First post of 2012

I made some pretty good progress on Axis Mundi today. A little animation, a little filming, and a little compositing. I realize that this is a pretty tame start of the month (even though the month is pretty much halfway over already), but as always, I'd like to remember that a productive streak could be just around the corner.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Texturing and importing

So that model I was talking about. I textured it and imported it. Now I am even closer to filming some more. Thats's pretty much it. But I am going to try my best to work on The Battle for Axis Mundi as if it is a project for school, because I seem to be able to work pretty hard on those. I figure I ought to be able to have at least same amount of dedication for my own personal projects as I do for those that are assigned to me. Cross your fingers.

Productive Procrastination

So I just finished some really productive procrastination. When I was going to be working on a paper, I worked on the walk-cycle and got it to a presentable-enough-to-film-it level. And now I can work on my animations more this week, unless a boatload of unexpected stuff happens, because I just finished the paper! But I think I'm going to go to sleep now.

Complete Success

I totally just imported the model into RCT3. And it worked freaking perfectly. I am happy.

I know it must have been strange reading my posts. Since I have not given much away about this model, you've had to go on basically nothing. Sorry about that.

Anyways, it is now fully imported! All my test animations work perfectly. I just have to texture it and it will be complete. I love conquering stuff. Or rather.... I like at the end when you get to step on the back of your foe's head, smashing his face into the dirt, as you strike a badass pose and gloat about how great you are and how much he sucks.

It just came to me

I think I have figured it out. And I don't see how I could possibly be wrong this time. You can't have a vertex belong to more than 4 vertex groups. That's what causes the error. I think I need to add this information to my RCT3 Animation tutorial. I should be given a medal or something for figuring this out.

I will report back when I have configured the model properly to conform to this quirky rule.

Even Closer

Today I successfully imported many of the vertex groups for the model. That means that some parts were deformed by the animation, and some weren't. I'm going to slowly add groups until I find the one (or ones) that are causing the problem. This post is very good news, because it means that there's nothing wrong with a good number of the weight painting that I did. So I can at least keep about half of my weight painting at this point. I'm hoping I'll just narrow it down further and further until there's only a couple of vertex groups left, and those will be the ones that are causing problems and have to be re-done. And then it's on to texturing!!!!

3/4 of the way there

So today I managed to get the Mesh, and all 64 bones (that's right, I said 64) of the Armature to import correctly into RCT3. But there is a catch. The importer will only accept the armature if I delete all of the vertex groups that correspond to all of my tedious weight painting. So, the model imports, but it is not properly deformed even though the armature is imported with it. The suspicions that I had a few posts ago have now been pretty much completely confirmed; it's the vertex groups. Now I just need to figure out what the heck is wrong with them.

Halfway there

Good news. I've successfully imported the mesh of the model that I am still not revealing. But only the mesh. I had to take off the armature, and replace it with one that was different. Why that should make any difference at all is very strange to me. But it supports my theory that whatever is wrong has to do with the vertex groups.

Importing problems

Ok, here's the deal. Two days ago, I went over the model that I have been weight painting and found a handful of mistakes and little things that I fixed. That was good. The day after that, I continued doing the same thing, as well as doing a little animation to test out the model in RCT3. That went well, too. The problem came, of course, when I tried to import the model into RCT3. It gave me the same ping that it gave the higher poly mesh. So to make sure that size wasn't the issue, I took a different model that imports successfully, subdivided the mesh a few times, and then imported that. This .modxml file was 12 MB in size, and it imported successfully. The model that won't import successfully is 5 MB. Clearly, size is not the issue here.

Now, at first this kind of made me regret going back to the lower poly mesh, since it wasn't the complexity that was the problem. However, it was so incredibly frustrating to weight paint the hi-res version that I think it is worth going back to the low-res version just to make the weight painting easier.

Back to our timeline: Yesterday all I did was try and figure out what the importer doesn't like about the model. The only thing I concluded was that since it can't be the size, it must have something to do with the vertex groups/weight painting. However, the Warrior of Light model uses vertex groups to define weights for the various vertices, just like this model. And there are no problems with it. I figure I just have to keep looking and I will find some strange thing that I did that causes the error. That's the nice thing about Blender. It's always something you've done. It may be frustrating, but you can always correct it. However, what's really frustrating is when a program malfunctions, and you have done nothing wrong. Then it's almost impossible to get it working right.

I'm looking at you CryEngine 2.

Greenhouse: Retaliate

So yesterday CD5, a proliferant RCT3 Machinima creator, announced his newest project! It's a sequel to a machinima he released in 2009 called "Greenhouse." The sequel's name is "Greenhouse: Retaliate." Here's the thread about it on LGMC:

http://gulk.bplaced.net/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=676&start=0

I am very excited about this as CD5 always makes great RCT3 films. Greenhouse was one of his best so hopefully the sequel will be even more amazing! This also energizes me to get working harder on The Battle for Axis Mundi. Knowing that others are creating RCT3 movies too makes me want to work more on my film and make it the best that I possibly can!

Here's to RCT3 film making!

March Madness

Well, it's that time of year again, whether I am prepared for it or not. That's right! It's time for....... MARCH MADNESS!!!! It's time for me to make a crazy amount of posts in one month! I have a feeling that I will break last year's record, considering how I am starting at the very beginning of the month this time. It may very well also help me make faster than normal progress on Axis Mundi, since I am having to post so much! I know it has made a difference today, because I got back to work today because it was the beginning of March Madness!

So, about said progress; as of the writing of this post I have finished one new (animated) shot today. I will probably get another one done tonight, though. Also, the last time I gave a length of time for the film was a while ago, so here's a new one: 4 minutes and 16 seconds.

That's about 36 seconds of new footage from when I made this post, which was the last shot that I did before I stopped filming to do Research and Development on the Animated CSO aspect of the production. So you could say that I have done 36 seconds since January 15th, which is pretty much when I was able to start animating.

Small Progress

I've been making small progress on The Battle for Axis Mundi over the past few days. It's really only a couple seconds in the edited film. I only did one shot today.... but it did take 12 tries to get the timing right. And of course I had to make the animation and particle effects to film in the first place. I guess that one shot per day is starting to be a typical workday for this film.

Victory

Spectacular news! Today I found out that the last RCT3 Crash montage that I uploaded to YouTube has it's audio back! I feel hugely vindicated. When the audio was initially muted, YouTube was pushing it's ridiculous audio swap feature. I was appalled! Replace my video's music with something other than what I intended!? Absurd! I would never give in! And now.... MUAHAHAHA! THE AUDIO HAS RETURNED!!!!!!!

Unfortunately, the video will probably never regain the popularity it once had, and should still have now, were it not for the audio being ripped out. Check out the YouTube insight for it:

Yeah. It was pretty much dead in the water once the audio was taken away. Who knows if it will make a comeback? Nonetheless, I am very happy that anyone who cares can once more watch the montage in it's full, precisely timed glory.

Excited

Today I got to polish off those 200 frames of animation I was talking about, and I imported them into RCT3 and filmed them. And.... oh man this film is gonna be awesome. I can't help but be excited at this point in the production. I guess that it's normal to be excited when everything is starting to come together.

Animating

So I got to animate some today. Got about 200 frames done in the couple hours that I worked. The frames aren't 100% polished yet, however. But it's really fun. I love how whatever I make in Blender appears in RCT3 exactly as it looks! I'm still getting used to how cool it is. Thank you Jonwil and Belgabor!

The future is now

I feel really accomplished today. Why? Because I fixed all of the problems with my imported animations. The Warrior of Light is now 100% ready to kick Evil's butt. He is fully modeled, textured, and rigged, and, as of today, totally bug free. He looks EXACTLY like the peep I chose to play the Warrior of Light. I don't know if I have ever accomplished a goal this perfectly. It works exactly like I imagined. Speculation is now reality. What used to be the distant future is now the very real present.

Back in March of last year, I wrote an post that I entitled "The Future of RCT3 Machinima." By far, it has been my most viewed blog post over the last year (Good suggestion CzWorld!). In it, I talked a lot about Animated CSOs. Basically, I considered them to be the "final frontier" of RCT3 Machinima. At the time, though, I wasn't sure if it was possible to implement animations like I dreamed of doing. Today, I have confirmed that it is indeed..... very possible. The outer limit of what I thought might be possible, is now possible. It's the best case scenario.

Sometime this year, all of this ranting about how awesome animated CSOs are will come to fruition, and I'll release The Battle for Axis Mundi. In the best case scenario the film will be released this summer. Wait, I already said this was the best case scenario, didn't I? Well then, in the best case scenario of the best case scenario.

Back to work

So, since my Christmas vacation is coming to an end, it's time to start working on Axis Mundi again. What I am working on right now is adjusting the brightness of my WOL textures. They look great when I render them in Blender (see here and here) but they are too dark when they are rendered in RCT3 (sorry, no screenshots of that). I am also having a little trouble with my custom animations. Currently, whenever I import something animated, it's size changes to about 3 times what it should be. However, if the model is not animated, then it is the correct size. I have a theory about how to fix this that I will be attempting later today.

In Christmas present news, I got a pair of noise cancelling headphones, and a Blu-ray/DVD of Inception (great film!). I gotta say that I can't actually notice the noise cancelling in my noise cancelling headphones when it is turned on. What I DO notice when I turn it in, is an AWESOME bass boost, and a large over-all increase in the quality of the sound. This is some of the best sound I've ever heard, even outside of headphones. I used them to mull over a rough cut of The Battle for Axis Mundi, and they helped me catch mistakes in the audio that I missed on my computer speakers.

Texturing Completed

Woo! The rest of the texturing went by at warp-speed! And I couldn't be happier with how it turned out!

Prepare for awesomeness in 3... 2... 1 AWESOMENESS:

It look so close to the original! I am extremely pleased. Now I just need to finish my other ...secret... assets, and I can start animating some action scenes!!! Yaaaaaaaayyyy!

More Blender stuff

I've been working in blender some more, creating assets that I'll use in The Battle for Axis Mundi. I don't feel like giving away everything as I make it, so I'm not going to post pictures of any of these models. Just thought I'd let you know that I was making something. As far as the Warrior of Light goes, I'll work on him some more when these new models start to become boring to work on. But for now, since I've got something new to work on, the newer models are more exciting.

Texturing

I've started to texture the model. It's definitely a learning experience for me, because I really haven't done texturing as serious as this before. Not that this is anything close to professional. It's just more complex than what I've done previously.

Here's a screenshot from blender:

There are still a few kinks to work out with the bit that you see here. This process is going to involve a lot of tweaking.

Oh, and yesterday when I said that it was the last day that they were accepting entries for the SCAD contest, I meant today.

Another update bites the dust.