Modular Set-up

I am working on building a level in 3DS Max, the idea for the level is that of a crypt.  I am setting up for the scene to be an outside, dark and dreary place leading to the inside of the crypt.  This leading down to a darker area where the bodies would be laying.  The way the level is being set up is in that of a modular setting.  To make a level modular is to make everything into set pieces that you can put together as a puzzle after you have it all modeled and textured out.  One can make multiple walls, floors, ceilings and even objects such as tombstones to be placed either together to create a closed off building, fencing, or wall.  You can even take the smaller objects and place them where you wish throughout the map, which is usually done with small things like boxes that you can find sporadically in Halo or many other games.  This is done in different games, sometimes to make multiple different levels within the same building or even in making an entire large city for the main character to travel around in.  In my sense of the crypt, I plan to have a few different walls, some columns, trees, tombstones, even doors and gates to populate my level.  With that I can set up a graveyard scene, making several markings with tombstones pointing out that there are many buried, even make a few different crypt sets that don't work to take you to another area and leaving one that is different and is where you need to go.  Having multiple possibilities that don't work and one that does is a way to keep the player immersed into the game and making it so they won’t finish too quickly.

Stewart animation

One particular part of game design is that of the animation of your characters for said game.  For this project I am going to be animating this preset character/rig to do some pantomime animations.  Essentially to pantomime is to express actions without the use of words or sound.  I will be using this rig to do actions like jumping, diving, even different sorts of attacks.  Rigs like this are good to get down the basic move functions and actions for characters and to better learn the steps of animation so that you can raise your skill level.  The actions I will be laying out will be in an eleven second long animation to see how well i can organize and set up a scene.  This particular model and rig is named Stewart and is a great use to get down poses and actions, I will be using him for this set up.

Skinning the Rig

For my Team Production (Gambit), we are making a third person platform game.  To make a game you must go through a long process creating different assets of the game, from environment components like trees and rocks, to fully animated characters.  However you can not simply start with a fully animated character most times, a lot of times you have to take the time to create said character and rig them for animation.  For those that don't know, a rig is essentially the bone structure of your game characters.  You must create the rig with joints in the right places where you want the character to bend certain parts of their body to best imitate walking, running, shooting, swinging and so on. However creating the rig for your character is only half the battle, you must also apply skin weights to the rig after you have all the bones and joints set up the way you feel they should be laid out.  What applying skin weights does is makes it so that each joint only affects a certain section and amount of the body of the character.  This will affect not only which sections of the body each joint effects, but how strong of an effect that joint has on that particular section of the body.  That is what I am currently doing, I am editing where on the characters body each joint can alter, and how much they can alter said part of the body.

Mapping

I am in the process of making a level and in this process one must first make a paper map to have a broad idea of where the level will be going as it is created.  At certain points one may not follow the paper map exactly, they may reach points during creation of which they think of better ideas or certain things planed just don’t seem to fit or work as planned.  Also by making a paper map you can organize your idea, get an idea for spacing and what can go where and where it may look best before you get into the process of modeling it out.  In these two images are two of the different levels that I am trying to choose between to start working on.  The one to the right is a boss level, in short there are a couple of obstacles to make it more difficult and some sections on walls to aid you in defeating the boss.  The level to the left is a level that splits into five different sections of the level that you must go through one at a time, the fifth being the end of the level itself.  While the other four each lead to their own process of puzzles that the player must get through and collect objects to bring back to the center room to be able to go through the last section and beat the level.  Each sections is designated by a different element and the challenges in each section are based around said elements.  I haven’t decided on how the level will end but I will worry more about that later, it will be a ruined cave however.  I will more than likely go with the level too the left considering it will probably look a lot better in a real than the simple one to the right.