Grey Matters

Too Dark

What with Kernel and a 10,000 word dissertation to write I thought I wouldn't have enough on my plate (sarcasm), so I took up Adam Warne's offer to produce a small amount of animation for a documentary he's making on the subject of the brain's capacity for creativity. Most of the documentary will consist of interviews, but for the bit where new neural pathways are forged during the conception of an idea is described a visual explanation was required to augment the crazy science.

Too Pink

I believe the shot will play out with a slow shot roving over the undulations of the brain's exterior before diving between the folds to a shot of the camera squeezing its flash-lit way deeper into the brain. Much like the stomach cam effect seen down a patient's throat, often used for surgery. Then the camera will dive further in, at this point down to a very high level of magnification, and here will be the neural pathways being forged.

Neural Pathways

This is the visual reference I need to aim for. I'm not entirely sure how to depict this yet, if all I have to show is the currents pulsing up and down a modelled set of neural pathways that shouldn't be a problem, but if the pathways have to be shown connecting I'll have to try something new. This is all subject to collaboration and revision at this point but its definitely an exciting challenge.

Mmm, Drained Brain.

I made an exceedingly basic model in Maya comprising of about 6 polygons. I jest, of course it wasn't a cube but very simple none-the-less. Then I took this into Mudbox after UV unwrapping it and subdivided it about 7 times.

Sculpt 0.75

 Here it is at about 75% completion, I often forgot to mirror the brush strokes in order to save sculpting both hemispheres separately which meant there is a certain amount of organic asymmetry in the sculpt but also some dodgy bits where the brush was mirrored even though the geometry wasn't symmetrical. I then went through the usual ordeal of exporting the thing to a displacement map and setting up the correct nodes (why does this never work quite the same way every time?).
Then I decided to start tweaking the shader with the texture applied only as a bump map in order to generate quicker test renders.

Glowy

 Too much sub surface scattering so I turned that down, a lot.

Soft

 Better but still too soft, don't you just love these work in progress comparisons? Yeah, me too.

Displaced

Then I turned the displacement on, and realised it looked nothing like the final sculpt in Mudbox, and I can't quite remember what I did to solve this but I think its because I hadn't exported the base level mesh from Mudbox to displace in Maya, and was instead using the original model. Therefore the alterations the high level sculpt had made to the low level mesh weren't there.

Shiny

Here are better specular qualities to the shader more accurately representing the spotlight flesh aesthetic I was going for.

Bulgy

Here is the correct base mesh for the displacement and all the bulges are now in the correct place.

Slimy and Inflamed

 The detail of the folds of the brain in this render was starting to get closer to the look that I wanted but due to the fact that its only really the sub surface scattering powering the shader at this point its quite dark and the redness makes the brain look kind of sore and inflamed.

Squidgy and Creamy

So with a pastelly flesh tone and some indirect lighting its starting to look much healthier but until I have a proper diffuse texture I won't be able to quite replicate the look I want which is something closer to this:

Real Brain

So veins will be a key feature which I think I can just bump map on, gloriously revolting aren't they?
and I need to figure out a way to create that gooey caramel type stuff between folds in the shader or texture. So there you have it, a nice visually stimulating post for those of us who are as sick of the words as I am from dissertationing. Pretties abound!

Some of you may have noticed how sneaky this project is as I can just reuse this sculpt in Kernel for the bulb brains, yeah, cunning. All it'll need is a simple texture replacement.

No propaganda this time but for Loz's astute response to my gamification piece.

Also, happy one hundred posts to The Pixel Crush, I think I planned to make a big deal out of it but
then forgot :/

Once Upon A Pixel...

Story time.

Since what was probably nearly a week ago now I've been angsting over the same things I was grappling with in summer. I was supposed to be prepared so this didn't happen, but I failed to base my initial idea on anything more than environmental or political ideas. My Frankenstein of a story I had neglected to give a heart, so when the feedback came that it needed to be cut down, without its complexity it would've been a husk. So me and Loz opted for the backup plan, to develop a second idea in double time. This back up idea was one I had suggested to Loz back when I was having a particularly despairing moment about Specimen Paisley and he reassured me we were onto something and shouldn't change tack (rightly so) and the context I had tacked on was just that- tacked on.

Early, Early Concept Art From Summer.

Coming back to it with no alternative has been an interesting and creatively harrowing experience, to resurrect that concept and try and grow something intriguing, symbolic, and evocative out of its literally fertile imagery and visual metaphor has not been easy. But we know this, all I ever seem to whine about now is my chronic inability to tell a story. Well, I have surfaced triumphant, or to something that creates a thoroughly convincing illusion of triumph. Or maybe its more proof of chronic inability, ultimately its for an audience to decide. I will present this new script with the single caveat that being a dialogue-less animated short the majority of storytelling is visual, therefore a script is not the ideal format for it, so use your imagination and think about it.


Kernel (Working Title) Script


There are a number of people who I owe a debt to for providing feedback and allowing me to bounce ideas of them whilst they tell me theirs, and I encourage you to do the same.

Meanwhile I'm transferring Noel's (now Leonard: cue confusion all round) uber detailed sculpt onto the original low polygon model in readiness for facial rigging. This process also required some better unwrapping than my shoddy job last year so that the displacement map (the texture that creates all the wrinkle and pore detail) was better distributed across the face. Where there was pixelly blotches before, around the nose and ears, there is now a smooth texture creating all the little blemishes I first sculpted. But until I got that point there were the glitch renders, which I love.
Nothing like spending 7 minutes waiting for a constructive preview of your work only to be shown what it looks like when Maya b*tch slaps Mental Ray in the face.

Shiny.

Also when downscaling the fur description from the 10:1 scale Mudbox sculpt Noel's beard went rogue with some spectacular results.

Note the fancy cinemscope aspect ratio.

Here the downscaling also meant I had to tone down the displacement maps alpha gain from 1.00 to 0.10 in order to avoid retarded results: pro tip for anyone experiencing the correct displacement at monstrous values.

Part Brain Coral, Part Clay Beast.

But of course if you press all the buttons for long enough then you eventually find the right one.

I win, at last.

This render breaks my heart a little bit, hopefully if I can inspire some sort of empathetic response in the audience it won't matter what symbolism I'm trying to convey because they'll care regardless.

LOVE ME!?

Now back to storyboarding again, then animatic, then pitch, then production!

Pixel Propaganda

More fascinating stuff on the dynamic character AI in the Bioshock Infinite E3 Demo, this time narrated by Ken Levine and two other important members of the Irrational Games team.


A talk explaining the elaborate and fascinating lighting tech in Crysis 2.

This Extra Credits episode explains why the "it's just a game" argument doesn't hold up anymore, god I hate it when people say that.

Gamasutra interview the narrative designer and writer of Deus Ex: Human Evolution and at last I'm excited for this game a month too late, love me some behind the scenes narrative mechanics. Brilliant. Excuse any typos, it's 3:30am.

Paisley's Pixels

Some advice: stock up on warm clothes and canned food, this post is looooooooooong...

Mudbox: Screwing up hard work on a computer near you.

I've finally finished exporting my sculpt from Mudbox, which has been a complete pain, because while I finished the sculpt a day or so ago the displacement maps have been playing up in Maya. So for myself and anyone else trying this I'm going to make some bullet points so I don't spend ages experimenting next time I have to do this.

Displacement maps do work, but only if you ask really nicely

• You can export using both subdivision and raycasting methods, subdivision is faster but limited to one object, raycasting uses more memory and is less stable and has more settings: so more room for error
• There are options to smooth target and source meshes and smooth UVs. These are all necessary for a correct displacement apparently, otherwise the maps exports with un-smoothed values.
• Stick with floating point EXR's, any 32bit format should work but this one ensures compatability and quality.
• Make sure you export the base level meshes from your sculpt back into Maya as they probably changed significantly from the meshes you started with.
• When you connect the displacement map to the displacement node of the shading group make sure you then go to that objects displacement attribute and click calculate bounding box so it can figure out how much displacement is going to take place.
• If you're doing this with a mental ray shader you make have some errors so do it with a lambert or something, and then when the bounding box is calculated you can apply the mental ray shader back to the object.
• Sometimes subdividing the base mesh with the displacement on top improves the appearance of the tessellation.

Yes, he even has hair. Yes its shiny as f*ck

I have literally been sat in my room in my pyjamas for two days finishing the sculpt and trying to figure this crap out and, while not healthy, I actually feel like it might all be finished in time for the deadline, and to a much higher standard than I hoped for halfway through this project. It's probably not going to be as perfect as I initially imagined, but its encouragingly close. All that's left to do is paint textures which, apart from the face, should be fairly quick.

Noel Paisley Ladies & Gentlemen

Gauntlet close up

Sock (couldn't think of an epic equivalent) close up

Ignore the tip of his beard geometry protruding from under the hair, I haven't yet figured out how to cover it in hair.

Did I get a bit render happy? Yes but I that it is both justified and well earned.

When sculpting was too much I sheltered within the familiar confines of Photoshop and tried to get something presentable in terms of concept art for the pitch project. Teaser:

Thomas Farriner Makes His Escape

Amazing what blending modes and a couple of textures can hide ;)

The Animated Analysis that tanked in terms of marks (though not as much as my dissertation proposal) but which I'm quite proud of (though not so much now I'm told its not worth an academic damn).

Analysis of an Animated Work:

Immersion & Emergent Storytelling in Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft, 2008)

Most people would classify Far Cry 2 as part of the open world, first person shooter genre (FPS). This is a rare hybridisation, so uncommon in fact that the sub-genre of the 'corridor shooter' has become ubiquitous when describing most FPS games, as many of these games take place in environments where the player is funnelled down a series of corridors in a restrictively linear fashion; both in terms of narrative structure and level design. This is perhaps where Far Cry 2 innovates the most but also where it stumbles, most likely due to the massive scope of the game world that is being represented in game for the player.

Immersion can often share a close relationship with the technology of a game. When the player needs to be sold on the illusion the game is offering in order for them to suspend their disbelief, their sensory connection to the game is one of the most important elements. Hence the emphasis on graphical fidelity, sound design, and the perpetual existence of the game world that Murray hints at in her writing on immersion (Murray , 1999: 105). There are a number of ways that Far Cry 2 strives to maintain perpetual existence of its world that work to enhance player immersion.

There are no loading screens, no pauses while the player is forced to wait, in an open world game this a difficult but necessary technological achievement. Jesper Juul talks about the way a game has fictional time and a play time where time in the game world is fictional time, whilst play time is time as the player experiences it. He gives the example of the loading screens in Half Life maintaining fictional time by pausing to stream data, but disrupting play time (Juul, 2005: 143). Far Cry 2's lack of load screens (except for when the player boots the game before playing) allows the fictional time and play time to remain in sync. In this way suspension of disbelief can be sustained, and the player is immersed for longer stretches of time.

Far Cry 2 uses a safe house system where the player can 'save' their game by sleeping on a camp bed. Save games in Far Cry 2 allow the player to rest his character for a chosen amount of time using a watch on the character's wrist, this is the only example of fictional time breaking away from play time and it is portrayed by a time lapse of the world outside the safe house. As the sun lowers in the sky the weather changes, non-player characters (NPC's) whiz around, and the player is shown how the game world is in perpetual existence. It continues to exist without him or her, which creates a believability in the procedural nature of the game world and it's various systems.

The animation system in Far Cry 2 plays a big part in the player's immersion, the game shuns the use of the cut scene, a technique ripped straight from the frames of its moving image sibling, film. Instead the player is fixed to the first person perspective of their character continuously . This means that every action the player performs is done using their own digital hands, without the use of an obtrusive user interface or heads-up-display. For example Far Cry 2 allows the player to navigate its 50km open world (an unnamed African country in the middle of civil war) using a map, which the player carries in the hand and can examine at any time. When the player finds a vehicle, they enter it without leaving the first person perspective, with animations provided for every action. The same goes for firing, reloading, and unjamming weapons, repairing vehicles or swimming.

Far Cry 2 also has a unique approach to first aid. While it borrows the rather tired convention of the health pack to heal a players wounds, when the player is critically wounded, they must retreat from battle and tend to their ailment. This cues a brief animation of the player reaching down and say, pulling some shrapnel from a leg, or fixing a dislocated knee joint. This insistence on a first person perspective, perpetual world existence, and 1:1 fictional and play time all follow an uncompromising design ethos that match the brutal nature of the games themes of idealism and greed. In this way Far Cry 2 forms a communication between designer and player though its mechanics of play, a design methodology that is described in Extra Lives and advocated by independent developer Jonathan Blow (Bissell, 2010: 93)

This unrelenting immersion can occasionally hurt the player's experience, while games have evolved beyond placing 'fun' as their only purpose, this does not mean a player is going to relish the frustration of having a game's systems punish him/her time and again. Whilst getting to a mission objective on the map, the player can begin to resent the systems that embedded them so firmly in the game world when they have to run for miles in real time, only to be gunned down in the chaos of the enemy AI and fire propagation system.

While these systems can work against the player's enjoyment of the game at times, they are what create the potential for the player-centric emergent narrative that Henry Jenkins discusses in his Narrative Architecture essay (Jenkins, 2004) and truly explore the medium's narrative potential. This approach to meaningful story relies on the 'buddy system', the characters that the player meets can rescue the player when they are failing in combat, in this way the immersion of the player is saved from being broken by a fail state or load screen after death. While the missions remain fixed, the certain elements are interchangeable, and players can make choices that allow the narrative to branch. In this way Murray's “procedural authorship” (Murray, 1999) is at last put to use as elements of the story are directed by the author's hand (the buddies) and the player takes those elements and assembles them through choices and gameplay, forging a personal and unique emergent narrative. This was taken even further by one critic who documented a 'perma-death' (a self enforced rule where once the player dies, the game is over) play through of the game and annotated the screen shots he took with anecdotes of his own emergent experiences (Abraham, 2009). This is one example of the best that Far Cry 2 can be, and a logical extension of its uncompromising nature.

Bibliography

Murray, Janet (1999) Hamlet On The Holodeck The MIT Press

Juul, Jesper (2005) Half Real The MIT Press

Jenkins, Henry (2004) 'Game Design as Narrative Architecture' in: First Person: New Media Story, Performance and Game The MIT Press

Bissell, Tom (2010) Extra Lives Pantheon Books

Websites

Abraham, Ben (2009) Permanent Death - The Complete Saga http://drgamelove.blogspot.com/search/label/Permanent%20Death 27^th April, 2011

Games

Far Cry 2 (2008) Developed by Ubisoft Montreal [Sony Playstation 3], Ubisoft

 Pixel Propaganda

Not the must cutting edge article on story in games, but its still intriguing to ascertain the state of narrative among developers. There are two other parts also so worth reading if this piques you interest.

A wonderfully written review of LA Noire that interprets the games world and characters in a wholly original manner.

Why sometimes I should learn to shut up about my passions and obsessions, and why not shutting is up is so important.

Pixel Crushed

This is all slightly out of date as the blog has been given a rest while I attended to other things. The Animated Exeter promotional trailer is finally done. It was all worth it in the end when the "client", Susannah came down to see what we'd accomplished, and she saw the Cathedral come on screen. I believe her words were: "oh wow". That's job satisfaction :)



It was a real struggle the last few days leading up to completion for me, failed render after failed render, mostly down to human error (my human error) and I felt additionally responsible for pushing the high production aesthetic and, while this obviously created extra work, it really feel it was worth the effort, and it shows in the final trailer. Extra credit to Jake who held it all together and was the only one still able to power on right til the end, apparently you've got to be that hardcore to produce a trailer plus two 3rd year animations all at the same time.. I'll detail the two hiccups we had with Maya so people can avoid similar issues in the future.

I had a displacement node on the grass geometry in order to create detailed blades of grass. Mental ray uses a technique to control displacement quality by judging how close something is the camera and adding to the mesh accordingly, this meant when the camera swooped in close massive spikes of grass appeared and when it drew back and grass in the distance came into view there was little to no displacement. While this is really clever it unfortunately caused a rippling seizure effect in the grass so it was distracting and glitchy looking, apparently this can be fixed by using better sample of the displacement texture but I'd have to do a lot more experimentation to figure it out properly. Hurray for re-rendering. This meant using six computers to render out the fixed grass at 13 minutes a frame, which is pretty respectable considering the fancy final gather lighting, 4k and 2k textures and stained glass window shaders.

 Gorgeous I know, but as a moving sequence, problematic to say the least.

The second problem was with displaying a texture that was an image sequence on the robot's chest, this came out blank on the first render, fortunately we formulated a more elegant solution to this by rendering out the chest separately in the Maya software renderer and using surrounding models to mask the parts of the chest that were supposed to be obscured by using setting them as an alpha channel in after effects.

In my continued exploration of the mental ray render settings I uncovered the motion blur settings, one in particular caught my eye. It controlled the amount you blur something, I convinced myself it was necessary to crank it up to 1.5 in order to help the cathedral feel more like a giant piece of architecture than a miniature scale model. I think it genuinely helped enhance that effect whilst also smoothing out the harsh transition from inside to outside the cathedral, but I would think that wouldn't I...

I've started to work on modelling and UV unwrapping alongside Nigel on The Little Helper, (Pete's lighting work on one of the sets). My first prop being a cuckoo clock, I have some useful information to go on, requirements for its animation and a photo for reference etc, using that I created a very quick concept sketch-see above, and began modelling. While I like the proportions of the thing, at the moment it feels too perfect and CG, I'll have to find out about the style it needs to be in an hopefully look into creating a more wonky, handmade feel to the prop. Other than that just a bird and the pendulum missing before this is ready for me to start unwrapping and then I can hand it to texturing.

Nelson the supercomputer I have just invested £579 in something else I've been devoting a bit of time to recently. Last week has seen me travelling the length and breadth of Falmouth trying to track down the multitude of packages I've managed to miss. Now all the necessary parts have been assembled and I'm highly anticipating the moment I can begin enjoying the new processing power as I render Pixar quality CG in real time...perhaps I should consider lowering my expectations? Nah, its a beast :)

In my continued attempts to open the minds of my readership to new and exciting ways of thinking about videogames I have discovered these two articles. The first talks about the content of the painfully dumb looking Bulletstorm, and what's appropriate/offensive. I personally feel that the medium needs to go through stages of evolution. According to Shatz's genre theory there was the time when a genre was just discovering itself, before it moved into the classic phase (which can last for an extended period of time), after this it develops self awareness and moves into parody and pastiche phase were humour is derived from the audiences knowledge of the genre's conventions. Finally comes the revisionist stage where films in the genre play on the audience's expectations of the conventions to create new ways of presenting the narrative whilst still operating within the format of the genre. Games are still in the stage where designers don't yet know how best to use interactivity to tell stories, this means we are a long way off reaching the satirical stage that Bulletstorm claims to be inhabiting. While there are certainly gaming conventions that are ripe for comedic material, its mostly because they're ridiculous in and of themselves, we don't need another shooter filled with stereotypes, sexism, questionable motives behind gameplay themes. Just because Bulletstorm has self awareness doesn't mean its being clever and witty just by pointing out what's already laughable in a very obvious way. Lets have some progression and then we can laugh about it all later.



Not sure where that all came from.

This piece references some of the finest experiences the contemporary media consumer can have, and on top of that it makes an excellent point about player agency and the personal nature of interactivity.