chris cunnington

Probably old news for some, since that title was used on Duck Studios website in Feburary sometime! Shy the Sun (aka, The Blackheart Gang) are directing and animating the new Jack Splash Short Film. Its been roughly two months since my move here to Shy the Sun, and work is progressing at an amazing pace! We’re all hard at work, working some pretty long hours (I’m here at work writing this on a sunday afternoon , coz XSI just crashed on me again, lol) The fact of the matter is… if you work hard, you’re probably gonna party harder, and that is to true of all of us here!

I have been intergrating a few of my ‘gaming methodologies’ into our animation pipeline. It prooved rather painfunful (oh look, XSI crashed again… maybe I should stop multitasking… but seriously why can’t I have XSI and firefox open?!) at first becuase XSI has mutiple, Instancing, Cloning, Duplicating options each slightly different in behaviour, but in my opinion none of them are perfect.  Let me explain! I have been building suburbs and a city enviroments, so I decided to use a modular system where each window face of a building would simply snap to the next adjacent window panel and thus build up an entire building. It works well until I referenced each panel into my city scene and then duplicated the referenced model. Each ‘reference’ model gets re-imported everytime you re-open the scene, thus making the scenes take hours to load. The better option I have discovered is to use an instance of the orginal reference model, however instances stay totally indentical to the source model. Effectively these means that you cannot change that instance at all, another silly bug within Softimage is that an Instance cannot be made local, so that connection can never be broken! Sorta annoying hey! Anyway, this annoyed me and off I went to xsibase.com and thankfully managed to find a great script that allows the conversion of instances to local models. Viola, problems solved… if only I had found that little script about a month ago! Thats life though, you live and learn!

The modular system really does pay off though, just yesterday I was sitting with the director and he wanted to move some of the city shops around! This was a simple task of just moving each section around which would not have been possible if each building had been specifically modelled.

Okay back to work! Need to start setting up passes and lighting these enviroments!

~C

Its HERE! Marble Blast Mobile has hit the market. I cannot wait to watch the response to this new release! Available on the App Store for an introductory special of just $4.99!

Take your iPhone or iPod Touch to the next level with the first real-time multiplayer action game on the iPhone. Challenge up to 4 of your friends at the same time to race across the levels to collect all the gems.

Be sure to go check out more on Garage Games Website

Exciting times! The world has begun talking about Marble Blast Mobile for the iPhone! It was the last game I worked on whilst working at Luma Arcade and its really great to see the reponse that the market place is having! It was officially showcased at the iGames Summit 09 in  San Francisco a couple of weeks ago.

Read up on a few of the reviews here:-

N4G.com
Marble Blast Forum
Garage Games
Slide to Play
iPhone Games Network

Marble Blast Mobile has been ported using Garage Games’ iTorque Engine and a whole bunch of new little tricks and wizzardry by the programming guys!!
The game should be getting submitted to Apple in a few weeks time, so keep you eyes open for this one!!

~C

Its been 2 years & 4 months that I have been with Luma Arcade! Sometime at the beginning of this year the desire to evolve, grow & experience a change in my life, finally led me to move from the 3D gaming feild back into the field I was trained in, Animation. As of the 23rd of March I joined Shy the Sun an animation firm based in Cape Town. The move came with an entire life change, a new job, a new city, a new car, a new home!

Its my 4th day here, and so far its been pretty awesome. The Cape Town lifestyle is completely different to JHB and the company seems awesome! I am no longer working in 3DS Max but have finally made the move to Softimage. I am missing my modifier stack with simple tools like the Shell Modifier, but have found a script to do a similar job and already used it about 4 times! I dunno how I could work without it. I am busy playing with the Roadkill Plugin for unwrapping my models. Roadkill is an awesome little tool, so once I get it fully integrated into Softimage it will add a great boost to my UV texturing productivity.

Just to rub it in, here is a pic of the view out my office window!!

I still can’t belive I get to look at that everyday!!

Any Torque artist has most likely landed up having to work with DIFs at some point in the lives. DIFs are basically BSP files generated from .map files.
Recently we have been working some old .map files generated in Quark (from another company) These .map files however cannot be used ‘as is’ and thus require either reloading into Quark (or Constructor) to make the changes needed or we need to figure out a new method for making our changes.
With that said, it has lead to an interesting investigation into the .map format that has proven valuable to me and our programmers. I thought I would share those findings here!

Lets start by pointing out that the .map format only store Tri’s (or 3D co-ordinates for 3 verts per polygon), the format does not actually store all the data needed for a quad (or single surface of a brush)

So how then does the .map format store a cube, do I hear you asking?!
Its actually pretty clever! The format, by only storing Tri’s has enough ‘vert position’ information to easily calculate where the extra verts for the missing Tri’s go. It allows the format to store only 6 polygons (Tri’s) to create a Brush, instead of 12 polygons.

Lets look at a visual representation of this!

Image showing a simple cube ‘recreation’ within Max.
This image only shows the tri’s stored within the .map format.

As you can see from the image there is a vert at every corner of the cube, thus there is sufficient data to generate the missing Tri’s to complete the cube.

Below is the .map representation of the brush pictured above.

“index” “Brush 1″
“primitive” “B03[D]126″
{
(18 18 13) (18 -18 13) (-18 -18 13) GENHS [ 8 0 0 16 ] [ 0 -4 0 8 ] 0 1 1 -> TopFace (Pos Z)
(18 18 0) (-18 18 0) (-18 -18 0) GENHS [ -8 0 0 16 ] [ 0 -4 0 8 ] 0 1 1 -> BotFace (Neg Z)
(18 -18 0) (-18 -18 0) (-18 -18 13) GENHS [ 8 0 0 16 ] [ 0 0 -2 16 ] 0 1 1 -> Down (Neg Y)
(18 18 0) (18 -18 0) (18 -18 13) GENHS [ 0 8 0 16 ] [ 0 0 -2 16 ] 0 1 1 -> Right (Pos X)
(-18 18 0) (18 18 0) (18 18 13) GENHS [ -8 0 0 16 ] [ 0 0 -2 16 ] 0 1 1 -> Top (Pos Y)
(-18 -18 0) (-18 18 0) (-18 18 13) GENHS [ 0 -8 0 16 ] [ 0 0 -2 16 ] 0 1 1 -> Left (Neg X
}

The .map format is broken down as such

(18 18 13) (18 -18 13) (-18 -18 13) GENHS04 [ 8 0 0 16 ] [ 0 -4 0 8 ] 0 1 1 -> TopFace (Pos Z)

• Green = The 3 verts listed via thier specific location in 3D Space, XYZ
• Blue = The Texture Name mapped to that specific face.
• Red = Texture Offset (x_off, y_off), Floating Point Value indicating Texture Rotation (rot_angle) & Texture Scales (x_sclae, y_scale).
• Pink = My added comment (this does not appear in the actual .map file) however this tells you which face this line represents.

Basically that’s all I am going to cover, as this was never meant to be an in depth look at the .map format. It is simply intended to point out to the artists how the format functions and stores geometry. See the Quake MAP Specs for a much deeper explanation of the .map format

~C

So in between learning Modo, which is totally awesome from my dabblings so far!!
I have finally gotten around to Retopo’ing the rest of the windmill! Its come out at 5,127 polys which is pretty good in my opinion!

So far I have baked all my occlusion, normal, etc passes and will now be moving onto texturing! I am aware of the weird dark edging around the windows etc, that I will be fixing shortly!!
I’m really excited to see this guy textured.

So those in the know, will know that we at Luma Arcade are busy working on a version Marble Blast for Garage Games! Having said that, we were given all the original source Quark & .map files of the original Marble Blast games, and there in lies the rub! I would have preferred to have max files to create .dif files from since that’s how we have worked our pipeline out since the days of Mini#37. However we couldn’t all the .difs were made in Quark. Turns out that we have had to remap and reprocess all the levels. I couldn’t handle the thought of learning Quark, so originally turned to Delgine to see if it could open raw .map files, turns out it can’t! Finally I turned to Torque Constructor 1.0.31 its been my life saver and opened my eyes to the weakness that is .map format and not the .dif format!

Obviously when opening any new software you feel slightly threatened at this new world layed out before you, and the thought of figuring out how to do something so simple as select a face seems daunting! Yet constructor is pretty easy to get into! Okay so I haven’t modeled anything (don’t plan too) but just the overall package has really impressed me!
Here’s why:-

1. The interface feels comfortable and everything you need for simple editing is right in front of you all the time.
2. Shortcuts to flick between Vertices, Faces & Brushes are nice and easy.
3. I discovered the ‘Select’ option on the top tool bar, so handy for selecting all faces calling the same material! This was lifesaver no. 1
4. Saving in Native Constructor Format, wow is .map buggy! Never try to remap something and expect the .map format to keep your texture UVs
5. Exporting straight to .dif format! Saves you from having to go through the .map format which messes up your UVs something rotten! This was lifesaver no. 2
6. Texture Tools!! Okay not brilliant just yet, but they do the job! There are some nice tools available like the ‘As One’ option which allows you to map multiple faces across multiple brushes at once! Awesome! Something lacking in my opinion is the ability to Fit to Face and then to ‘Tile’ the texture within that face. It can be done but via a work around of scaling and shifting your textures… a tile option would be awesome! Also the rotate tool behaves very weirdly… it seems to rotate about some random location, haven’t quiet worked out the logic behind that one yet!

One final thing I discovered is there is a nasty collision export bug in version 1.0.31 which was fixed with the update to 1.0.4, but since then they have released a 1.0.51 which has some nice little bug fixes in it! Be sure to upgrade to version 1.0.51

Overall its a great little tool, and I might just be changing my pipeline to work from Max thru Constructor… simply to avoid the .map format!! I am going to be looking into the Max2Ctor plugin more closely to really start harnessing the power of Max & Constructor combined!

03/02/2009

I recently began retopologising the Windmill for the Low Resolution Game Version, currently the Blades & Sails have been complete and I have moved onto the body of the mill itself!

25/01/2009

So its coming along nicely now, added the windows on the lower floor, some more rope rigging on the sails, the small intricate detail under the eves on the front, and also the tie down poles on the ground around the windmill.
Just for fun I added the rickety old fence!

23/01/2009

I have begun ‘rigging’ the windmill, not for animation but simply the ropes that would be required if it were a fully functional windmill. I have added the ropes that hold the sails to the blades and just been working on some of the smaller details on the back of the mill.

14/01/2009

Been managing to spend sometime working on my windmill again! Yay! I have begun detailing the door. I have gone with a nice rustic wooden look with a few covers over old key holes, as if they windmill has been owned by a few people who kept changing the lock. The door frame is still to come, and all the hinges! Also the step is just a place holder for now, its gonna need a few cracks and chips modeled into it.

This is the first render of the windmill with the cloth added to the sails. Its a first pass for major cloth forms, coz eventually when I get to texturing they will be slightly more ragged on the edges and have some finer wrinkles visible too.

Its coming along slowly…..