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 Riding Circuit

All those with quite special poses are done and I’m starting to set the first scene in Unity tomorrow for them.

I found I might have made big mistakes to sculp hair in really tiny messy faces topology which could result in great computing and that should actually be the work of texture and height map things… because of my lack of experience in modelling. And I still don’t know yet what I will be faced with when I do the texturing later…

The Encyclopaedia of Riding Poses

Never think something is easy before you have ever done it!

But are you humans really alright doing this… on a horse…….

Blender really drove me crazy when I was firstly doing the animations with more than one pair of the rider, which was the two humans on a camel one. Because I used the same rider prefab appended into the model, the two humans were always in the same poses although they have respective rig. And if I made multiple actions for one model, like the common horse, then they always messed up with some actions seemingly gone nowhere.

So I stopped to look for some explanations systematically for the action editor to avoid keeping wasting my time trying to clear up things or losing my animations that I paid great efforts on….

This should be basic knowledge of using Blender but I still wrote it down here… So actually each single object can take only one action at one time. That object is the ‘user’ of that action, and each action can have multiple users which is shown as the number after the action’s name (4 in the picture). When no one uses the action, it will disappear after closing the file; and F is a fake user which means there will always be the user for the action.

So when I used two humans on the camel, they were identical because I was trying to make them in the same action… and they got alright after I allocated them into different actions. And I can keep many actions for one model which is obviously better for my importing them into Unity later.

But I was still quite worried if Unity can play the different tracks for one model since I had just done some simple single animations before. So in this project for the first time I opened Unity and created my project today lol.

 

 

The model imported into Unity is still separated by object as they were in Blender. And actually I just set the default take and it was exactly how I saved the animation (set it ‘legacy’ and loop time to make it keep animating). However, some small things in the models did not work properly, like the eyeballs. I made them separate objects to the body, but in Unity they came out of the head, and also I feel the relative position of the humans to the camel is slightly changed. This is not a good sign… but for now I just test if the animation can work in Unity so that I can go on with my work in Blender.

Anyway, so far more than a half of the circle has been done. I now get quite familiar with the process of parenting the rider prefab with the bone of the mount where he sits on, and then making the animation for other parts of the body.

Did very delicate key frames for not only the body pose but also the gesture and facial expressions, and cleaned up the problems in weight paint along the work. Now feel great satisfaction when looking at these together! Really hard work literally did nothing but this for the whole days but the time is still extremely tight for the tremendous pit I have dug for myself……….

Animation: the Riders

Decided to go on with completing circuit after the last set of work done, probably a much organised way of working with such a massive project. As many humans in that circuit have quite different poses, even interacting mutually, I suppose I should make everyone a single model although I cannot figure out if it is the right way of professional process (however, as soon as I was typing the last sentence I suddenly found that I should have made them in multiple animations of a single model instead of multiple models since many of them have just the same elements!!)

I did not work a lot this weekend but the first four pieces was quite smooth and I feel the process will be not as long as making all the quadrupeds. The only problem now is that in Blender, the frame rate went really slow to about 3-4 when the human object added, and I still have no idea if it is going to affect the Unity project – but I cannot do anything at this stage to change it even if it would do.

Animal Modelling – Quadrupeds Day 3

Finally finished everyone (however, just the mounts) in the circuit. I am feeling exhausted especially when thinking about this is just a small part of the whole work……

I found that I actually left all those don’t-know-what things for the last day and that might be why I felt so tired today.

Like the rabbit/cat, the bear’s face is also very different with the horse-like animals which needs a rebuild, a different shape of the body and different paws. I won’t say tail and ears though because everyone has its own kind.

The pig, or porcupine. The hair on its back drove me crazy but I would not say so after making the next one… Quite like the shape though comparing to the bear which seems kind of too cartoon.

Totally no idea what this big shaggy is. I can only see its head on the painting but that is interesting enough to imagine its body!

A griffin. This guy seems really cool but I had totally no idea how to reform from something else, so I just re-modelled it from zero which took me the whole night.

I thought I had finished but suddenly found this guy on the left-down corner of the circuit, raising his head up high and looking like a frog or something… I had lost all my patience to think about what it should be and made it always like the position it is on the painting. Quite nice though! Lol.