FMP Week 21 - February 16th

                              FMP Week 21 - February 16th

Rigging, Weight Painting, Unity Setup

William Marshall

Intro

Enjoyable weeks keep on coming!

With the texturing for my M44 Rotary completed and finalised, I've been able to consider how I wanted to present my work inside my engine of choice, Unity. I eventually settled on improving my initial 'Animation Room' idea by reflavouring it into a 'Loadout Room'. This room will include the ability to switch between multiple Mechs, changing their camoflauge, turning the emissive on/off and accessing a few unique animations per Mech.

This new presentation idea was inspired by a few different projects, which I will break down in the 'Unity Setup' section.

Additionally, I've been able to rig and weight-paint the Rotary ready for animation with surprisingly few issues. I've been utilising 3dsMax's CAT rigs in order to achieve this, as I learnt this rigging system during my second year.

Rigging

Using 3DSMax's CAT Rig system, I designed a custom rig that replicated the bone structure of my Mech. Beginning with a hip joint that spread across the middle section, joined by a 3-bone leg structure in order to support full movement in line with the design of the leg.

Moving upwards, my intention was for the Rotary Upper Body to be able to rotate on a 360 degree axis to fire in multiple directions. With that in mind, I created a short spine that was pointed upwards at 90 degrees so that this rotation could be achieved. The cockpit and arms were then connected to the spine, meaning that the entire upper half would rotate as a whole, due to the arms being welded to the sides of the cockpit itself.

In order for the weight-painting to be successful, I needed to attach the entirety of the model together to form one large mesh. In the end, the M44 Rotary totals around 70,000 tris - which I believe is a little too large for a Mech with this level of detail. Optimizations will be required in order to bring it down to 50,000-60,000.

With the rig in place, I am able to manipulate the positions of the upper cockpit & arms, leg positions and hip position - which results in the Rotary being able to crouch and rotate in the necessary places for a Walking, Running, Idle and Shooting animation.

Weight Painting

Weight Painting a non-organic object is actually quite simple, as there is no deformation of the mesh necessary when moving. With that in mind, I would simply select the appropriate bone and assign the entirety (1.0 = Red) of the weighting to the area around that bone, with no other influences. This ensured that if I would move the cockpit and ONLY the cockpit when moving that bone.

Since the entirety of my rig mimicked the layout of my Mech perfectly, I went through all the bones and assigned the 1.0 weighting to each one in turn. 

Testing out the Weight Painting & Rig with a simple walk animation. Enjoy the music!

Colour Variations

One of the best parts of this week was creating the alternate colourschemes for the M44 Rotary. This was done by simply editing my base colours in Substance Painter. When I was creating the new colours, I tried to stick to a primary (most noticeable) and secondary (less noticeable) format, ensuring that I wasn't making the Mech too loud or unattractive.

Coming up with names for each colour scheme is something that games like Overwatch and Titanfall 2 do to give the new colour scheme an immediate purpose through the name. I wanted to give each new variation an appropriate name relating to the environment it would be used in, as well as a name related to a 'Hunter' for each environment.

• Desert Marauder: The original, suited for desert & urban environments with a range of yellows, browns and greys for blending in. Orange Emissive is used to mimic the effect of street lights. Marauder is used to seem like a destructive bandit, aggressive language.
• Arctic Ranger: Cooler colours such as white, blue and grey for blending in with snow & mountainous environments. Blue Emissive is intended to evoke the effect of snow crystals. Ranger is used to seem noble, protective and wild.
• Midnight Wanderer: Vibrant & Mysterious, dark shades of purple and black used to draw attention and evoke fear. Wanderer is used to seem like a stalker in an alley at night.
• Hive Predator: Intended to look similar to a Bee/Wasp, the Hive Predator uses a mix of black and yellows to seem dangerous and ward off intruders. Predator is used for animalistic/insect connotations.

I actually created a Google Forms questionnaire in order to figure out which colour scheme was the most attractive. This was given to other students in the Games Art channel. According to the graph, the Arctic Ranger and Midnight Wanderer are the clear favourites, most likely due to the effective colour combinations used.

Unity Setup

With the ideas for my new animation room in mind, I created a mockup in Photoshop for my intended result. It is broken up into several parts, including:

• Mech Class: Switch between the 3 Mechs I intend to create. The info button on the right side will bring up a sub-menu which allows the Player to view some background info.
• Hull Camoflauge: Use a material switcher to switch between some alternate colour schemes
• Lights: Enable/Disable the emissive colouring
• Animation Menu: Select any of the buttons to play the corresponding animation

There were a few inspirations for this type of loadout menu:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oO3BWq

This is a graduate project created by Cameron Torrie, which features a loadout menu with weapons. His version features various customizable attachments, stickers and weapon types. His colour scheme is a consistent black/blue theme, which helps the UI seem very uniform.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution was the second inspiration, mostly for the scrolling background and the Sci-Fi yellow/black colour scheme used. The text and shape of the UI also makes it look robotic and advanced, with sharp edges.

Titanfall 2 was the last inspiration. I took the position of the Mech and the faded background from this example!

Next Upload: 3rd March

Now that I'm reaching a good place with the Rotary, I aim to move on to my second Mech in order to bulk out my work.

• Second Mech Design
• Second Mech Creation
• Unity Project Creation