Stop Motion Animation

Stop motion animation is the process of taking a pictures of moving objects and turning it in to an animation. This type of animation is harder to do as if you do something wrong like forget to add something in the scene then you have to completely redo the animation, an example of this would be using the wrong resolution or if the camera moved and you cant get it back to the exact position.

For the camera I used my own Nikon Coolpix that I got for Christmas a couple of years back and to put the frames together I imported them in to blender as a image sequence and set the fps to 30 and rendered it as a video. The whole animation took 178 photos and was only 5 seconds long. The huge advantage of using stop motion animation is that it is easy to achieve higher resolution, this animation I did was originally 5k but I had to lower it to 800x600 so it could be turned to a GIF.

Here is a stop motion animation I made in class:

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!

It took a while to make this model of a Christmas tree because I was going to use particle systems for the branches but it turns out there is a much simpler way to do it with planes and textures. Unfortunately it isn't decorated yet because i'm not sure how I would do the tinsel, the baubles i'm sure will be textured spheres. Anyway the model has 3.3k of triangles and 6.3k vertices which is large for a decoration so level of detail will be handy and should bring it down to a few hundred.

2D Animation

Today I have created a simple animation using blender's new 2D animation. It allows me to draw shapes and animate them using key frames. After trying blender and Adobe's Flash, I find that blender is much easier to use. Another great feature is layers which can be used to give the sense of depth and because each shape you create is a normal blender object you are able to join, move, rotate, and scale etc... It's much easier to use because I already know all the shortcuts. This render runs at 30 FPS and has 60 frames in total.

Cyberpunk Themed Roads

Last week I have worked on creating roads for my cyberpunk game. Unfortunately to use with the splines in unreal engine the models has to be subdivided. To counter this I will use the level of detail (LOD) to bring the poly count down when the player is far away. The model has 1024 faces and 1122 vertices.

ZLVR Review

Last Thursday I tried out Zero Latency Virtual Reality. My first impressions when I put it on for the first time was "wow". I found the experience very entertaining and despite your location and rotation being visually tracked by cameras and that it had to track all 8 players it was ok. I did loose tracking a couple of times but quickly regained it within a second.

While i'm quite confident at playing games in VR, when I first put on the headset and moved, due to past experience of VR, I felt like I didn't want to and was going to hit something. The games definitely gave me a amazing experience.

Dynamic Paper in Unreal

For a project im working on in my spare time, I have made dynamic paper. The special thing about this is that it isn't a texture of paper with some writing on it. Its fully dynamic so that you can change the text to anything just by typing in the text box.

How did I do it?

First I created a texture of paper using GIMP. To do this I created an A4 size canvas used the "RGB Noise" in filters to make it very noisy, I then turned the noise to grayscale and added motion blur to give the paper some texture.

I then scaled it down to 2048x2048 which squashed it but because of how we will set up the UV it doesn't matter. In fact it's more efficient this way because it allows unreal to create mipmaps for us automatically, saving time, making the game faster and it's less assets for us to track. I also exported it as portable network graphics (PNG) so that we don't get any artifacts that we might get if we were to export it as a jpg.

Next we setup the model for this i used blender. all we do is get a cube, stretch it to the size of A4 paper and then make it very thin - not too thin because if the vertices are too close together then unreal complains.

I also made a material and added the paper texture we just made. We export this now as a FBX, making sure that it is in the center of the grid.

Now in unreal we import all the assets we just created and make sure that the material is correctly assigned and properly rendered. Next we create a use widget. This is what we will use to render the dynamic text to the paper, in the widget we have a multi-line editable text box set as read only -  we use this because the regular one can't have more than one line of text. We also use a scalebox so that the text can be scaled and a sizebox so that we can resize the area of where the text will be on the paper.

After that is set up we then remove the background so that is transparent. Next we setup the blueprints (diagram will be at the bottom of this post), first off we change the style of the tex, we set the width and height and text.

We then create an actor called "Base_Paper" this will have all the necessary blueprints and we use child blueprints for each different paper we have. For the actor itself it has a static mesh component with the paper mesh set, we also set it as the root and have 2 widget components sandwiched either side of the paper mesh.

For the actor's blueprints we have an array of the front and back components (easier to loop blueprints) and another array of 2 texts which will be text on both sides. in the loop we create a widget, add it to an array (so we can keep track on them) and set the widget component to that.

Cyberpunk Christmas Tree

Using Blender 2.8 beta I have created a cyberpunk themed christmas tree in my spare time that would be good to use in my game that may show when the in-game date changes to around christmas.

The model itself consists of 3,118 vertices, 3,091 faces and 6,182 tris. I plan on using LOD in-game so unless your really close to it it wont render all those faces and instead show something like 100 faces depending the distance you are from it and the quality of settings you have set.

As you can see from the screenshot, I have removed the bottom faces so that it has less poly count so it is faster to render, Another reason is that there is no point of there being faces there if the player isn't going to see it. In the game it wont have physics and so it wont fall over and will only be on the ground.