University of Wales, Newport Graduate Show featuring Void

It was the opening night of the graduate shows at The University of Wales Newport on Friday the 29th of May, which was including the Computer Games Design degree show as well.

For those that were unable to attend here are a couple of photos, there is also a link below to see all the photos that had been taken. (The pictures below are more Void related though)




A Flickr set of all the photos of the graduate show can be found here. Although sadly we didn't get any photos of the food that we had made, either way it was a very successful degree show, we learnt a lot from it.

Void Lighting Tests

Here are some light tests I did for the first level, The Anemone Sea.
The level itself is not the final build, and many assets are arranged solely to see how light will behave on them at various angles, most notably the orange pads.


These screenshots are taken from Unreal's InEditor Game. The Editor's game mode doesn't access the scripting files that allow our character to be used, so that is why it's first-person.

These screenshots are taken from the game itself, hence why our character is now there.

This is a lighting/material problem we found as a result of the light testing. It has since been rectified.

These are screenshots of the Emerald Cavern. The lighting wasn't my job for this level, so these are only examples of fog testing.

Floating Character Model

Here is a spin around of the Floating character along with its current texture.



In total he comes to 7636 tris.

It was modelled and textured by Rob, using Maya, Zbrush and Photoshop.

Heavy State Animations

Here are the the animations for the heavy state.

Some notes on the animations:

The heavy state doesn't have a jump function, but because it bounces off of the starfish bounce-pads, it needs a land animation. The brief wiggle before the land is used by the unreal engine for the 'air-time' between jumping and landing. that's why it doesn't flow smoothly like it should.

As with the neutral state, there is no option to change the backwards speed compared to the forwards speed in Unreal Engine; both must be the same. Hence why are character is running backwards (a feat that is awkward for any biped).

Emerald Cavern Starfish Rigged

After having all the characters rigged I decided to do the starfish along side all my other work.

Below is a video briefly showing the controls of the rig with a flat texture applied to it, although the actual texture is almost finished.



As you can see his rig is quite simple, I wish I could of had less controls on it, but it seemed the best way to give Caryn the most control over it. I wanted to allow her to translate the bones as well as rotate, but Unreal wasn't having it, but I feel I figured out a good way to control the squash in it's belly for when the Heavy character falls on it, which isn't in this video, but I worked around it by using rotation on bones around the belly, which gives a similar effect.

Character Changes Working With Our Characters

We have now jumped an even larger step in our game, mainly because our programmer Rachel Cordone gave me an updated version of the script which has allowed us to get our characters in. I had to add in a line of code so the game would look for the AnimTrees but other than that it was perfect.

Also the glowing on the characters is due to the lighting which needs sorting.



Now the only thing we have to do to have this perfect is tweak the animations, and the characters speeds to make them work well together. Get the jumps working, make them cast shadows, and perhaps change the camera.

Floating Character Rig

While working on the heavy character rig I started on the floating character's rig, which took no time at all after doing two previous ones.

He is very different in bone structure to the other models, as his movements are less complex and more flowing and elegant.



I would like to point out that the texture is currently not finished, and is a very old version of the previous textures we were having.

Heavy Character Rig

After finding out we will be able to get changeable characters in our game, thanks to our programmer. The heavy character got rigged quickly so that animating could start being carried out.

Below is a video showing the controls of the rig with its texture applied.



As you can see his rig is quite similar to the neutral character, with the slight changes being a fat control on his tummy and no face control. Caryn is now busy animating him so expect some animations on here soon.

Heavy Character Model

Here is a spin around of the Heavy character along with its current texture.



In total he comes to 8240 tris.

It was modelled and textured by Rob, using Maya, Zbrush and Photoshop.

Character Changing Working

We have now jumped a huge step in our game, mainly because our programmer Rachel Cordone sent us some script which allows us to have changeable characters from trigger points. Below is a small video just showing what it allows us to do.

It is currently using the unreal defaults, but we are getting our characters in at this present time with her help. Although as you should be able to see with the run through that each character that the test changes to has their own speed and abilities.



The first character can run very fast and jump, where as the second character cannot jump and is much slower, and then the third character is even slower and cannot jump either.

It is just amazing what she has given us, as without her we may have been in a bit of a sticky situation.

Neutral Character Animations

And here are the final animations for the neutral state character.
Well, unless they need to be changed at a later date of course.
There is an idle, a walk, a run, a backwards run and a jump. The jump has no pre-empt or reaction on the land because of the way Unreal does its jump function.

















And here is a video of some of the animations working in UT3 engine, though sadly not as a playable character just yet.

Emerald Cavern Whiteboxing

We are now working on the Emerald Cavern as well, the basic layout has been sorted in Unreal and now various tests are being carried out, making sure everything flows nicely.



Some of the stacks of platforms will be changing slightly from the pre-production, but will make more sense when playing.

The level is currently quite jerky in movement (climbing stacks etc) as we are currently creating various mutators for Unreal to change the Unreal defaults, so we can portray the movement we want.

Anemone Sea tests

While learning about materials in Unreal I conducted some tests by creating a small Anemone Sea inspired room.



If you notice the further away that the pads are, they slightly change colour. In this video it is a greenish yellow colour, but it will be changing to suit the lighting and shadow colours we want.

The textures are currently not completely finished as they are preliminery textures.

The character is in as a pick up, thanks to Andy finding out how to do so, this is why he doesn't cast a shadow or look like he's actually jumping much.

There will be a version of the final Anemone Sea room coming up on the blog soon, showing how it is actually looking.

Neutral Character Rig

The neutral character rig has gone through many iterations, as it started off very simple, but has since then developed into a more complex one, allowing our animator Caryn to have an easier job animating it.

Although we did have a few problems getting it into the engine as you can see from the video below.



This then meant that the rig had to be started again, and tests were run every step that the rig was changed, but it is now finished.

Caryn is busy animating it as we speak, so we can soon have the character in engine with the finalised animations on it as the player character.

Below is a video showing the controls of the rig with its texture applied to it.



There is ikFK control on the arms, just my recording software seemed to not include the channel box, while also managing to chop a bit off the top.

Neutral Character Model

Here is a spin around of the Neutral character along with its current texture.



In total he comes to 8240 tris.

It was modeled and textured by Rob, using Maya, Zbrush and Photoshop.