Final Blog

This is the final blog post for my sr project. This was a great project and the team i worked with got a lot done and I'm proud to say that this project is (for the most part) complete. The reason i say "for the most part" is because there are still a few things that need to get done to call it 100% complete.

What still has to be done on my part is the fact that well the other night the SVN went down, and for everyone that doesn't know what that is its a tool that helps the whole team stay connected by working on 1 project. When this went down it meant that i wasn't able to make changes to the current project thus when we presented today the changes I've been making weren't showing up. This wouldn't be so bad but with the deadline looming ever closer its imperative that we get this done.

My first step was to see if the teammate in charge of the SVN to it up and running and luckily its a GO! I was able to commit some of my files and get them updated in the main project like the most current coworker and forklift packages. This is really important because i ran into some issues getting all the animations to work, thus making me have to turn the forklift into a static mesh so that i could get it to animate correctly. This was a chore because i had to go back into 3ds max and export it again, but when i would do that for some reason it would want to import everything seperatly, like the wheels would be their own file and so on. Once i realized that there was a merge mesh button that i had to click everything started coming together.

After getting the coworker into sitting position on the forklift i figured it would be easier to export him a static mesh instead of a skeletal mesh and just animate him separately, this really seemed to work out because i was having issues getting him to export with the forklift as one entity and with him in the pose that i had put him in prior to exporting.

After everything was exported into UDK the tasks of animating them was extremely simple it was just very tedious making sure that the movements and the rotations were done properly. The last thing i did was add some sound, that was very easy it was just playing a sound cue when the level loaded.

Sr Project 9/2/2013

My part of this part of the sr project was primarily based around the coworker and the forklift. I had a lot of issues getting the forklift to work mainly because I started with individual skeletal meshes for each part of forklift. My first challenge was to export all the skeletal meshes for the forklift and then reimport them into 3DS Max. The problem I ran into after this was that even though I had all the parts imported into 3DS Max they still did not have a accurate pivot point, and It would not let me change the location of the pivot point. I ended up taking advantage of the control you have when importing an object to get the accurate placement and to get all the meshes in the right spots.
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After I got the meshes imported and placed in one file the next challenge was to add bones and rig the forklift to get it ready for animation. This would be easy but I have never done any kind of rigging in 3ds max before so it was a huge challenge for me. After some research I was able to figure out how to use the bone tool and get it rigged. I only used 4 bones and rigged it to the 4 wheels,  this way I could do some basic animation like the turning of the wheels. After you create the bones and get them generally in the right spot you need to make sure that the bones are centered with the wheels so that when you do your animation you get a clean rotation and not a skewed rotation on the wheels.

So now that the forklift was rigged and animated the next part was to get it imported into UDK. This part was actually fairly easy. All you have to do is export the forklift with the animations to an FBX file and then when you have UDK open you can just click and drag it into the content browser. Once you do this it will give you an import dialog box and you have to change the settings so the import is named appropriately and its designation is the right package. So now we have a forklift in UDK that we can use and the great thing about this project is that it picked up the textures from the previous skeletal meshes so I didn't have to retexture the forklift after it was imported.
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After I go the forklift done I needed to fix the coworker because unfortunately the coworker was not textured when I imported him. I was really confused for a while as to why this was and after analyzing the situation I found out why. I'm not the best when it comes to UDK so I didn't notice this right off the bat but what I found out was that the materials that were loaded in with the coworker didn't have 2DTextures applied to them. This was a simple fix just by opening the materials that the coworker was using in the material editor then dropping in the appropriate texture and attaching the black to the uv so that they show up.

Integration pt 2

So one of the biggest issues with working in a project is integrating your work into the collective. I've been working on the animation for this project and one thing that i was suppose to do is integrate the new coworker animations into the project. The problem with that is when i get the animations into UDK i'm not sure how to replace the actor that is currently there with the one that i need for the animations. I've been doing a lot of research and i think i'm going to have to change the matinee manually to get it all to fit together. I've never done a lot with UDK so i'm kind of nervous to see how this turns out but at the same time i'm pretty excited.

WISH ME LUCK!

Integration

I fell behind last week trying to get thee animation done for the co worker but now i got to play catch up. I got to get the animation and the integration done for this weeks project. I believe i can do it it shouldnt be that hard. The only thing that bugs me is getting it integrated with the rest of the project which im having issues with right now. I dont think i go the right version of the aspire project and its starting to bug me. Well i got some time to get it working and it wont take long.

Tasks to Complete

So this week we got some official duties to be completed by the team members. My task for this week is to get the walking animation done for the coworker in our warehouse simulator. I'm not quite sure how this is going to work but I believe that it should be pretty easy. After talking with my professor I believe that I'm going to re rig the model so that I can use a default walking animation inside of 3ds Max. This should make things a lot quicker simply because rigging in my opinion is faster then re doing an entire animation.

Late First Post

We just recently started the continued work on what is a Warehouse simulation for Aspire. In this simulation employees will learn the proper ways to do various tasks throughout the warehouse, like packing boxes and stocking shelves. The project has started out kind of slow but i hope that the team is able to pick up the pace here soon. I feel as though im responsible for this project because of the role i play during the meetings. We have assigned roles and duties to everyone and i hope everyone takes the initiative to get this thing going and going quickly.

Tasks for each person:

-Manager's textures will be handled by Chris G

-Coworkers Animations and possibly AI will be handled by Dan, Steven, and James

-Camera Movments will be handled by Brandon

-Feedback system will be handled by Steven

-New hud icon will be handled by Chris K

-Asset collection and creation will be handled by James and Brandon

-Kismet integrations will be handled by Steven, Brandon and both Chris's