Month: May 2015

Assignment Report

The fairy tale that has been decided was Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the reason for this was because it would allow for a huge amount of creativity to be used when designing the story. This fairy tale is in first person to give the illusion that the player is actually the character within the story. This was done with the potential future use of implementing it for the Oculus Rift.

This fairy tale will be made using multiple levels instead of an open world, the reason behind this is because through the menu the player can start at certain points within the story instead of playing the whole story.

Many decisions had to be made within the design phase, this included the layout for the chapters, and how the player would move within the environment. The decision was made that the player would have control to move around the environment but features like the eating of the porridge, sitting on the chairs and lying on the beds would be done through Matinee animations.

Creation:

Once a layout had been established it was then time to create the landscape for the chapters in the unreal engine. The texture that was used was a custom material that had two layers one grass and one mud, which would be used as a path. This material was created following an Unreal document, below is a screenshot showing the layout for the material.

grass

Once this had been created the paint tool was used to add the mud layer as a path for the player to walk on, the next step was to create trees for the forest to fill up the levels the trees were imported from SpeedTree and then duplicated multiple times. The original idea was to use the paint tool inside unreal and use this tool to create the forest.

This method however was very processor heavy and made the gameplay lag badly. The trees were implemented with collisions to stop the player from walking of the path.

The next step was to create a basic structure for the outside of the house. This structure was created using the BSP blocks inside Unreal, and using subtractive blocks to create doorways and window frames, a wooden fence was also implemented to create a garden around the house, and this model was download from TurboSquid below an image showing the outside of the house.

Wooden fence – http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/free-pack-wooden-fences-modular-3d-model/600091

house

Below is the Matinee animation and Blueprint that was applied to the front door to be activated when the player collided with a trigger box.

blueprint

Assets

Once the foundations had been created the detailed assets could be added, the majority of the assets inside the project were created using Autodesk Maya.

I decided that the next step was to create the difference chapters using the same tools that were used for the house. I manipulated the size of the boxes until the rooms were a realistic size.

A fire particle effect was implemented in the ‘Chapter’ level to give the room a more comfortable feel, a fire sounds effect was also added here to make the particle realistic.

Assets created include:

  • Cupboards
  • Table
  • Porridge
  • Spoon
  • Lamps
  • Beds
  • Chairs
  • Bowl

The models that weren’t created were downloaded from turboSquid.com or tf3dm.com

The only Blueprints added to this project were blueprints that triggered the matinee, sounds, the opening of doors and moving to between levels.

Matinee

Matinee animation was used to keep certain sections of the story to be played without interruption.

There is a matinee for the doors which plays when activated by a trigger. The bowls of porridge animation zooms in on the porridge bowls, the porridge goes down slightly on the first two bowls and disappears on the last bowl to give the impression that the player is eating the porridge.

A matinee was created for the chairs which shows the player sitting on them, while using a sound track to play the narration for the story. The last chair had key frames added to break the legs of the chair and topple it over.

The animation for the beds was done in a similar manner giving the impression that the user was lying down on the beds.  The voice-over for each section was done in a recording studio which then required using Audition to split the track into small sections to sync with the matinee.

A model of a bear from this website http://tf3dm.com/3d-model/brown-bear-17385.html was used, then it was imported into Maya and rigged/ animated and duplicated. There were some difficulties however with importing the animation into unreal due to some unforeseen problems. The video below shows the bears moving in time with the audio.

In total three animations were used in the story.

All the bears parts of the story was done in one level using one animation with many cameras made into a seamless matinee. Once the story was completed the user is taken back to the menu were they can exit the application by pressing ‘E’.

Sound

Multiple triggers were placed throughout the application that played certain sounds at certain points in the story. 3D attenuation was used to make sounds gets louder the nearer to the source for example the water by the bridge. Ambient music was also added to make the experience more realistic, (wind, birds)

All the sounds used were either third party sounds or sounds created using Audacity and Audition, unfortunately there were problems using FMOD as the files could not be exported

If this was to be done again an open world would be used instead as many problems occurred using multiple levels, Level of Detail would have been implemented on the trees due there being lag, to make it run smoother , and more sounds would have be implemented.

The scene was successfully packaged.

References

All third party sounds from http://www.freesfx.co.uk/

Footstep, Walk, Walking – http://www.freesfx.co.uk/

The rest of the audio came from https://www.freesound.org/browse/tags/sound-effects/

OR
WAS MADE IN AUDACITY AND AUDITION

Assignment Brief

This assignment requires the creation of a virtual 3D environment for a fairy tale story, there was a choice between:

• Little Red Riding Hood,
• Hansel and Gretel,
• Goldilocks and the Three Bears,
• Rumpelstiltskin,
• Three Billy Goat’s Gruff
• Puss in Boots

The fairy tale that was chosen was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I was also required to produce an online journal/blog that should outline the main steps, technical, and creative decisions that were made in producing the story, as well as an evaluation on the effectiveness of these techniques and the artefact overall.
The word Count for this Assignment was between 600 – 1,000