#ShowingOff Im very proud of my team for achieving the re-release of our first title: Dire Consequences in the span of a month. The screenshots of the following dont do it enough justice but let me tell you what this model represents. The model that you can see in the screenshots is an Undead Knight, a fairly basic enemy in the game. However he was built in a month. Now building this guy took at least 3 people. I did some basic design of the enemy, not image wise but I had to make a note of behaviours and attacks this enemy had. That information needed to be relayed to a 3D artist for animation and also the coder who stitched together the AI behind the scenes. When it comes down to making a model you usually have a reference image or you can just simply wing it. Our concept artist was busy on more pressing matters, so the modeller took inspiration from the old assets of the iOS version. The modeller went about creating the raw mesh of the Undead Knight. This was a static, in a crucifix/T pose. To get an idea of what a mesh is, its a WYSIWYG exterior of a model, without colour. After creating the mesh, the artist has to rig and skin the model. Rigging is where you begin building a skeleton to allow the model to move. Skinning a mesh is literally taking surfaces of the mesh and configuring it so that when something moves there is no tearing or awkwardness in the appearance of the mesh moving (so it folds in the right places). After the rigging and skinning is complete the modeller suddenly turns into an animator and begins posing and recording movement of the model. Starting with an idle pose and basing every animations beginning and ending off of that idle pose. Once animated it can be thrown towards the programmer who creates the behaviour of the enemy and attaching that behaviour to the animations. The mesh and animations are imported to the game engine, we use the Unreal Engine 4, a powerful piece of middleware that links all our media together to create the game we have designed. Upon import, one dimensional blend spaces are created by a designer or programmer to match the movement compnent of the coded character class to the idle, walk and run animations. What this does is blends the chosen animation together to make a seamless transition from idle to walking and then running. The mesh also needs to be attached to a character class and an AI controller needs to be created. The controller controls the character, so a player controller would mean a player controls the character and an AI controller means the AI will control the character. Obviously we went down the AI route as its an enemy to the player. The enemy is then programmed to have health and then is told how to give and receive damage. It also requires its damage dealing code to be linked with its attack inside an animation montage, which is literally a montage of animations that are called appropriately. Meanwhile in 3D modeller town, our 3D artist has now become a 2D artist! All this time whilst the coder is create the AI, the modeller is literally flattening the model in something called a UV or UVW map, however he needs to arrange these maps so there are no overlaps, not only that he must duplicate the UV map so it can be used on another channel so all the shadows of the model line up correctly in the engine. In the 3D world of computers there are 2 different Axis. The first set of axis are X, Y and Z, with Z being the third dimension. The second set of coordinates relates to the position of 2D images being placed on 2D models. These are called textures. There are usually 4 types of textures that are commonly generated, which are the Diffuse (colour that you see on the model), the normal (which tells the computer to make ridges and almost 3D looking material), Specular (the shinyness of a model) and the Emissive (glowing features, however we have none on this enemy). These textures are imported to the engine and can be made into materials which are applied to the model and can also be mathematically manipulated to do many things. For example, making water can be a very complex process because youre adding maths to make a texture or a map move. Finally, after the coder has pulled off all of the above, they move onto the next task. This model was created within the span of a month alongside the player character model, the coder also had to code a LOT more than just this models AI (however he did spend the majority of the time on AI and this AI is very basic as it looks for the player, chases, attacks and backs off at a certain distance away from the character). I didnt realise how much Ive written and I apologise for the wall of text! I thought I would give you all just a little insight into how much work goes on behind the scenes of not just our video games, but many 3D video games. Well done Derp Studios, proud of all of you.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 11:49:57 +0000
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