Breathing life into the Abettor Tank

Hey everyone, KrimsonStorm here. It’s starting to be that part of the year again. Winding down in terms of course work, which means time to show off the work I have done this semester. Next Tuesday, and the following Tuesday, I will be showing off what I have done, what the team is planning for the remaining time allotted.

With that said, I did spend most of my time rigging this vehicle, and doing some animation for it. While I did have the rig mostly set up, I had to skin it, get Maya’d, and skin part of it again. With all that said and done, I got 2 GIFs to show how it works.

The first one is the animation for the driving animation, while the vehicle rumbles around, these details are physically animated:

The antennae are going to be physics objects, and are based on how the vehicle and turret behave in general.

Another thing I want to show off is the rig for how the track will work. The rig is set up so the wheels move correctly in the unreal engine, but the track can still flex around terrain. Observe:

This week, I have:

Met with the development team: (180 minutes)

Weight painting for the Abettor: (10.5 hours)

Animated the Abettor (180 minutes)

Wrote this blog (60 minutes)

Next week, I will be doing a lot of presenting, so a chunk of the week will be devoted to working on presentations. Besides that, I will be going back to modeling one of the weapons. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Stuffing my tank with delicious joints

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving (or Thursday, if you lived outside of the United States) and had lots of delicious food. I had most of the week of, and as such I don’t have nearly as many hours as I would regularly. So I decided to spend the limited time I had to work on this project as setup for next week. Just as for the Vehicle Pad and Weapon Dispensor, the Abettor needs a fairly dense rig in order to get it working ingame the way we want it to.
Don’t believe me? Take a look:

(Note: The second picture is from the same angle as the first image.)

In total, that is 81 bones; only a few of them are for technical purposes, such as sockets or muzzle bones. The overwhelming majority is to get the model to animate right and animate dynamically. The tank tracks are designed to be able to follow the contour of the ground below it (mostly) and other pieces are set to just make the tank have character.

This week, I have:
Rigged the Abettor (180 minutes)

Wrote this blog (30 minutes)

The next 3 weeks will follow a normal schedule, as I finish up the Abettor tank before heading back over to weapon creation. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

I built Abettor tank

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week was a bit of a panic, as the beginning of the week started with a missing laptop. during my 3 day search I didn’t have much time to work on other projects. That doesn’t necessarily mean I didn’t do work in regards to this project, as most of it is done Thursday-Sunday. What it does mean is that there was a snowballing effect of trying to catch up from work that I am still in the process of recovering from for other classes. Thankfully, Campus Safety managed to find the missing backpack & laptop, and it doesn’t look like anything was looted. I managed to put some good hours into the tank model to make it all nice as far as ingame models go. Here you go, the finished M-128 Abettor tank:

It sits around 11K polygons. A little lower than I expected, but that makes it even better to render ingame, especially with all the particles in there. I did a bit of work on doing some higher detail on the turret; giving it a radar dish and reactive armor. Infact, the treads are now covered in it to make it look like, despite it’s size, it’s a tough vehicle. The secondary gun is now complete. It’s a rotary heavy plasma cannon. A ROWS like that will really do close range damage, and also just look cool. Here is another image of it, in detail:

This week, I have:

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

Modeled Abettor pieces (10 hours)

Vehicle Research (60 minutes)

Wrote this blog post (45 minutes)

Next week, since it is a holiday, there will be minimal work done. I will work towards getting the Abettor rigged to be animated on the week of December 1st. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

The Abettor Model

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week was spent mostly working on the Abettor Tank, doing research or doing the actual modeling. I bounced a few ideas around with the development team about more building designs. A few hours of research was necessary in order to understand how vehicle behavior functions in the Unreal Engine. Previous vehicles and assets were either made for other engines, or for older versions of the Unreal Engine (UDK 3.0) Only recently did Unreal update the Unreal Editor and included with it the advanced vehicle documentation, so it’s much easier to understand how to do things like suspension for vehicles.

Of the time I spent doing vehicle work, the overwhelming majority of it was spent on actually modeling the Abettor. Check it out so far:

Currently the Abettor is missing the ROWS weapon on top, and some small parts of the finer detail are missing, but the low poly model is there. While modeling I was making sure that, specifically for curvilinear sections, the amount of geometry is JUST enough to ensure it looks good. This vehicle will sit right around the 12k polycount range, and I think that is a good spot. Since at most there will be 6 of these things on the battlefield, I didn’t have to worry about a really low poly-count. However, optimization is ALWAYS important. Sure, there will be only 6 of these, but there will also be anywhere between 2-32 players, up to 11 more vehicles, and many different beautiful fauna, building, and landscape features. Not to mention the particle effects that will dance across the skies. We want this game beautiful, but still be able to run on well on computers that aren’t brand new.

One thing I had to figure out, and I will continue to design the process, is the technical process for the reload animation. Since the projectiles are visible before being fired, as well as the turret is required to hold forward during the reload animation, this requires a bit of a deviation from a normal vehicle workflow.

This week, I have:

Building layout designs (60 minutes)

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

M-128 Abettor Mesh (15.5 hours)

Research ( 120 minutes)

Wrote this Blog (60 minutes)

Next week, I will work on the ROWS Heavy Machine Gun, the higher detailed model, and continue researching how to handle the passing of the design’s features into UE4. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Vehicle Design

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. Last week, I was working on concept art for a number of things. I spent a few hours working with my team’s environment artist, designing building layouts and polishing up a modular kit for them to use when creating the level. All of this is stuff you can find on her blog right here.

However, the main focus on of my time this week was starting the design for the vehicles. We sat down Saturday and discussed the basic aesthetics for the vehicles; their general shape and design, and slightly on their behavior. Out of the 3 vehicles that we are setting out to create, I chose the largest one out of them to really design and push out a heavily detailed sketch. I would like you to take a look at the next major piece that I will be working on for a few weeks: The M-182 Abettor Light Tank.

The Abettor is a 2 person vehicle, and without including any stretch goals is the highest health vehicle in the game. The driver gets to use the main weapon, a paired set of missile pods. Reloading of the main weapon will take a long time, as more rockets are fed into the pods from the chassis. This contrasts with the vehicles single fire, or semi automatic, nature. Every squeeze of the trigger is one round, so if you want more rounds down range you better have a fast trigger finger.

The secondary gunner gets to use it’s ROWS (Remotely Operated Weapon System) affixed to the top of the turret. It’s similar to the SAW in performance, but will have a slightly higher damage and weapon bloom than the SAW. This is an overheat weapon, which means you must take care of making sure the weapon does not overheat. There are visual indicators on the weapon itself to help you judge how heated the gun is, on top of the game’s UI.

When creating the vehicles, like anything really, you have to make sure it fits into the big picture. Vehicles generally bring in tactics which are unavailable to infantry players (brute force pushes, blitzkriegs, sieges, etc.), and forgetting what vehicles can or can’t do will generally spell bad news for most games, not just shooters.

Players don’t like not knowing what is going on in the game they are playing. It leaves players frustrated and unwilling to continue that game. How many times have you stopped playing a game not because you were losing, but simply because you couldn’t understand HOW you were losing. Snipes from weird section of a map that insta-kill you. Taking damage for apparently no reason. These are things which may or may not being intuitive, but it still will frustrate players, and you need to minimize these things whenever possible because it will cause most people to eventually stop playing.

No weapon in this game is going to one hit kill a player at full health, even tank missile rounds. We want players to be a lot more tanky (no pun intended) than a lot of shooters that have existed in the past. With the weapon set that will be available to infantry, this allows players to get up close and try and deal damage to a tank with a anti vehicle SMG(which I will be working on soon), or sit back and try and engage in medium/ long range battles with the tank using a weapon like the Neutrino Catapult.

The reason the primary weapon for the Abettor is missile pods is two fold. First, the slower nature of missiles allow for players to better deal with the rounds of the tank; dodge, and position themselves for it’s combat. Secondly, is to keep the grand scope of things in mind. If we get to the point where we decide we want aircraft in the game, the Abettor already fulfills the job of an anti air vehicle. It’s secondary cannon allows it for more engaging team play while not making the vehicle too overpowered.

This week, I have:

-Met with the development team (180 minutes)

-Building Layout Design (180 minutes)

-Modular Kit Work (4.5 hours)

-Vehicle Research (30 minutes)

-Vehicle Design (4.5 hours)

-Wrote this blog (105 minutes)

In the coming next two weeks, I will be modeling the Abettor Tank and getting ready to do all the animations associated with it on the third week. Until next folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Unpacking the Vehicle Pad

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week I spent in a blitz doing the rigging and animation process. Towards the end of the week, I was almost totaling 30 hours.

Part way though rigging the Vehicle Pad, I realized that the scale was off for the game, and I had to go back and start over. Unreal Editor uses a base size of 16 Maya units count as a Unreal “foot”, so you have to plan that accordingly. Having forgotten that, I started rigging without scaling. A mishap by me, but I doubled down and spent the entirety of Saturday doing work. It would have been simpler (and much, much faster) to have gotten Maya’s copy weights tool to function properly, however I have yet to have that tool function correctly more than once for me so I had to do it manually.

Enough about Rigging woes and on to the big show. Since I assume that everyone would want to see it in all it’s glory, I have the animation hosted on Vimeo, instead of as a .gif sequence. BEHOLD!

(You can view the animation by clicking on the picture, or clicking here.)

I think this animation is very successful animation for a large asset. I’ve seen a lot of art assets look fine animation wise on the small scale, but when put in as massive objects they aren’t really as interesting… at least, in my opinion. To help with this, I picked objects to have certain speeds and had each type of object work at a different speed than the others. Having differing speeds allows your eyes to wander around the model, shifting from piece to piece. A lot of the animation has some slight offsets to them, with the unifying constant being the nozzles which work in unison. Each nozzle head has a slightly different behavior during the middle, or looping, phase of the animation; turning in different directions, when they turn, for how long are factors that set each of the nozzles apart since they all have the extend and retract cycle.

This Week, I have:

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

Rigged the Vehicle Pad (17 Hours)

Animate the Vehicle Pad (7 Hours)

Rendering for the Display (6 hours) <not counted>

Wrote this blog post (60 minutes)

Next week, due to a lot of other semester long projects and the fact that I am waiting on deliverable from another coworker,  I won’t be doing as much effort as I have this week. (Especially taking into account the marathon of work I did yesterday.) Next week will consist of a lot of concept art. Until next week folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Vehicle Pad, mesh complete!

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. Over the course of the past week, I’ve been working on finalizing the model for the Vehicle Pad. Since this is homecoming week, and the weeks college schedule was changed, the development team didn’t get together. Next week we’ll have a 6 hour meeting on Saturday. In the mean time, I took the advice from my colleges the week before, and made modifications to several parts.

(Note: The newer version is on top, the older version is on the bottom.)

As you can see, there are some large differences in the head for the nozzles at the end of the crane booms. The old version looked a bit more like an offensive weapon, and wasn’t as interesting as the new one.These nozzles work with the rest of the machine to develop vehicles in a Planetary Annihilation style animation. An outline of the vehicle pad is generated as the central pad rotates.

Once the wireframe is completed for the vehicle, the crane booms will erupt from their boxes and start the nanolathing process. Nanolathing, in the universes of Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, and Planetary Annihilation, consists of spraying nanites which form the desired object. What this means atheistically is that while the crane booms animate, the vehicle will then fill in it’s form, turning into a solid color. I think that process is very interesting for constructing things, and definitely has a Sci-Fi feel to it.

Once that step is completed, the nano-lathing ends. The Cranes adjust their position and then begin to spray a fine powder. This co-insides with the actual texture of finished vehicle coming out from the mono-colored silhouette. The machine will be ramping up it’s actions, with it’s pistons in a accelerated fashion, just like in the Weapon Dispenser. Once that is done, the pistons and cranes quickly go back to their resting positions and the vehicle becomes complete.

Here is some finished pictures of the Low Poly and High Poly mesh for the Vehicle Pad:

This week, I have:
Vehicle Pad LP mesh (5 hours)

Vehicle Pad LP mesh UV’s (9 hours)

Vehicle Pad HP mesh (120 minutes)

Wrote this blog (60 minutes)

In the coming week, I’ll work on making the rig and animations. By this time next week, you’ll get to compare your vision of how it animates with mine. Until next week folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!

Constructor under construction

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week has been a lot of formalities when it comes to work for the week, with a lot of University workings to take care of for the necessity of the game. I’ve spent a lot of time doing work for the Design Doc for this project, which helps us find a sense of continuity between us as workers. But that’s not what you’re here for, so let me show you my progress:

This is a rough WIP model of the Vehicle Pad as it stands. A bit of it will be changed after talking to group members, such as turning the rear pillars from container tanks to large pistons. The V shape pistons will help reinforce the fact this is a vehicle pad by making it look like it uses over sized vehicle parts itself. The crane booms will have a swivel mount to help them with their job. This will compliment how articulated they already feel and make the Vehicle Pad feel busy like it’s counterpart: the Weapon Dispenser.

The Vehicle Pad will have a number of animations to it. If you divide the individual animations up, there will be a total of 7 different animations involved in the construction of a Vehicle. Some of these are more technical, like the popping out of the Cranes from their storage bins, and also animation cycles such as the animation loop of the cranes. It will feel fantastical and very Sci-Fi.

This week, I have:

Worked on the Design Doc (180 Minutes)

Worked on the Thesis Presentation (180 Minutes)

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

Worked on the Vehicle Pad (6.5 hours)

Wrote this blog (30 minutes)

For the next two weeks, I will continue working on the Vehicle Pad. By this time next week, you’ll see a finished model for the vehicle pad, and the work and a breakdown on how I go about the process of rigging. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing out!

Another week, another weapon

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week I’ve devoted myself to finishing one single asset. If you read my post last week, I showed progress on a weapon I’ve been working on. Today I am here to show you the finished weapon itself!

The Squad Automatic Weapon model 13, or SAW-13 for short, is a high capacity weapon. It fires high energy bursts of plasma from both of it’s co-axial barrels. It has a large liquid ammo supply in the stock of the gun, and when combined with the heat-sinks near the front of the gun, allow for a continuous stream of firepower downrange.

As the starting primary weapon in the game, the SAW-13 will have it’s role as the jack of all trade. The perfect fit for those trying to give covering fire. However, it won’t perform as well as a dedicated close range weapon, or as a dedicated long range weapon. It will also have a slightly longer than average reload time, somewhere around 4 seconds.

This weapon will really shine when firing. Literally. Every time a round is fired, the heatsinks will get brighter and brighter. Not only that, but the cables that bridge the middle of the weapon will pulse. Like the goal for every weapon and vehicle we’ll make, we want these weapons to feel great to use, but also feel unique.

I also did some other documentation work for this project for our in-class presentation coming this week.

This week, I have:

Modeled and UV’d the SAW-13 (14 hours)

Met with the development team (180 minutes)

Worked on design doc, presentation (180 minutes)

Wrote this blog (60 minutes)

For a total of 21 hours this week.

Next week, I begin the creation of the Vehicle Pad and all it’s glory. This next project will take a few weeks to get done from modeling, to UVing, to rigging, to animation. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing out!

Meaningful progress

Hello everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week I’ve been pretty frantic. Practically every course I have has had a project and/or test due this week as well as some real life issues, so I wasn’t able to do as much work as I normally would have. However, I still managed to work on a number of various things for the Parallax Project.

The first thing that I’ll show off here is my work in progress mesh for the Squad Automatic Weapon:

As you can see, it’s got the very basic shape down for the model. The way I go about doing my game modeling process is I first go for making a medium poly mesh. When it gets to that point, I’ll then generate a low poly version that you play with, and a high poly version to help the model look even better using normals.

Since this weapon does not fire any true rounds, we have the opportunity to experiment with different ways of making a weapon work. There is no spin to put on a ball of gas, or on a lazer, so the barrel can be any shape we want to design interesting forms. In this universe, plasma weapons don’t have circular barrels. We went with a more square-trapezoidal barrel form. In the following week, I’ll finish this weapon up and talk much more about this weapon as it gets finished up.

I also did concept art for the next thing asset piece I will be working on, that got a lot of positive feedback on, and that was the Vehicle Pad:

The vehicle pad, when idle, is similar to the pads you see on a lot of other videogames. It is mostly a flat platform where the vehicle comes from. The big difference here, is that when it starts to build the vehicle, it really comes to life. On the right side of the picture, there are 3 stages of construction, that illustrates the different ways the machine will behave over the course of a vehicle’s construction. As with the Weapon Dispenser, the Vehicle Pad will have a lot of character in it’s animation.

The last thing, and what took the most amount of time for me this week, was checking out the map that Melissa was working on for her thesis in the past few weeks. (She’s a great environment artist, you can follow her here.) Using my game design and level theory thinking, I put it under the microscope and figured out what worked and what needs changing to make this a successful game.

I loaded up the map, and took an Arial view of the layout. I located the bases on the map and put big gray markers on where they were. The Purple and Green bends are the respective team bases, which will have a dam-like appearance to them.

After I got the locations of the bases set up, I wanted to see how the map would function. I went through and did time trials to judge distance.The time, T, was an average of 4 trials I did for each category. Understanding base distances helps figure out the likely paths players will take. For example, from the purple base, it is faster to get to bases 2 and 13 than bases 11 and 7. Purple team players will start off going to bases 2 and 13 before migrating to the other bases. Also, the position of bases 3 and 13, being in a thin canyon strip in the bigger open canyon, so the paths they can take will be slimmed down. From base 13, the best option to go for would be to base 5, or back to base 2 or the home base.

There are some more items in there, such as the TTK and TTKr. TTK, or Time To Kill, is the approximate time a weapon will take to kill a player 1 on 1 if they have perfect accuracy. Then you have TTKr, which is a real form of TTK. Players are never perfectly accurate, and after doing a lot of digging and looking through existing game stats, it seems that the average accuracy of a player is 30%, so I took the TTK and adjusted it accordingly.  Another thing I looked at was the time it takes to transfer control from one side to the other. We decided to double the time from 20 seconds, seen in the graph, to 40 seconds after going over the data.

The main reason we wanted change this is this diagram:

Currently, using standing walking speed of humans, the distance one can travel in 6 seconds is represented in the red circle. Since we decided that the map should be increased by 30%, as well as increase the average players walking speed, travel times will stay mostly the same. This just means that the map will be more open and will allow players to round corners and dodge shots a little better. The increase in speed, roughly 30 percent, is shown in the yellow ring. Under regular walking speed, that distance would take 8 seconds, and in a shooter game when milliseconds count, that is a huge game-play difference.

After doing that, I did some tweaking of the base locations and numbers, as well as pathing. All the red dots are changes in the location of the base. The yellow dots are additional bases, so we can have some overlap. The brown paint strips are changes in the thin canyon gorges. Black lines indicate roads, or other major avenues of travel.

I also took a look at the relative height of the map. While the extreme heights of the map are good, inside of the canyon, where players can interact, is very very steep. Some of the canyon pieces are placeholders, so there isn’t much the game design portion of me can critique that. I still think we can get away with nice variations in the height of the terrain while toning it down a little bit.

This week, I have:

Work on level design (6 hours)

Model the SAW (5 hours)

Design the Vehicle Bay (180 minutes)

Had group Meetings (180 minutes)

Wrote this post (120 minutes)

Like I said, next week, I plan on having a completed SAW model to show you guys. I’ll also be putting together a design doc for the project to help keep continuity of the project. Until next time, KrimsonStorm signing off!