Week 3 of Midterm

This week I was put in charge of putting in the enemies into our test level, and finishing the static meshes. Importing the enemies was a simple task the only thing that I had to do was create a custom class to tell the game engine 'Hey I want to load this model and animations with it when I do this.'

One of the more harder things I had to do with Importing the enemies was getting the animations to work we are for right now the enemies will charge at you. We need to create a delay from the time they see you to the time they start attacking you. Our Professor said and I see why this will work, he explained that when the model 'pushes the fire button' he will do a certain animation and that he use the same thing when creating a sword attack animation. Other than that everything was simple.

The screen shot below shows that I had to make a custom class.

This screen shot is what I had to do to make the models appear in the game. 

All the other crazy lines just means that at the start of the level load a random enemy and have them start attacking you then when they die spawn another random enemy and keep on repeating.

Besides getting the enemies into the game I had to finish creating some models that are needed for the beginning level. While I was making these model I noticed that when you look at them in 3Ds Max the look way different than in UDK, because of the default lighting that comes with both programs. So that's why I added two screen shots one in 3Ds Max and the other in UDK to show the difference that I noticed. Something fun that I did was create a bridge out of a photo and I like to think that I got it spot on the only thing that I didn't get would be that there are far more planks and that the rails have there own planks but other than that I would say there identical. I also went back on one of my earlier models and touched it up the only thing with touching up a model would be that you would add more poly's I also included a screen shot of the poly's that are currently on the model to what they were.

If the model looks bigger in the UDK Game Engine it's because the way the camera is set up.

(Left New Chest, Right Old Chest)

Week 2 of Midterm

This week I was Placed in charge of putting the Uno model, and enemies 1, 2, and 3. The only hard thing I had to do this week was to edit a script so that I can play as Uno and not the character that comes with the engine. This was simple I even memorised the steps of doing this. We ran into three hiccups that I seen other groups also run into. The first one is that even though Uno imported perfectly and so did his animations when I get to "Play" as Uno he just stands perfectly still. The code is fine and running perfectly I might have just gone wrong in some other part of the process or steps. The second hiccup was that the Uno model is floating in the sky, at first glance this looks like it has something to do with the pivot points on the model but I double checked that and even had to remodel parts of Uno, but the problem still exists. The third problem is that when I import the enemy models and bring there textures with them they don't get applied correctly. This might happen because the way the engine renames the textures for you. Here are some images of the animations we will be testing with Uno's.

(The little white thing is so that you can see where the sword of subtraction would go because Uno doesn't have any arms or hands.)

(This will be the running animation we will be testing, but there are plans for later to add a walking animation also.)

7/24/12 8:45 P.M Edit: I'd like to just make a quick update I've resolved all my issues and everything works perfectly. This week I will try to get working on making more animations other than just running, but that is up to my team to decide tomorrow.

Week 1 of Midterm

So starting this week we will be officially working in our midterm project. Week one was easy for us since we already had it done and approved before we started the class. The assignment for week one was to do our high concept and that is to get our idea on paper, the professor told us that though out the entire project this will be changing because we will either want to change some of our ideas as we find out if its even possible to do. I also wanted to post a problem that I had while working on our grass that were going to be using.

In this picture the grass has a slight white pixel at the border surrounding it. Even though the actual texture is edited straight to the pixel level the border still shows up. I found out that it has to do with the program stretching the texture the applying it. A way to fix it is to either add a extra layer of cushion on the image just before the alpha layer is applied

The fuzziness of the texture is very little but for someone with a good eye they would be able to see the difference.