Last Week of Internship

Wow. Time flies. It's already the last week of internship! Currently preparing the presentation of what I did in Backbone. I know it is not very much, but I do know I've learn a lot of stuffs with the guidance of the supervisors and the lady boss.

Why do I make this post sounds like my last post? Anyway, continue with the updates.

The mock up of the game development has been made, so it's here for you to check it out.

The mock up of the game of Jelly Land, with vector stylized background and game environment.
This is the colour pallete of the items exist in the above mock up. Colour scheme may change depending to the game level environment.

In the meantime, I shall continue with Jojo's texturing and rigging, hope it will be done by this Friday.

UPDATE

It's been days.

So here is an update on what I've done for those MIA days.

First, I have drawn a story board for a CG animation for Ms Evelyn's presentation. Here is a digital copy of it.

Then I've continued the game development. I began early visual development of the game and I'll let the pictures do the talking.

a sketch of the how the 'lands' will look like.
a mock up of the early levels in the game, "Jelly Land".

Besides drawing these for the games, the game group further discussed the game in details and hopefully the supervisors will like the idea.

Game Development: Progress

Yesterday a meeting regarding the game development was held. A few topics were discussed

We started off by giving out ideas and simple stories of the games. Here is what we've accumulated:

1. A dog trying to rescue its owner

2. Space ship fight (similar game mechanism to lightopus)

3. Achievement unlocked

4. Roach run

5. Sucker fish cleaning the environment (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plecostomus)

6. Mosquito killer

7. Lines (puzzle solving by drawing lines/tools, similar to space physics)

Then we filtered out the better ideas to further develop. We chose Roach run and sucker fish.

For the roach run, we planned that the game will be a survival-running game where you have to find food, avoid threats (humans and lizards) by hiding. However the hiding time is limited, so you have to run again after you've hidden for a short while. Throughout the game players get to upgrade their roaches to overcome the gradual increase of difficulty with each level.

For sucker fish, we could make the fish eat waste products in the given environment in a limited timing. We explored some of the game mechanisms as well, for example if the fish ate toxic substance accidentally, the fish will excrete and the player will have to collect it back before continuing to eat waste products in the environment (thus taken your time used for progress); the fish excretes gold for player to collect in order to purchase upgrades. This game comes in levels too.

Later Christine came in to monitor the outcome of the meeting. She gave some critics and questions to make sure if the ideas are really what we want. She also demonstrated a game called Furmins as an add-on to Yuki's Lines idea. She asked us to do a proper research on the game's target audience as well as the icon of the game., as they are important factors for the game to sell.

I found something that might help this project, so have a look. It's called Game Develop, a software that enables one to design game without any knowledge of programming.

http://www.en.compilgames.net/index.php

here is a screen shot of the software

Furmins Trailer

MORE RAINBOW

Nuff said.

Game development

And so we were called to form a team and create a simple game. Christine gave us a short briefing on fundamentals of character design as we might need it for the game. Other than that, she also gave a guide on the pre-production of the game, like what is the genre of the game, what is the theme revolving the game, what happen to the characters in the game and who the game is targeting at.

Yuki asked me to check out a game called lightopus. I found this game is very similar to a game called Spore, as it collects stuffs in order to survive. It is very easy to play, just guide the 'organism' called lightopus to collect sunlight and defeat the enemy organism using the 'fish' which follow behind you after you collect sunlight.

Here is a footage of the game.

Nestle AR

We were asked to do a research and ways of how AR can help Nestle. So here we go.

I know Nestle is holding a lot of brands; the brands are products ranging from infant food to ice cream, breakfast drinks(dairy based and non-dairy based) to coffee, performance food to cereals and such.

Since the product varies, their demographic is very wide, which includes infants to adults. Since it's like that, I thought of ideas which are relevant for everyone.

First is the cubes which I posted on the 6th March. The cubes are actually toys, which could be played digitally and physically. However Christine thought it is more suitable for kids rather than infants which I suggested.

Next up, the cereal box. The cereal box have almost no function other than containing the pack of cereals and displaying nutrition information, so I thought the box could be a little funnier than it seems. Maybe a markers could be printed on the box and kids will see something funny inside the box with the help of the proper hardware and software. Christine added on, to put an AR game at the back of the box.

Then I thought about the Milo T-shirts which is given out during sports events. We could print a marker on the shirt, and with some tech equipment and voila! The wearer transforms into a big hulk that represents strength and power. The big hulk could be replaced with other things which is relevant to Milo's marketing strategy. This idea could also be applied to Milo trucks, or even Nestle's catering service trucks.

The last idea from me is to place the markers on the LRT ad boards. Usually people will sit in the LRT and wait for the train to arrive at their destination. While waiting they could 'drink coffee like a boss'. It's actually an animation that triggers when the marker is in view of the tech equipment, and the character in the animation will serve the viewer coffee and make them feel like a boss.

Yup, that's all from me. Hope you find this report helpful.

Some cool stuff

The above is about Sixth Sense, where this technology can be the future of gadgets.

Found another cool stuff. Imagine your screen goes fully 3D!

MOAR AR STUFF

As mentioned in the meeting, these are the cubes I was talking about.

As I suggested, the cubes can be a toddler or infant's toy because it's made of plastic and not easy to break and in my opinion it can be made into different shapes.

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muahaha, finally the rig is skin binded, and ready to be animated. however it has imperfections due to my 'pro' modeling skill =.=

Re-rig!

For the last Friday and today I have been re-rigging my character. I found another tutorial which has a simpler controls so i combined it with the tutorial I found earlier.

Now my arms don't have any FK, just IK with rotatable controller to ease my control on the palm. The IK arm alone is good enough to control the entire arm in my opinion. Other than arm fingers, spine and head (which means only the legs!) are done following the 1st tutorial.

Here is how it looks like:

Paint weight here I come!

it's thursday

yesterday finished the rig, and already been skin weight painted. but the thing is, i do not know how to rig the pants! gah, have to ask kai for help.

anyways, found out a lot of problems with my rig - it's the local rotation axis again. the foot controller is not being orientated, the head is spinning weirdly when trying to move the chest, elbows are not bending smoothly.

gahhhhhhh need to re-rig and adjust some of the modelings. have to learn to be vigilant when rigging next time.

mid valley ar

yesterday christine held another AR meeting, this time it's about mid valley. so... we had some ideas but they are just too mainstream. so, christine asked us to do group mind mapping, which allows us to write anything that comes into our mind with a given word on the mind map. and this is our result:

This is the mind map we did, it's messy and not constructive before filtering wordss.

These are the filtered words from the mind map, which are unusual words that is linked to mid valley.

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Back to the rigging part, luckily i've checked the tutorial before proceeding, as the tutor used another method to rig instead of the first method for the finger rig/hand rig. i guess it's not easy to rig something, especially a good and advanced one.

oh finally the arm rig is done!

ok, just the arm rig, you still have the hand rig to do. although the rig is attached to the arm, but i think the rotation axis of the FK arm rig is wrong but nevermind... it's kinda late to fix it now. now i know the importance of orientating the local rotate axises. anyway, i will proceed to the hand rig and see how that turns out.

yesterday night i came across some fun stuff at 9gag, and this is one of them. Koreans seems to have a helper to clean the chalk board but it will be expensive to install such robot in schools.

and this is in the air port of miami, they made the windows colourful so it would never be the same old window again! the sunlight which shines through the window projects rainbow onto the corridor, and visitors will never look at the corridor the same way like they used to

First Post

This is a log of what I have done for the last friday.

I am still rigging the arm following the tutorial I've downloaded but it seems the tutor himself did some mistake and I've followed up until where he made the mistake. Then I followed his steps in correcting the rig, but I am not sure if the arm is rigged the way I made it to.

It is somehow confusing because there are two arm rigs, an IK and an FK arm rig. I am not sure what does FK arm rig do, but I am guessing its for convenience of animating the arm later on. Still trying to explore this kind of advanced rig tho.

As for the last Thursday, the important event that is worth writing it here is the idea sharing for Augmented Reality application for Mc Donald's.

Alex suggested we could create an app for ordering which generates QR code after you've picked your menu and scan it at the Drive Thru station to quicken the ordering process at Drive Thru stations. The app also calculates the grand total you need to pay, thus you can prepare the money needed to be paid before you order. Li San also gave a similar idea to Alex's. Vincent, he had a similar idea but with a little change of it. He said the Drive Thru should have a kiosk with a touch screen, and folks without a smart phone to generate QR code still could order their food and with that it can solve the communication problem which exist now, due to the fact that McD is using microphone and speakers to take orders from customers. Li Shin added on that rewards can be tied to this system with point collection whenever they purchase through this method.

I gave a total of 5 ideas, which all of them are less business mechanism based or rather they are fun based. First idea is the make the cup filled with water with characters swimming in it whenever smart phones read markers on or in the cup, or make a surprise for lucky customers to win away freebies using this method.

The second idea is to make collectibles - in this case a cup cushion, with illustration of McD characters on it. This way, we can use it as a cup cushion and view a digital sculpture using smart phones. 2 in 1, not a bad deal eh? CJ also mentioned a similar idea, which is to collect points thru the collection system.

The third idea is to make McD's newspaper ad in a marker form, this way McD can save space and money whenever they advertise on newspapers. Moreover, the size of the ad can be adjusted in the digital space (I think it's possible tho)

The fourth idea is to make an app, I called it the look-a-like. Whenever a smartphone's camera is pointing at a person's face, they make them look like a McD character according to their facial features.

The fifth idea is to make balloons be detected as a Big Mac in smart phones, be it a hot air ballon, helium ballon or birthday balloons during birthday parties. However, I thought it would be cool if a flash mob wearing a shirt with marker walking down the street and ask passerby's to view them with smart phones, it would be cool to see Big Macs walking around the street in the screen.

I think that's all I have to say...