on at this time, cause my personal life on the other hand is kind of falling apart... Now since I'm pretty busy with work and thinking of the movie, it makes the other stuff bearable and I am sure that once all the personal stuff is lived out, I'll be putting all my waking hours into the movie and my job, so it's all good and I'm running with it.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

The Dreamer

So I just finished writing the first draft of my next animation, along with the first draft of the whole storyboard. Again, this would not have happened without the inspiration and unintended poking of other animators who are putting their work and methods and inspirational links online. Than you Internet and all of those on it, making good use of it, sharing knowledge and strength!


The actual script is only 3 pages long, but the storyboard came out to be 23 pages... This is definately gonna be something else for me, as most of the stuff I've done is real short and simple (3 line "scripts", 2 pages of storyboards, one simple character and set) and mainly I was just trying out stuff and fooling around. This time I really have a focus on the content, so I'm not worrying about the tools so far. What IS real clear to me now is that for my aim it will have to be mainly a visual story, so I have no dialogues and I don't think I will use more than a word or two here and there. I've got about 8 to 10 different scenes and sets, one protagonist, about 5 incidental characters and 4 of these scenes have from a dozen to a few hundred extras in it... hmmmmmmm.... One big decision that I already see coming up is in regards to facial animation. As I see it in my head, it will have to be very precise, but maybe there's a way to stylize and keep it real simple. I dunno yet... I've done puppet stuff in the past, so I know that lots can be said with just body moves... but yeah... I gotta think about this.

Anyways, I'm real happy that I finally sat down to write and draw this all out. For the last two weeks I was intensely rolling ideas around in my head, but just couldn't pin them down and suddenly I sat down to type and in a few hours the whole thing just took shape. And interestingly, none of the specific details of the stuff I'd been writing down since January are actually in the draft, but I can see that the main points are still there. I did keep the name from one of these older drafts. So actually it's not that I just sat down and the ideas came out of nowhere, I'd been chewing on them for months, it's just the actual shape and sequence of it that came out in a sudden and clear flow.

For next week I'll be collecting reference images and sounds, and breaking down each scene into characters and props and sets properly. I am sure new ideas and some changes will come out of that. I still don't know how long it will actually turn out to be, I'm guessing 12 to 20 minutes, we will see. I want to set up an animatic to figure out the durations and the sounds too (I haven't done sound stuff in years!), as they will play an important part, but that might have to wait until the week after this one....

BEcauzzz, I just got a one month gig working on a video game! Yup, that's right, I'm real excited about it 'cause not only will I get a little bit of cash for some needed upgrades to my computer, BUT it turns out that the work is actually fun and it's at a small company, so I get to be involved in many aspects of the game, not just the graphics. At the moment my job is to lay out a storyboard and after that I'll be making little 2D animations of the characters inside the game editor! wheeee!

Soooooo.... Once I realized I had the job, I sat down and made a real clear schedule to make the most of the coming times. I think this is a real good opportunity to focus my energies. I'm programming just a few but dedicated hours to the animation pre-production every day, so I'll slowly get into the habit of working on it and into the mood of the story, and when the job is over, everything will be set so I can jump right into actual production.

So the upcoming posts will be mainly about the work on the animation pre-production, plus maybe some more game design insights that might come up from the job.

Again thanks to all of you who have inspired, pushed and guided me forward!

Sunday, May 17, 2009

3D Animation, movies and games



So as I posted earlier, on of the reasons I got interested in game creation and game engines was because of the film-making possibilities of the tools. Yesterday, as I was following Mdot's video on Z-brush-c4d workflow, I realized that game engine or not, I still have a film to make, that whatever digital tools I use, they will suffice, IF I have a story to tell... And this is where the big difference between games and movies comes in, a game doesn't have to tell a story to be good, as long as the gameplay is fun or interesting. A movie might be interestingly made, but without something to say it's just nice motion graphics... and that is fine too, but it's somehow subutilizing a very powerful medium.

Sooo after fooling around with Z-brush/c4d/3dmax last night, I set my new plan to FINISH the script, jobless or not and regarless of my additional game-makin'-research-and-other-things, the priority now is to finish the story.

Here are two interesting videos, one of them posted by Mdot on his blog, absolutely ass-kicking for those of us who haven't gotten serious about our movie-making and the second one, a very interesting use of "procedural city building". I can see that turning into a plugin of sorts for 3D programs... I have heard that there are some game companies using this technique to quickly generate content. More about that later.

Here is Ralph Bakshi on making animated films:



Here is Shamus Young's Pixel City:

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The Big One

So in previous posts I talked about getting your game out and the advantages of browser based or mobile applications. Well, Bigpoint has just opened their DevLounge Beta, opening the doors for game developers worlwide to market their games to an international crowd of millions of users. It was just a matter of time. Register now at: BIGPOINT

For a very cute Flash game check out Akinori Oishi's Opniyama. He is better known for his character designs at Pictoplasma and is simply a wonderful allaround artist.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Ooohhh the internet....



What started off as simply checking my email and some internet research (those game engines) ended up in sore fingers and wrists... yup, my beta tester code for Battlefield Heroes was in my inbox this morning... After a couple of hours of good ol shoot em up fun I was ready for a break... so I went to check out the websites of my potential employers... oh oh... more games to be tested... one hour later and after a coffee break, back to the Battlefield.... stop for a quick lunch and... unfortunately the server for Magic Online was down... No biggie... more Battlefield!!! Weee! No matter how hard I searched, I only found one bug! Never mind, I finally got back into the game engine search when... wow, pixel games, gotta play those too!

A fine day indeed, with lots of game research done and... oh well, about the engines, yeah, so other than the simple and elegant Battlefield Heroes proprietary software (from DICE for EA, creators of Mirror's Edge as well), most of the other stuff was... Flash.... Hmmm? I'd totally forgotten about that! So web stuff: Flash, Java, Javascript or Shockwave (Director?). Your players need only have the necessary plugins, etc....

Here are some of the fun places I visited today, don't miss Pixeljam, it's got the good ol arcade style stuff, addictive simplicity! Gamma Bros brought distorted memories of galaga/space invaders back... oh those 8 bit sounds.... And somehow along the way I also stumbled on a very nice synth/mixer/rythm machine thing, free, Flash based (requires version 10 and signing up).

Pixeljam Games Small and sweet!
Dragball Very strange might-be- tetris-spawn-but-maybe-not kind of game, not my kind of music, but interesting.
Pixeljoint art challenge (Game Boy screens) Ends Sunday
Pixel Tutorials (With links to phone games site)
Zombie Massacre! Simple band game... with pixel zombies in shades of Black, Red and White... He also has another game on his site.
HobnoxAudiotool
BH....Of course...

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Game Engines and Publishing


So I've been playing with the Unreal 2 engine (Awakening), not doing much else than setting up a room, some boxes and lights, a player and getting the thing to run from the game menu. It was a thrilling few seconds anyways, running around this box, shooting the other (floating) boxes in the hastily wallpapered room... If you can make your stuff out of boxes, its rather easy to get started, with a simple environment. Later on I will try importing my own models and animated things and see how that goes. But I started thinking, what if I want other people to play the stuff I make (later on!)?

Hmmm.. Well, for one thing, they'd have to install the Unreal 2 engine, and not just from any game (like say Brothers in Arms), but they'd have to install Awakening. Each Unreal Editor version is tailored to the game it ships with, and these small differences are enough to make stuff made on one incompatible on another. So that's the thing about making mods. Naturally there's also the OS to think about... And the OS would also be an issue with some of the affordable engines out there, which are for the most part PC tailored (the exception being Unity 3D, which can run on PC but makes games for MAC, IPhone and Ipod). I haven't yet looked into the free engines, so I'll skip them for now. The good thing about having your own engine thing is that you create a self contained installer, so the players don't need other software to run your game.

Some interesting bits I learned at the game convention is that making games for the Iphone and the Nintendo DS is not necessarily expensive nor hard, although becoming an OFFICIAL Nintendo developer might be... But... I found a little program online called DS Game Maker, which though not visually too intuitive, probably works out well for the more hardcore nerdish type (or maybe I didn't play long enough with it). Becoming a developer for the Iphone also requires passing some approval of sorts for putting the App on the store, but other than nudity or something easily termed offensive, is not a huge deal. The great thing about these two platforms is the distribution, particularly for those looking to use the IPhone shop as an additional income (and from what I gathered, can bring in a bit more than "spare change"). The great hurdle there is for newcomers without any kind of fan base or followers, as otherwise it is hard to compete with the 8000+ Iphone games already posted. And the Ds? Well, the wonderful world of emulators and R4 cards can be a big help in getting your game out, but it means more work for the player, and I am not sure what the future for HB apps will be with the newer DS model.

Another alternative would be publishing with the "live services" of consoles like the Xbox, but the last time I checked, you gotta like code to use the XNA developing system... about the other consoles.. I didn't check, but I do know that if you really make games for a living, game publishers are always on the lookout for PS(x) and Xbox stuff, although mainly they want the "AAA" blockbusters. Specially developers for the PSP are favored by the comparatively minimalistic competition, and some smaller publishers can do more experiemtnal things with it. And what about Nintendo? Well, despite how many machines they've sold, it sesm like the barrier is high in terms of getting approved and the pricey license. Nintendo does premium marketing for their own games, not for those of other publishers. Games which make good use fo the special controllers do have a better chance.

And last but not least, it looks like the future of... everything, is the internet... so browser based games are the thing, whether for mobile phones or computers. I did a quick search on what is out there and found too much stuff that I didn't know of, so that'll have it's own post coming up. My eyes are melting.

Friday, April 24, 2009

The magical connection: Games

So it's been over a month since my last post and I can say it's for good reasons. It seems like the moment I turned my attention to the area of creating video games, some "magical connection" turned on and suddenly lots of interesting things started happening in my life. I've suddenly found myself with the possibility of various job offers, I've learned overwhelming amounts of stuff about games, game design and the game industry and I've had some amazing conversations to boot. In the following days I'll be posting some of the nuggets of information I picked up in this seemingly very long span of time. I'll start off with one of the new strange thoughts that popped out of my head after two days of "state of the games" info picked up at the "German Gamedays" conference two days ago...

The thought:
That the nature of life is for things to grow to their fullest capacity and development, but as this approach tends to create dinosaurs who are doomed to extinction, mutation appears with the random innovation to save the day. Many mutations fail to produce anything new, but every now and then one succeeds in changing the direction of evolution and opening up new possibilities for growth. So it seems to me that the role of the individual artist, the rebel, the one-man army, is that of the mutant gene, the creative gene which creates a new branch of things that no one else can or dares to foresee, but without which the life of ideas would come to a swift end.

The things that led to the thought:
"Top Jobs of the Future: Working in the Games Field"
It was a rather informal presentation, with two top guys from one of the world's largest browser based games company, Klaas Kerstin (CEO) and Ralf Adam from Gameforge. As a footnote, Germany is the world leader in browser-based games. Basically they told their stories of passion, love and success as a game designers and finished off with sugary descriptions of what it is like today to work for a game studio. Think of informal clothes, loose schedules, healthy meals in a top class cafeteria, a basement loaded with arcade machines and consoles, loose hierarchies, good pay and plenty of creative space for all. It bears a striking resemblance to the Hollywood style special effects and animation studios (plus or minus the ping-pong tables, gyms, mini-cinemas, etc). The feeling in the audience seemed to be a mix of skepticism vs internal drooling...

Rewind to the previous day, Ubisoft's Benedict Grindel and Christopher Schmitz talked about "Why big games need to be made by big teams - or do they?(...)". They spoke about the 2 to 4 year production cycle and the team size needed to churn out AAA titles, think 80 to 400 people (Assasin's Creed). Mr. Adam, previously mentioned, seemed to be in favor of smaller teams (under 100 people), argumenting that larger teams and longer cycles burned out the people and made things very impersonal.

Enter the Americans:
A little bit later that day, veteran game designer, writer and presently on the board of directors for the IGDA, Mr. Bob Bates ("Game Design:The Art and Business of Creating Games) was joined by Robert Wallace, (retired manager consultant in the business) and guess who..? Ralf Adams again... This discussion panel got interesting, with Bates arguing for the individuality and creative authorship of the individual game designer; Adam going for the middle size yet still personal co-creation team and Wallace stating that the upcoming business model would resemble the Hollywood production cycle more and more (this is the AAA/Ubisoft approach).

In the midst of all the flurry of conversations (particularly the ones happening right after each talk, in the halls), I suddenly realized a basic fact of "Big Things". I am referring to anything from a biological organism to any human endeavor which grows and develops into a massive living system. Sometime ago I had read the phrase "Much gathers more and loss leads to greater loss", and it suddenly came back to me in a flash, along with a feeling for the history and development of the videogame industry. In Germany, the demand for artists needed for the continued growth of these hungry "company creatures" is exceeding the available pool. Just think that Gamesforge, the browser based game company, has grown 4500% since it's founding days (2003!). Mr. Schmidt from Ubisoft, made it very clear that their only way forward is bigger and better. They are expanding their markets on all platforms and all kinds of games, not just the AAA ones. They are the second largest game publisher in the world and it would seem like they intend to keep it that way or become number one...

So it was in this context which I came to think about the role of the individual artist/inventor/enterpreneur... The world produces both massive creature/systems and independent creators running in parallel. These apparently antagonistic elements are impartially put out in the merciless game of life, death and rebirth, playing itself out, over and over again across time.

Coming up next: Back to the game engines!

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Game Engines Galore....

So in the search for interesting storytelling tools I've been looking into game engines. I am totally overwhelmed by how many there are out there! Follow these two links to see what I mean:

Mod DB
Wiki List

Wow! Ok, so a quick run through the list brought me to one that I've actually tried before (duh, I hadn't figured that they were game engines cause I'd done like simple 2d stuff on them, engine just sounds so 3D...)

So yeah, if you can do 2D graphics and just want to get started trying stuff out without spending more than a day or two on figuring out the engine, I'd suggest downloading the Multimedia Fusion 30 day demo. This little program has very simple and quick drag and drop functionality which lets you assign and test for collisions, make things appear (or vanish) on collision, test if all objects have been collected (and go to the next level) and other simple game actions like that. It comes with a whole bunch of graphics you can use to get started and it's just plain fun and gives almost instant gratification. It's what we used at a summer camp I was teaching at and the kids made awesome games in a week's time! That said, it is 2D, so FPS and such nifty 3D things are out of the question, but lots of fun anyways. The end result is an .exe file (plus a .dll you need to put in the same folder).

Now the 3D stuff... well, I haven't advanced much... So far I've rounded up all the games I actually had access to which included source engines, so now I've got the UnrealEditor, the Aurora (Bioware- Neverwinter Nights) and the Source (Valve -Half Life) engines to try out. All of these seem to have some sort of introductory documentation on each of their makers sites, so hopefully this weekend I'll finally get "in depth" at least with one of these. The thing about these engines is that whatever you do gets tied to the maker's of the engines and this could (or not) result in some issues later down the road... So I will also be checking out things like Unity (yes, they have released the pc version!) and Torque and perhaps also the open source OGRE and the cube 2 based Sandbox as alternative tools for independent game makers. In the meantime here are a couple of interesting things people are doing with the engines besides games:
Concerned (A Half Life based comic)
Game Engines for Music

The game engine music thing is from an artist called Julian Oliver and he's got a few other things using game engines to generate images. He's also got an awesome little "cube toy" thingy that mixes a realworld cube, webcam and computer vision with a controllable 3D space. Here is a video of that, until the next post!


levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Several Things in Mind Part 2, Survival

Another thing that is keeping me busy is finding some kind of part time job that will leave me enough time to keep writing, and so I came upon this "online job desk" which might be useful to you too:

Odesk, "the virtual workplace"

It seems like many job offers are underpaid (and its hard to compete with the low pay that some people are willing to work for), but nevertheless I'll be trying that out for the next few months. Any other ideas (or part time job offers!) are welcome! Just leave a comment...

Several Things in Mind Part 1, The Script

First off I've been working on my script pretty much everyday since the 1st of January (2009). I've never really written a script before, as I've only done very short clips and animations, so it has been a rather interesting and unexpected experience. Being and avid book-reader, I found the following titles more useful than others, mainly because they focus on creative writing more than on final technique or structures. Which doesn't mean that they won't tell you about that stuff, but it's not the focus.

Script Magic by Marisa D'Vari

The New Scriptwriter's Journal by Mary Johnson

The next book is on how Hollywood scripts work and what to focus on if you are interested in writing to such an effect. Absolutely practical stuff written by one of those few people that can actually teach (or so it seems).

Screenwriting Tricks of the Trade by William Froug

The last book analyzes ten well known movies to show how these are structured and how they work, an interesting read if you want to go deep into "The Structure".

Storytelling in the New Hollywood by Kristin Thompson

Sunday, February 15, 2009

February Competitions and Calls

Cg Society, Siggraph and Tilt festival

Cg Society has a surreal style competition going on : CG Society / NV Art

Siggraph, the largest CG meet still has some calls open (art and animation f.e.). Links to full descriptions here: Siggraph Calls

Courses, Information Aesthetics Showcase, Emerging Technologies, Panels, Posters, Talks Wednesday, 18 February 2009

BioLogic Art Wednesday, 18 February 2009

Student Volunteers Applications Monday, 23 February 2009

Game Papers Sunday, 1 March 2009

Competition Films, Real-Time Rendering Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Late-Breaking Posters, Late-Breaking Talks Wednesday, 6 May 2009

FJORG! Wednesday, 6 May 2009

Research Challenge Wednesday, 6 May 2009

Tilt Festival has a movie remix competition, contest open until Contest closes March 10 2009. Details here : Tilt Festival