I don't see a place here for WIP threads so I'll just put this here in this forum because I have no where else to go...
Anyway, I think I'll join in on that NaGaDeMo thingy... yup... 16 days late.
So the game involves a gecko that's trying to get to the top of a mountain/cliff/something-that-you-can-get-to-the-top-of. you might think "but geckos can walk up walls, why can't it just walk up?" To which I say it's because a spider tied up the front legs with super strong web. Why? Who knows...
Anyway, this gecko (which can stand like a two-legged thing) has to chase the spider to get the web undone, and to do that the gecko has to jump up a mountain/clif/whatever. Since geckos can drop their tails it's only natural that this magical gecko can shoot its tail into a wall and use it as a spring board to get up further.
So yeah... that's what I got going on...
Also since I know people don't usually care about stuff outside their discipline I'm going to put bolded words relating to what I'm talking about, so you can skip it if you're not interested, because I'll be posting and talking about both art stuff, tool stuff, and scripting stuff.
First WIP image. A Gecko I whipped up. Sitting at 2380 triangles.... Probably too much for an iPhone and Android (Or perhaps I'm underestimating the devices since you don't often see 3D games on those devices so I've nothing to compare to) but we'll see.
Maya:
The gecko was made and rigged in Maya. I heard you have to do the UVs before you skin so I took it to ZBrush for the UV layout. Since I don't do my textures in photoshop I'm not overly concerned about the UVs as long as they aren't stretched or compressed
Maya -> Unity
Stupid Unity does not appear to like contraints in FBX files (or maybe it doesn't like curves). I had the eyes constrained to the head control curve and so it would animate fine in Maya. But as soon as I put it into Unity the eyes would pop out and go further that it should. I had to parent the eyes to the head bone and mess up my heirarchy separation (I now have eye models in the bones group...).
Unity Scripting
No progress here yet.
Cool! Nice work Chirone - keep it coming!
Will setup a WIP forum - definitely keen to see what peeps have got going on.
2380 triangles is sweet bugger all
(I wish I could make 3d models....)
I know in next gen games characters can be ~10,000 and you can have quite a few and not cause issues. But if this is a mobile game then i don't know what the limits are.
Hey mate. That's lookin pretty cool.
You said your having some issues with getting it to animate properly in Unity. Have you baked out the animation before exporting?
Yeah it turned out I missed the "below" option when I went to bake. Now it's fine.
Good stuff. Yup, constraints are a no go in Unity, all bone based or transform based animation. There was some talk of morph animation in the past but little more..
~A
What do people use to video capture Unity when it runs? I'm using Freez Screen Video Capture because it was free and it worked and I can't be bothered writing my own for Windows. When I capture a video I can't pull it into Premiere Pro or After Effects because the video glitches (although I didn't render it, I just saw it glitching in the preview)
Anyway, here's a raw video of what I did last night (I'm redoing the animation and binding because this one isn't great for the arms and I need to do something with the tail since it's going to fire off):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwCbzhJOrNQ
Unity
I put the model into an empty game object and made it a prefab, the prefab has a box rigid body. I may consider making a proxy mesh collider (I assume you can make a mesh that doesn't render) if the box turns out to be insufficient. Ummm... yeah... that's it for the Unity stuff... the rest of the post is about scripting
Scripting
I put a script onto the prefab called GeckoController. I had to put one on the Gecko model itself because I wanted to use the AnimationEvent, and they only send the function call down the heirarchy not up, which meant the controller itself wouldn't be in control of everything because it would never hear about the AnimationEvents.
I don't know how you Unity scripters do stuff but I've got two files so far. GeckoController and GeckoAnimationEventHandler. If I were to apply what I know about MVC to this then the way I see it, the game model is the view and tells someone "hey this animation event happened... do something!" and the game object it's parented to is the controller which will tell the game model what animation to do.
So yeah... GeckoAnimationEventHandler is responsible for making the AnimationEvents and telling someone when they happen. GeckoController is responsible for coordinating what does what.
I haven't tried to capture Unity before, but have you tried Fraps? I've found it extremely reliable for recording different games.
Re-Skinned the gecko, it also has a tongue because it looked funny without one. It's initial jump starts off more dramatic too. Although it looks like it's getting ready for a sprint
We have the spider who binded the gecko's fore-legs/arms
There's also a turtle that you get turned into while you're jumping
And here we have my touch input complete for the gecko controls.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoXUb_1rYbY
Maya
UV mapping is annoying. But I do half of it in Maya and then let ZBrush finish it off. I used Headus once, it gave me the best results, but I can't justify buying it when ZBrush does a decent job and I'm not a full time 3D artist.
MonoDevelop
I'm used to using Xcode and I must say... I wish every IDE had the same thing as Xcode where you can just right click and hit "Re-indent selection" on selected code.
C#
I relearned the delegate and event thing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2zdwKIsXJs
I also sort of duplicated the gesture recognizer stuff from objC.
Chirone.
VirtualDub is the best capture software I've ever used. It's free and powerful as hell. Sometimes it's a little complicated to use; it's amazing once you get the hang of it.