Woah! Hey folks! How did you get into my apartment? I'm presenting what? Okay I'll give it a shot.
Welcome to Mars Colony: Neornot City! I hope you enjoy your stay. Things are very under construction right now, but we're working on some exciting projects for you to enjoy! Competitors from all around the city are coming together to test their skills against one another in a grand tournament, from hardened mercenaries to cosmic beings of otherworldly strength, downtown denizens just here to party, to lil' ol' me. I'm The Horror by the way... Maybe I should put on some pants.
Sorry, just getting my morning stretches done. So let me tell you about the roster we've got planned:
The Horror
There's me! I came to Neornot a few years back and I've been getting by on odd jobs and temp work. I do alright, or at least I did until a mercenary named Ulon accidentally crashed his ship straight through my apartment. In return, he set me up as part of his mercenary squad as a part timer. Bounty hunting isn't glamorous work, but there's rarely a dull moment on the job. Using my Shapeshifting abilities, I can contort my body in all sorts of ways to outrange, evade and trick my opponents!
STRETCH PUNCH!
Ish Tarkous
A veteran mercenary, Ish is equal parts tactical operative and offensively-unmatched soldier.
Her
greatest pride is a collection of Pulse Rifles, custom-built with unorthodox utility firing modes to help her for any mission. She also pilots a shell ship known as the Venus
Comb, an agile combat-ready ship often used for high-speed chases through Neornot.
Ish Tarkous
Member of an extraordinarily rare, almost
infinitely resilient species, Ulon Iskill is unfortunately prone to deadly
circumstances given his occupation, yet due to advanced regeneration on a cellular level, is
impossible to kill, at least not permanently. Clumsy, cowardly, and wholly unimpressive as a
mercenary, he is often hired for minimal pay as a "Coalmine Canary"
who runs in to trigger booby traps and gauge security on mission zones.
Imp Gail
Gail is well-tuned to the going-ons in the city's underworld, not for any ulterior motive or criminal intent, but just because she prides herself in attending the best parties planetside. You can often find Gail in foggy, bass-boosted raves, and she's always ready for a dance-off against challengers. A practitioner of Capoeira-style martial arts, Gail blends dance-like rhythm with quick offensive strikes.
There's more to come later, but these are some planned character designs for the Part Time Bounty Hunter fighting game project! For now, enjoy a gallery of yours truly doing some elaborate practice stretches! A Shapeshifter's gotta stay flexible you know!
Hey again, it's been quite a while, between inclement weather and Thanksgiving Break, Thesis has been up in the air for a while, and my progress has been a bit slower than desired. Nonetheless I do have a few new animations to show. As I said I won't be going into the nitty gritty of this process, but currently I'm simply working at the base movement animations; walking, running, jumping, crouching and so-on. Below is a gallery of what I've accomplished thus far.
Skeleton & Control "Armature" View
Walk Forward
Walk Backward (Woah man, take it easy!)
Dash Forward
Dash Back (Or a Chicken Dance)
Jump Forward
Crouch
Idle (flexing his fingers, hinting at shapeshifting ability)
Tomorrow is the IMM After Dark event, where we'll be showcasing our progress, so unless I get a lot done tomorrow this is my current status for the WIP project. What I do want to prioritize before the semester's end is considering creating a more cinematic scene than just a gray void for my character to float in, so I may do a little research and development of environmental art, or otherwise finding some placeholder, public domain stuff until I can build up a scene myself. Developing the cinematic approach a little further, I'm thinking of building my ultimate mockup-showcase in the style of the PS1-era Tekken games' character showcases and intro cinematics; a little rudimentary, but providing a scene for the characters to show off their abilities within. Given I'm also planning on reworking a lot of my progress over Winter Break, I don't know what's wisest as far as how much work I want to pump into the current version of The Horror, but I'll feel things out and decide what's ultimately best. Anyways, I've blathered on long enough. Time to get back to work!
This one has
a bit of a story to it in how it counts as a resource for my own project. Aside
from seeming to be exactly the sort of high-end program I would want to inhabit
if I could afford such a thing as grad school and to travel out to the UK, it
provides several student blogs who show the results of following several
high-detail tutorials on a variety of fundamental and stylization-techniques in
Maya. One in particular, Poma, is a tutorial on 2D Facial Rigging that I really
wanted to find, but could only access student blogs detailing their final
results, rather than any of the actual process. (seen on http://manishadusilacaanimation.blogspot.com/2016/10/maya-stylisation-2d-facial-rigging-part.html
& https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAI7N8FEZTQ
) In other
words, there’s fantastic resources here, but my understanding is unless I were
a student those resources are locked off to me. Nonetheless, I can find
equivalent resources elsewhere, and if the time and opportunity comes, I know
where to go knocking for an in-depth academic program for 3D artists. Until
then it’s a good basis for ideas.
13 Kuserkvfx Demo Reel & Portfolio Website
Kuserk,
Andrew. “3D Generalist Reel.” Kuserkvfx, May 2015, www.kuserkvfx.com/.
Andrew Kuserk is a graduate from TCNJ
who excels in 3D art from every facet. As his work demonstrates he has a firm
grasp over several industry standard programs, and utilizes them in tandem to
create professional quality models, rigs, animations and renders. If possible
getting in contact with him could definitely help bolster my own workflow, and
improve my own thesis project.
Farley
Chery was one of my professors when I was attending Becker College around 2012-2014.
Though I never took any Maya courses with him, he has a series of videos on
Youtube documenting rigging research he had done in Maya, as well as a handful
of in-depth hours-long tutorials on Pluralsight (originally Digital Tutors)
from 2011. https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/farley-chery
I don’t
know how applicable those tutorials are with today’s versions of Maya, but at
the very least the concepts should be valuable to learn. I’ll likely be looking
further into his work now that I have a better understanding of Maya.
15 Rigging Dojo: Teaching the Art and Science of
Character Rigging
“Teaching
the Art and Science of Character Rigging.” Rigging Dojo, www.riggingdojo.com/.
Rigging Dojo is a website dedicated to
keeping abreast of rigging technology and techniques, from 3D animated Netflix
shows to significant figures in the industry, they’re a great resource to keep
up to date on what’s happening in the wide world of multimedia. Aside from
that, their Rigging 101 page and other offerings provide course curriculums
that anyone who has a few spare hundred dollars sitting around can apply for
and learn advanced techniques to help them learn the ins and outs of rigging.
Pretty cool website, worth keeping in my repertoire of resources.
16 Cody Little: Animating 2D Eyes From a Texture
in Maya
From Cody’s website (http://codylittle64.wixsite.com/codylittle)
he establishes himself as a rigging and animation enthusiast, creating low-poly
models and in context of this video, providing guidance of performing niche
techniques to get stylized forms of animation functioning within Maya. As I share
this interest in low-poly, and have seen animated 2D assets on 3D models used
successfully on independent projects in the past, I plan to use Cody’s guidance
here to potentially create my own animated 2D facial features, should 3D facial
rigging prove too difficult to achieve in a limited period of time.
17 Garrett Shikuma: Character Eye Blink
Shikuma,
Garrett, director. Animation School - Animschool: Character Eye Blink. YouTube, AnimSchool, 28
Dec. 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=73jRo4fwU3I.
In this video Garrett Shikuma provides
some nuances to a rigged model’s blinking. It doesn’t account for the process
of rigging leading up to these animations, but as a general fundamental guide
to animation principles it’s good for getting into an animation mindset after
keyframes are implemented for more smooth, flowing animation.
Remco’s portfolio covers a vast range
of projects from game development to 3D, and his graduation project provides a really
solid benchmark for a quality rig that could be applied for most situations. While
there’s no instructional content as to how he got this rig done, the general
overview of the process in itself is valuable, showing the time frame in which
it was accomplished (14 weeks) use of facial controller attributes and
explanation of the animation itself having only two weeks before his deadline.
This may significantly change how I consider my own critical path, and how I
spend Winter Break possibly reworking parts of my model so that the final
result cooperates when I get to the animation stage.
19 Guilty Gear Xrd’s Art Style – The X Factor
Between 2D and 3D
This source coming from Arc System
Works’ Guilty Gear Xrd, which I’ve discussed prominently on this blog in
relation to the goals for my own project, Junya Motomura goes in-depth on the
technology and artistic approach taken to achieve a high-fidelity, 3D as 2D
style for their game, providing good info on the additional software used in
their pipeline, such as Autodesk Softimage, as well as specific details on how
they achieved their cel-shaded art style.
I’ve been trying to cover as many
different angles of Maya as possible in these resources so that I have a good
range to fall back on and get support with as I need it. Though on my current
model the clothes are modeled straight onto the character, I may find it better
to try separating the clothes from the character mesh in the future. I see this
causing rigging/weight painting issues down the line, but depending on my
approach it may make other aspects such as cloth physics and interchangeable outfits
possible, which would be great options to have.
In this
tutorial Mrs. G offers an approach to building out low poly details on the face
such as hair and facial hair. As The Horror exhibits both, and I’ve had some
trouble up to this point creating his hairstyle in a neat fashion, her video
may help me use a different approach to get a more effective hair modeling
technique into practice.
22 Toon Shading with Arnold
“Toon
Shading with Arnold” Toon - Arnold for Maya User Guide 5 - Arnold Renderer,
docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/Toon.
Directly from the Maya User Guide,
this article explains the implementation of Arnold’s Toon shader preset, as
well as connecting to various articles detailing its individual variable
features. As I’m going for a stylized, soft pastel look, but may need to tone
back from an approach such as Guilty Gear Xrd’s, this may be a good compromise,
and in general the Maya User Guide should assist me with variety of
troubleshooting issues and feature implementations.
Backtracking a bit, I’m considering
using Michael Swartz’s tutorial here on IK Leg rigging as I’m feeling that
reworking my rig could do a lot of good and save a lot of painful development
in the long-run, and part of where the biggest improvements will lie are in the
arms and legs. Being unable to get a reverse foot rig wasn’t terrible uplifting,
so I think it would be valuable to start taking note of some basic rigging
tutorials for a humanoid character. This is just a jumping off point, but
offers a pretty in-depth process and even goes a bit into coding with Maya,
which is something I’d like to introduce myself to at the very least for
reference’s sake.
This last site is an open forum for
technical artists, and may prove useful to lurk and search for prior threads
dealing with any potential issues that may come up in my own project. Pretty
open-ended, but useful to keep close nonetheless.
We're coming up on the end of the Fall semester, and therefore it's integral that we know exactly what the plan is moving forward for Winter Break and my final semester in the Spring. I want to finish strong on this project, and so I took the time to deliberate on where my time would be best spent, on what activities, and for what general timeline to keep on track and end out with a successful Thesis Project. Because of how I formatted this, and also because it's a long timeline moving from the beginning of the Fall 2018 semester to the end of Spring 2019, I've transferred it onto a Google Doc which is available via This Link
For a sample of the template here's how I'm organizing my Critical Path:
Taking note of my remaining time at TCNJ, as well as the interim breaks in Winter and Spring, I've organized my critical path so that each week I have a new set of tasks, and a loose deadline in which I expect to be able to accomplish them. Some weeks are more intensive than others, but the ultimate goal is to keep me moving and push me to my full capacity, and end up on the other side of the whole thing with a project to be proud of. I will continually return to this document to update my progression, noting my successful accomplishments from the previous week, and updating the Priority To-Do list with incomplete tasks from previous weeks, so that I can play catch-up if need be, or add additional tasks for the week on if I pull ahead of my projected tasks.
I may also transfer this document to a physical medium, transferring the necessary info to sticky notes which I can keep on a wall at home, and crossing off tasks as I complete them
Also, a small victory but a victory nonetheless, with Prof. Sanders and a fellow Maya student's help, I was able to finally fix the really annoying semi-transparency issue I was having on all my models since the beginning of this project. It was the simplest solution in the world, though I don't know what started it in the first place, basically I just needed to break the connection between my transparency and color components, they're defaulting as connected with my textures, but at the very least now I can fix it without a problem. Here's The Horror's idle now that you can actually see him how he's meant to look!
That's all I've got for now, but I'll be updating this weekend with a finished Annotated Bibliography including sources I'll be using to assist me with 3D art and exploring different methods, techniques and styles to take into consideration if I decide to revamp my models at some point or experiment with different approaches. Look forward to that soon! And as the Critical Path suggests, I'll be getting more consistent with my updates and their planned content through the rest of this semester, on through Winter Break, and into the Spring Semester.
Imagine picking up a sport or an instrument; games often don't cast up the same kind of view as these physical arts, but picture it for a moment. The well-practiced memorization of concepts, their applications, strengths, weaknesses, and the actual, consistent execution of those concepts. With a fighting game, each character in a roster provides their own set of moves, their aesthetic design, personality and dominant strategies. Characters in fighting games are your position in a sport, or your instrument in a band, and part of selecting a 'main' or your primary character to practice, is finding the right one for you, in turn fighting games provide players with a sense of identity, just as taking part of an orchestra may give a musician a sense of duty, a role and purpose in a larger scheme. You can dabble with every character, but ultimately each provides a potential for hundreds of hours to learn and master at high level play.
Furthering the analogy, imagine a combo as a bar of music, a fight as a song where the victor is the one who has practiced their instrument and responds to their opponent's notes quickly and correctly, applying pressure to play louder and harder. Fighting games are a battle of the bands, they're a competition but also an expression. Fighting games are an expressive scene populated by people who find their passion in coming closer to mastery of their craft.
That's what fighting games at their height represent as an entertainment outlet. From a game developer's perspective, fighting games are an intense zoom-in on high-detail character design and mechanical fidelity built and balanced for play between two or more humans. Fighting games are intense, mechanically dense, and difficult as all hell to create. They are also one of the most satisfying projects to work on.
This is Daisuke Ishiwatari, game designer, illustrator, musician... Basically an all-in-one. This guy is my idol. Daisuke has worked for decades under the Japanese game company Arc System Works, a developer and publisher of many popular fighting games. One such project, released in 1998, was Daisuke's passion project, Guilty Gear. This series is an amalgamation of his passions. Character designs, the names of special moves mechanics, and art aesthetic all paint a world of punk rock backed by the supernatural in the modern day, from Japanese folk legends of ghost possession to a society which shunned technology in favor of magic.
Here's one of the cast members, I-No. She's basically Guilty Gear's style personified in one character: Punk Rock, Magic, and High-Speed Aerial Combat. These three phrases are the bedrock of the series, it doesn't seem like much, but these three tenets inform the entire universe, and Daisuke's designs pervade the entire product. While obviously the scope of these projects require large teams, the amount of work Daisuke contributes to the world vision and more importantly to the art and music are considerable and respectable, he's not just an idea guy, this series is his baby.
I'm enough of a realist to understand this is too much to expect of a single person, it's very rare to find a person like Daisuke, and it's certainly not something to take lightly. The reason I bring him up is simply because the sheer amount of work the guy does is inspiring, and it shows the other side of fighting games. They are just as fulfilling to design, to create a world, a cast of characters and an intricate shell in which others can engage and identity with on a high level both independently and as a community.
What Strength!! But Don't Forget There Are Many Guys Like You All Over the World
But this by itself doesn't really provide background to the genre itself. How about we get a little history?
Hardcore Gaming 101's article here provides a mostly exhaustive pre-Street Fighter II history of fighting games, which goes as far back as '76 with the black and white fighter, Heavyweight Champ, or depending on who you ask, as is the case in the HG101 article, the '79 top-down sword duel game, Warrior. These were the early years of video games in general, and along the same lines as Space War, Warrior did not use AI, so the game could only be played as a 1-on-1 fight between two human players. Interestingly, many of these early video games showed that even back then we were approaching video games as social medium, a conduit to interact with others for entertainment, for competition, etc. The biggest change over time has been the visual fidelity and mechanical complexity, but the core purpose behind fighting games have always remained much the same.
The FGC, or Fighting Game Community is a social group that has emerged in prominence to mass media over the last decade with the popularization of e-sports, but their origins go as far back as the mid 80s to late 90s, where arcades had their boom. Back in these days, communities were close-knit, converging on local arcade spots where reputation, friendships and rivalries were built over this genre. The short documentary below shows one instance of this history at the Chinatown Fair Arcade in New York City.
The standout point that is made in this documentary I feel is the diversity of the players. Fighting games in the age of arcades brought people together from all different age groups, cultures and walks of life. Today, they are recognized as an international sport, with competitors hailing from all different countries. In spirit of this, Street Fighter, one of the most long-running and popular fighting game franchises, reflects this diversity in the expansion of its cast over the years.
Just as much as the people who play fighters hail from all over the world, so too do the developers, and many modern fighting game developers come from a background of competitive, sometimes professional play in the FGC
See Skullgirls, developed by American studio Lab Zero Games and headed by professional BlazBlue tournament player Mike Zaimont. Chocked full of references to classic Capcom and other Japanese fighters from those arcade days
French company Piranaking based out of Paris developed the 3D fighter Lastfight, based on Bastien Vivรจs' Lastman comic series and inspired by Dreamcast fighter Powerstone
Japanese studio French Bread has grown in popularity over the past decade to presently work alongside big publishers like Arc System Works, most recently releasing Under Night In-Birth.
And even on independent levels there are many small studios working away at innovative projects, such as Brazilian developer Onanim Studio and their project Trajes Fatais.
Gimme Your Best Shot
My point is, the influence of fighting games is strong. They translate on a worldwide scale in the spirit of healthy competition, building connections and communities both local and large-scale, inspire travel and broadened horizons in both players and developers. As a young, aspiring developer, as well as a somewhat seasoned fan of the genre I want to immerse myself in this world in both respects. I want to play these games and meet new people through them, and ultimately, I'd like to connect with those who create them, and offer my own talents to contribute to an amazing genre with deep history and instinctive roots in what we enjoy about games as social tools for personal betterment.
Fighters for the Modern Age
In the past, fighting games were largely 2D affairs, and the amount of work that would go into a quality fighting game from art to design, even for a single character, was painstaking and expensive. This has not changed today, but in an effort to remain relevant, fighting games have taken strides both in the realm of stylistic choices as well as the content they bring to players to improve their appeal to people who normally are turned off by their large skill gap and complicated nature, and to make the best use of today's available techniques and technology to optimize the creation process.
Today, many popular fighters have made the switch to 3D, sometimes retaining 2D gameplay as is the case with Street Fighter IV and V. Some have utilized 3D models from the beginning, and built their gameplay systems around the use of 3D space, major franchises to list being Tekken, Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur. Using a full 3D movement system meant that the Z axis would also be considered, not just X and Y as it is in 2D fighters. Sidestepping and sweeping attacks become an inherent part of the strategy of these sorts of games. The point is, 2D or 3D, the use of 3D technology in fighting games is becoming a standard part of their polish. Nothing is wrong with retaining the 2D roots of the genre, as games such as Under Night In-Birth have done, but we're seeing more and more games use 3D to great, and surprisingly still cost-efficient effect. In many ways, other than retaining a retro feel, there's little difference considering a 2D fighter to a 2.5D fighter. A full 3D fighter is a different beast altogether and thus requires different considerations, the two are not transferable, but they utilize the same base concepts of high detail character design, animation and in-depth movesets with steep learning curves.
To appeal to a wider audience, Fighters have also diversified their appeal by trying to reach out to a player base that does not have a history with fighters and cannot easily recognize the complex button inputs required to use all the tools a character has to offer. Many fighters have begun to implement cinematic story modes, where simple fights to round out the player's knowledge of the roster and gameplay fundamentals are accentuated by longer narrative-driven scenes, contextualizing all the fighting.
Even back in the day, fighting games often provided single player modes if nobody else wanted to play, from multi-stage arcade modes to practice several matches against computers of increasing difficulty, to actual training modes which set you up with a dummy to practice and experiment with combos and special moves unimpeded by a usually aggressive opponent. Some separate out gameplay altogether, and provide these story-heavy modes as standalone experiences the player can watch or read like a movie or book. This approach has been popular with several Japanese series, including Blazblue, Guilty Gear and Under Night In-Birth. Still, in the end, the main attraction is the genre's namesake, and the genre as a whole continues to provide a standard of quality for players to enjoy while providing new worlds, characters and lore alongside unique systems to set themselves apart from the competition.
Finish It!
Ultimately, Fighting games still face a challenge of being a niche market with a dedicated audience. That audience has allowed them to thrive, but to continue into the future they must continue to innovate to become accessible to a greater audience.
With Temp Work Mercenary, I hope to use my knowledge of the field alongside my pursuit to increase my proficiency in 3D art to create a new world full of colorful characters, a compelling world aesthetic, and something of meaning both in terms of mechanical depth for fighting game fans, and in terms of narrative experiences.
