So I definitely didn’t write a blog last week, mainly because I didn’t make any progress (I have other classes with other assignments too), so to make up for that I spent my entire weekend programming, flipping through books and finding as much help on the internet I could. Somehow programming kept my attention for at least 24 hours allowing me to learn tonnes about the engine we’re using and get enough assignments done to be able to write my exam. I also decided that, even if it doesn’t count, I’m going to try and do every assignment, just to learn as much as I can about the engine.
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| A Nice Gross Rainbow Arm |
The first thing I ended up working on was creating an arm with each finger segment individually controllable. When I first saw that question I thought it would be really hard so decided to avoid it, but after messing around in the engine I found that it may actually be the easiest to implement. All it required was creating each joint with a pivot in the right place and connecting the scene together, and of course assigning button presses to move each joint. Working in the scene graph here would turn out to help me in creating…
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| THE SOLAR SYSTEM!!! |
This was an assignment where I had to create each planet and moon (I chose to not include the 60-something moons of Jupiter) in the solar system and have them rotate correctly. I ended up using WildMagic primitives, which, although, more difficult than just importing it from Maya, allowed me to better learn some important functions of the engine. I gave each object a pivot point to allow it to pivot around the sun and then a translation node to move them to their correct position. On top of that I then added each planets individual rotation around their own axis, and also a ring for Saturn. Then came texturing, which took me a while to figure out, as images had to be in the wmif format. So, once again, I began diving through code until I saw something that looked like it would work and It did. With that my work on that was pretty much done, just finding and applying the right textures to the right planets.
The final assignment I completed (although I was working on more) was about shooting a ball from the camera at a block wall to demonstrate the Havok physics system. I found it incredibly easy to set up the scene in Maya and import it into WildMagic, and even getting a ball to shoot at the wall, but it was John’s help that got my project to the level it was at when I completed it. John helped me with showing me the function to rotate an object which was used as a pivot for the camera, and how to create the ball at the cameras position facing into the scene at the position of the mouse, which ended up just being a simple few lines.
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| Madness |
In terms of our game and group as a whole making progress this week, we ended up getting a list of all the art assets we want to have in our game (very useful for me, as I’ll me doing most, if not all, the modelling for our game). We also got a list of other assets we want to include such as sound and shader effects. Even though I’m not the person in our group that was going to be working on shaders, I’ll probably try to make a few, I had fun experimenting with them last year, and I really want to create a cool lava flow effect.
Well that’s it for now, hopefully I’ll make as much progress next week as I did this week, even with all the exams I have coming up next week.
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