Archive for June, 2011

Ranting about stuff

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

**A friend of mine reminded me what the true issue was regarding one of these points, so I have adjusted the article accordingly. Thanks Mac ;D**

Well it’s pretty self explanatory, I just feel the urge to rant about some things I have on my mind. The main thing that’s pissed me off today is the state of the game industry in Australia currently. Now as a disclaimer, I am just a 3D enthusiast when it comes to game design… I haven’t had a job in any game design studios nor have I been heavily involved in the game community such as IGDA and the Aussie communities, but some things are so in your face it’s a joke.

I follow an online digital community of digital professionals called DLF – digital laborers federation. Recently there has been a bit of talk about the issue of credits in games, namely LA Noire. From what I understand, the game was developed jointly between Rockstar Games and Team Bondi – the Australian game studio. The discussion is about the fact that Team Bondi didn’t include the full credit list of the staff who worked tirelessly on the development of this game. While this may not seem like a big deal to most people, for those people who have put blood sweat and tears into making this a game a reality, it’s a real spit in the face. And to me, it’s a big spit in the face of the Australian game development community as a whole, which has got me really pissed off…

This isn’t the first time that local companies, as well as external companies, mainly American, have dared to blatantly spit in our faces. One time that rings loud in my ears is with a game studio called Pandemic. They produced a game I used to play every day called Dark Reign. Although it wasn’t as successful as RTS’ such as Starcraft, it held a dear spot in many people’s hearts and had a strong following. EA Games purchased Pandemic and then proceeded to lay off nearly all employees and shut down the Australian office. EA Games has a long history of purchasing studios and then shutting them down, clearly flexing their control over the gaming industry.

Another company that is bitter to a lot of Perth based game developers is Interzone, which is now known as Big Collision Games. They entered Australia giving hope to lots of budding game developers in Perth, they accepted government support and financial aid. They employed a lot of talented people who invested a lot of time, energy, and intellectual property into the development of their game concept. In return, Interzone decided not to pay the employees, nor their super. They also didn’t pay taxes, and as a result went into liquidation destroying the gaming communities spirit in the process. They then had the nerve to relocate and reform, with zero intention of settling the outstanding issues in Australia. Now how does that look in the eyes of this who supported them? I’m pretty damn sure the government will be very hesitant in supporting any future business willing to set up studios here…

There are other studios who have experienced problems such as Krome, but I won’t go into these details because, well, I’m not too sure of the details. All I know is there were bulk job losses which cripples the industry – even if it is due to not winning contracts vs competition. I’ve had enough watching international companies deciding it’s ok to spit in our faces and treat us like shit, and what’s even worse is nothing has changed over the past years of abuse. I think it’s about time that Australian game developers give the big middle finger to the major studios and get on with developing high quality games that we can be proud of. You can definitely run a highly profitable business without treating your employees like shit, and why don’t we set a precedence?? There’s no doubting the talent that we have in Australia and frankly I’m sick of seeing all the talent being forced over seas… It’s about time Australia stands up and says ‘fuck you, respect me’.

This is just the random thoughts of myself, would love to get a discussion going regarding the issue, and also a plan in place to make the industry as strong as we can…

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It’s been a while…

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

Well it’s been a while since I’ve done a blog post, the last I wrote I was trying to keep a daily blog up and failed on the second day. I must say, blogging doesn’t come natural to me, but when I have lots of ideas to think about I need a repository to store these ideas, so it’s definitely something I need to get into…

I had the urge to write a post a few weeks ago regarding folio preparation, but didn’t get around to doing it. It’s definitely something I want to write about soon as I think it’s an important topic. A little update about what’s going on with myself… I’m working as a 3D and Multimedia tutor at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. Have been doing that for a couple of years and I’m settling in pretty well and enjoying the education aspect. Other than that, my freelance is just heating up. I have some decent size jobs going on and some sizzling clients and contacts that will definitely propel my business in the right direction. Enough about that!

The experiment

When working on a lot of work related things, it’s good to procrastinate sometimes to relax, and what better thing to procrastinate with than playing around with some 3D dynamics. Not particle, or cloth or anything like that. I’ve always wanted to play around with audio driven 3d animation, so I gave it a go on the weekend. This is my result:

As you can see, the line bounces to the audio track. It’s not perfect, but its a start, and a decent result for one days messing around. It’s actually a cool starting point and I can imagine what cool stuff I can animate to a wav file. Currently that’s just an extrude based on the value output from the audio file, mapped over time, but imagine using the output values for colour changes, other animation changes, particle emission changes etc.

How it’s done

It’s driven off the plugin downloadable off area.autodesk.com called ‘audiowave.mll’. Here’s the basic set-up…

  • Install the plug-in, import the audio file. Time to link everything up via MEL.
  • Create an audio node & attach the wav file to the node – note the file HAS to be a wav file not an mp3. Use the following code.

    • createNode audioWave;
    - This creates a node called audioWave1. It’s what you hook the wav file into. I just executed each MEL script after each line to make sure it was done correctly.
    connectAttr soundNode.filename audioWave1.audio;
    - Where ‘soundNode’ is the file name of the audio clip. You can find this out if you aren’t sure by right clicking on the timeline where the audio is placed, and hovering over the sound option. It should tell you the audio file reference name.
    connectAttr time1.outTime audioWave1.input;
    - This hooks the audio wave up to the timeline, so the value changes over time.

    From here you’ve hooked up the audio to the audioWave node, and also hooked it up to the timeline. What this will do is it will output various values ranging from 0-1 for the wave sign position in the timeline. You can now use this value to animate different elements of a model or texture. It’s the driver for the animation. For the animation you see above, I have animated the subcurve extrusion attribute. This is how it was hooked up:
    connectAttr audioWave1.output object.attribute;
    - Use whatever attribute you want to animate. If you are unsure of the attribute name specifically, you can right click on the attribute and go to create an expression, and nab the attribute name in that window. The only reason I did it this way is because I am pretty much clueless about MEL.

    The most noteworthy thing is, once you are happy with the animation produced from linking the attributes up, I noticed that you had to bake the keys for it to render in batch render. Not sure if this is supposed to be part of the process, but I found that this allowed it to be rendered. I noticed the bake only worked if the object baked was the one directly affecting the animation, so in this case the subcurve value.

    All that aside, you have now linked up the audio to a wave control node, and now hooked the wave results into an animated attribute. Another quick note is you can use nodes to amplify the results. For example, I hooked an audio clip up to the luminance value which isn’t easily seen, but the luminance value isn’t effective in casting light/shadows at low values which are output by the wave node (eg. 0.75 etc), so by putting a multiplier node and multiplying the value by 10 or 15, you get more of an effect.

    What’s the use of it?

    So as you can see, now you’re getting a result from the audio peaks/troughs, what’s animatable is only left to your imagination. My next thought was splitting audio waves into highs, mids and lows and animating different elements, such as colour, size, even particles. Set driven keys, anything you can think of. Could be useful for audio decoding and even initial mouth/character animation based off voice.

    The animation has LOTS to be refined on, such as motion blur etc, but the concept is there…

    I intend to tweak this and play with this a lot more in the near future with different animated elements, so hopefully I’ll keep this blog updated with progress.

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