Comes The Trailer Video, and My End with this Project <3

This is the final version of my final project for this summer and I’m gonna graduate finally! Actually the screengrabing had been so sooooo painstaking because there are too many things without any optimising knowledge and the frame rate went too slow. So my workaround was to disable all others or disable some of the animators when I record the certain part. I have a camera animation for the whole recording process but five versions of build file enabling different part lol. And I went to our lab to use the most powerful machine rather than my own Mac and it went better, with some still jerky. The scene looked reaaallllyyy amazing with the big screen though! The screengrab video was not so it’s a shame I can’t share the best experience 😛

The background music is by Jim Spalink on YouTube. The music sounds really nice but the best thing about it is that this melody is actually born with this triptych by Bosch! There is a small piece of music painted in the Hell Panel and was transcribed in the recent years. So thank him very much for the permission here again and I think it turns out really nice with the video <3.

Handed in my project and the 40-page dissertation yesterday. Personally I think this would be a project deserving future developments but at this stage I just want to sleep to the end of the world! Say bye to the most painstaking summer in my life and thanks Bosch and everyone for the supports:)))))

Final Gathering!

Just a lot of new models and animations… Comes the GIFs as usual 😛

Interactive butterfly here!

For the egg I use Instantiate () function, random three models (tell from the hair!) with slightly different animations and skin textures, from the three fixed position by slightly different generating rate. And destroy them after they go into the egg.

Similar for these birds below!

I’ve also got quite a lot walking around figures as NPCs (simply because their poses are just impossible to be position static :P) Got a wander script for them from this site http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Wander, really great resources here btw! And added a boundary by the MathF.Clamp function, and rotation when they reach the boundaries.

More of them are in the water:

These four below in the air are wandering too but not by that script because it uses a character controller with a collider so that they won’t go into the terrain..

But among all I like this jumping dancer best! Could you give my camera a front face though lol

ID photo.

More static images..

The red team and blue team

flower arrangement lol

Done with the Pond

Haven’t updated for two weeks since I was writing the dissertation and, creating new model & animation assets that don’t really deserve a post..

Now everything in the pond part is finished and I grabbed a video like I did for the circuit here. There’s also one controlled by scripts here and this time it’s an interaction:) Some environmental particle system details as well: sun shafts, falling leaves, some shining “dust”, and bubbles – exist in the painting I think they should be bubbles but who knows….

One Problem of the video is the blur on the right of the screen. I always get this in game mode if I have camera effects (even the build file has this too), and, this was tested to be the problem of my mac because others’ don’t have. No idea how to solve it at the moment..

And the third person controller model is changed now! Made some animations for him cos I thought I use different mesh and rigs with the Unity Ethan but, the fact is that it’s just super easy with no use to make any animation. Just import the humanoid model and do the configuration. Brilliant.

Found an easier way for couple animations, that I can export them in one fbx file, drag into the scene and delete one of them, and give the left one a clip with the original avatar. This would break the prefab but doesn’t really matter and it’s a lot easier to control the position etc.

Very proficient with the modelling and texturing now feel a bit sorry for those made at the very first lol.

Come the gifs!

The interaction is this hugging couple controlled by a boolean. When the player comes into a distance they’ll stop to be as the interrupted  pose in the painting, and when the player goes they’ll continue what they were doing 😛

Less than two weeks left dunno if I could finish everything… Go back to work!!

More Humans Start moving in

Humans are moving into the garden to make it (because it is) a better place -.-

I’m making all those human moves these days. Basically several clips that are in the same crowd or sharing the similar poses in one fbx file. Like I now have 10 clips in the ‘sit’ model, 11 clips in the ‘standing’ model, and 4 clips in the ‘carrying’ model. Although they use the same armature, since in the Unity scene they would have the identical pose which is the first frame of the first clip in NLA editor, then it would be very hard to adjust their transformations and parent-child relationships if I just used one model.

Making armature animations is fun. (The disgusting part is weight painting though – since I had more poses than just riding now, I’d found the weights were not that right at the hip part and it took me a whole afternoon to repaint it, to ‘basically right’. See the upper parts of the thigh is still quite weirdly swelling) But if you want to make them moving naturally, then you have to take care of every bone. Walking is obviously much more difficult than sitting, and like how you walk, every bone have to move to make the whole body move naturally, even the toe. Also the centre of gravity is important! The GIF below was initially for carrying a burden, but for quite a long time I felt it had been more like dragging something. I think the most important part for the centre of gravity should be the hip bone (the cyan below) – position as well as rotation.

Below is a combination in the real scene of several animations. The branch is set parent to one hand, and to make it move but not rotate, I have to be very careful with the hand’s bone and set it to the same rotation of every key frame. That was not very easy because the hip the spine the chest and the arm rotates all the time to look natural!

And another combination: the same person with the left one above but this time he is dragging a frog.

This one below contains more parent-child relationships. Actually I quite like this kind of thing because although it seems more troublesome, but once you got clear who will be the child of whom, then after dragging them in, the whole animation would seem quite good because everything seems moving along with each other and that makes the natural sense.

And a sitting crowd here. For a crowd of people like this as well as those trying to catch the red ball above, the differences between each other are very important. People can’t move with the same rhythm and the same movements. So one thing is to make more clips with maybe just slight differences (like they are all sitting but some are supporting the body with one hand or two, some shaking legs or looking around, etc), and the other thing is to use different speed for each animator controller.

Another thing except from the animation when importing these humans is that new models and textures as most of them have their own stage properties… (That could be another ‘default’ factor of being natural cos it looks that everyone is really doing something..) And here are the big birds in the pond.

I really enjoy the time restoring these adorable creatures by painting new textures, and I try to make them more like birds by adding thin strokes to create a feather-like material but not a colourful plastic. But, well, it’s not a good habit to take screenshots because I always feel that I’ve saved it after I make the screenshot. How much should I pay for my stupidness before I can get a degree?

The Circuit is ON!! XD

Literally four whole days (and nights) working on the components including separating models, reallocating actions, resetting smooth shading and UV unwrap, painting textures, sorting and cleaning animations, dealing with the hierarchies, and the codes…..

Animation

So now I eventually became quite familiar with Blender’s animation system and figured out how to store multiple clips for one file to Unity. In NLA editor I drag all actions I need into one track and delete others so that they won’t show up again in Action editor (become “0”, precisely, and disappear when opened next time. Cos I’d been confused why they were still not “0” although I checked all objects and no one was using them). And also, Unity’s clip list become clean now. Note that you have to delete the current action of the armature to <No Action> or all the clips would play the current action.

Therefore as all humans are using the identical rig, I can then append my prefab one (shape keys & modifier problem fixed) into each model file. I also found that it was because the parent-child relationship things that when I imported the models into Unity the components were always messed up in transformation. It seems that if I had more than one objects have parent relationships with a single object/bone, then it wouldn’t work properly. Like if I had both the hair and eyes set to the head bone, they’d fly away in Unity but if only hair, and eyes set to the eyes’ bone (moving paralleled), then everything’s fine. Neither .blend or .fbx. The same problem in complex animations such as something was set to a bone of an armature, and it had it’s own armature deforms or something set to it’s bones at the same time, then… well that’s confusing because the original models of human on horse animation work in the blend file’s default take (human has its own animation and is parented to the horse’s back bone); but when I had more complex things, I wasted hours on trying to figure out where went wrong, and failed.

My workaround is just separating things into single clips. The mount in one blend file, the human (if multiple humans, store them into clips in one fbx file, cos fbx can have shape keys animations), and birds on the head or something held by hand etc… then in Unity’s hierarchy, unfold their components, place the human as the child of the mount’s back bone, and place the others as the child of what it should be. Not really troublesome and very safe.

Hierarchy

Allocate the animator controller to everyone who has animation. Then, each human(s) with the mount and the related objects is set to an empty game object. That game object carries the moving script and a box collider. There’s also a “circuit” game object being the parent of everything here and it’s at the centre of the pond, so everyone can have a local position around the pond which is easier for the script.

As there had been more and more objects in the circuit I decided to sort them into crowds, and actually they are in crowds in the painting as well. I used numbers as in the clock then I found there were exactly 12! Brilliant.

So in the code I call the transform.localPosition to get the angle and radius (it’s an ellipse though so z divides 0.7 :P). Then angle+=speed and localPosition goes to its cos and sin. And finally use a Quaternion.LookRotation(Vector 3).

So that’s about the important things this week, easier said than done! How painful it should be to learn something…. I love painting textures though! Although Blender always has awful unfilled seams.

OK it’s too much for gifs this time so here’s a extremely unclear screen grab!! Forgot to say, it’s still even not everything in the circuit actually T___T

 

A Makeup Artist Should Be Able to Make Contour to Not Only Human

But also horses…

And after I replaced several models today, I found that I can just append the fixed human model to the same place and simply delete the original one, and give the new armature the original action because they use exactly the same set of armature. Brilliant! However at the moment I can’t figure out how to export multiple actions to one fbx file so that I don’t need that many human models which should save great space; I’ve checked the “F”, but in Unity there is just one clip. Doesn’t affect the appearance though.

Also found a very nice resource of a unlit shader that casts shadows: https://gist.github.com/pigeon6/4237385 because the the light and (even diffuse) reflections are sometimes too strong and the texture can’t be seen clearly, while unlit texture won’t have shadow that’s too weird for a real material.

Keep working!!

Shape Keys Animations Finally Work T__T

I WANNA CRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah just as the title says. After all those searches experiments struggles, since even a month ago when I found part of the animation was not working…. Searched all keywords I can think about, trying different export settings and even scripts, and also asked my teacher who gave me some experimental suggestions about baking….

I now found the reason is just so simple that I was using subdivision surface and mirror modifiers on my models, which shape keys won’t work together with. https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/3nmuaa/whats_up_with_the_missing_shape_keys/ So many said that Unity just don’t understand animations apart from the transform ones, and said Blender’s shape key animations just won’t work in Unity, but the above post is right and there is the solution. When I tried a human with those modifiers applied and remade the shape keys (so hard to control facial expression when there were so many vertexes this time), export .fbx instead of just the model file, the “BlendShapes” tab just simply appeared under the Skinned Mesh Renderer, and everything just moves smoothly without my doing anything. Nothing to do with anything else!

But I can’t apply the modifiers to models with shape keys, and, this tutorial seems great but don’t work with my complex models with armature. The saddest thing is that I’ve done such a great part of the animations, with everyone set with his own armature & shape keys animation, and with modifiers not applied.

So I’m now hoping that I can manage to use this new human model, importing into all my files, deleting the original human mesh and successfully parenting the new one with the armature. Sigh but better than nothing! Just a month left and… hold on plz everything works plzzzzzzz

The Architecture 5: Keep Modelling…

Come to update the latest progress of the project.

Now just finished the last two giant buildings on the top right of the painting. Seems quite exciting but still great many of the small pieces everywhere ohhhh hope I could finish all of them…

Anyway. Kind of getting bored with these models of the same kind of vivid colours and I don’t feel in this effect they look as good as the ‘sketches’ in Blender. By the way that inner organ like thing was really crazy to model…

But the screenshots in Blender in the unfinished editing scenes look very cool and technical, especially with the blank and missing-data shapes! I suddenly feel that it would be a great modern version related card product or something.

 

I can actually choose the Unlit texture shader in Unity so that it would look as flat as in Blender windows because they wouldn’t accept the lights and shadows from the environment. I’ve talked about this before and then felt it’s still better to have some more 3D ones. This is really contradictory maybe I just don’t get the good way to balance these knotty needs. Who knows.

A small ‘documentary’ here!

The 2nd Episode of the BBC Documentary Renaissance Revolution

Just share a brilliant documentary that I’ve just seen the third time. Talking about this painting for the whole episode, with the editing really full of motion to convey the mass jumps of weirdness as well as relations, and also some great modern background music instead of classical magnificent orchestral ones for the renaissance topic, which I feel express the idea that we understand this painting from our own age and thoughts, just as it was also modern or even advanced at its own time.

This is also where I got some of the knowledge/interpretations of this painting I used in my project, like the owls, the Tree-Man, the structure, and many other abstract ideas…. even before I thought about the topic of this final project.

https://dailymotion.com/video/x1ircew

the Realised UI in Unity!

Spent 3 days with C#… Came across and solved loads of problems from a total newbie, during which there were many moments I thought oh this technique was brilliant I should write everything down but, now just don’t know what I should conclude -.-

Just let the GIFs speaks

I changed the logic structure of the selecting panels in order to optimise the calculation and that it’d be better controlled if much more objects were added to the system (as if I would).. so first I had things sorted by type like all models in a folder which as a parent rotates, and all map segments, all titles in a folder.. but I spent the third afternoon renaming everything and resorting them by the objects’ name like all things of the cone in the cone’s folder, and everything in the same type uses the same name/tag (“title”, “model”) in the hierarchy. I saw a set of videos talking about importing database&php into Unity, but well… it would be good but the big thing about my project I guess should be that I can’t go too far with anything so that I could finally balance it as a whole TvT.

Got some useful suggestions and inspirations on 5th and 6th from our tutors Jules and Andrew in the interim presentation, and I’m now moving to the writing (in case I forget anything :P)

Static pics: