As we are starting to build pieces of the GUI for the much anticipated race mode for our game, I spent some time mocking up a general outline of what it might look like. What do you think? We will use this as a guide to build the real pieces. Click to see the bigger picture.
This is awesome watching all of this come together MM, you and your team are doing a great job with this, very inspiring.
I like the HUD as well, very clean, and I (personally) wouldn't change too much. The only thing that I think you could play around with is the power up , more so the size. I think it would be cool if the actual power up icon was popping a bit out of the box, or maybe when the player gets a power up, you could incorporate an animation that expands and then contracts with some follow through could add a nice "cartoony" touch. This could be done with the numbers as well (when you change positions or completed a lap) but subtlety may be the answer
Anyways, I just wanna say this is looking great, each update gets me more excited for the release
thanks Jason, I would like some kind of animation when states change as well. Esp. for when you first get an item and when your position or lap # changes etc. Just a real quick scale up with maybe a touch of rotation.
The speed by which you and your small team are pumping out this high quality content, indicates to me that Nintendo must have had only one person working on Mario Kart Wii during its development (likely an intern with no arms or legs). Keep up the great work!
If you're still interested in experimenting with it, in your rim lighting shader, I'd suggest retaining some of the diffuse component. Or if you're working with higher specs, do a proper snells law fresnel function and then overlay the function with the diffuse component.
This is a revised GUI mockup of how we want the garage to function. This will hopefully be another GUI programmed in flash, and will feature floating elements that can be positioned by the user. Hopefully you will be tooling around in this garage soon!
Hey Marsh, will it work fine if I divide my textures as follows for the character I'm working on :
1 square map for the bodytight suit,
1 square map for the hard armor (includes shoulder pads, legs aso + helmet) and hair,
1 square map for the visor (ideally I would love to have a nice cubemap reflection on this part, no painted detail),
and 1 square map for the head?
that should work, the only limitation to having multiple textures for the same mesh is that you can't customize the same color across all of them. So if there is one common color you would want to see change on all the pieces at once, they have to be on the same sheet otherwise you would have to change each one individually in the game. Also, you are limited to 6 custom colors for the entire mesh.
for the cubemap you could use the one I use all over in the game, or you could create your own. Eventually there will be a limit for the size of all total assets for each item, but I don't know what that is going to be yet.
Are the helmet, visor and character going to be separate items?
Yea, we are both working full time on this, self funded.
Hey, anybody out there that has 3D World issue 106 that just came out, there should be something in there about our game - if someone owns a copy, a scan would be much appreciated, I can't find it out anywhere around where I live.
Hey MM, do you make it so that the green and white are masked? So players can control the colour of the monkey, or is the customization aimed at the accessories and carts?
All I can say is I realllyyy wanna play this badly, you guys are doing such a good job.
Hey MM, do you make it so that the green and white are masked? So players can control the colour of the monkey, or is the customization aimed at the accessories and carts?
All I can say is I realllyyy wanna play this badly, you guys are doing such a good job.
Yea, when I am preparing every model to go into the game I set them up to use color masks for the parts I want to be customizable. Almost every single kart, character, accessory, hat, and wheel has 1-6 customizable colors on it.
The sock monkey will have 3 customizable colors, 2 for stripes and one for it's button eyes.
personally i'm not a big fan of the shininess of everything in the game. i think its the rim lighting shader that makes it look a bit too plastic.
maybe some more ao and a shader that makes it look more like rubber would suit the game a bit better?
thats the only crit i can offer but its more of a personal preference i guess
well, one cool thing about the way I am doing the rim lighting effect is that since it is done with a cubemap, I can experiment with the look easily by altering what the cubemap looks like.
We still have not experimented much at all with shaders or any kind of actual lighting on the characters, which is something I would like to do eventually but like so many other things in my head it is on the "when we have time" list.
Here's what I have. The colored bits (ref and green here) come from a multiply layer. I have a few different mouthes (with and without lipstick, smiling and neutral = 4) but also have variants with the cast shadow of the visor painted in. It could go without tho.
thats awesome! I could try and get it set up for the game from the .ma file if you want to send it over.
here is one last accessory for today:
*edit* I just thought of an awesome kart to go with that futuristic character. Some kind of f-zero-sh wipeout hover kart deal, complete with scrolling texture hover jets - and the cool thing which I wasn't actually planning on when I set it up - is there is a turn left and a turn right animation on all the karts that is blended in depending on on speed and sharpness of turn. Right now we are using it so that the steering wheel turns when the kart turns, but if there was a kart that was "hovering" then you chould have the entire kart tilt side to side for that animation. There is an idle animation as well so the kart could be bobbing slightly up and down. I am not sure what to do for wheels though, since at least the way the system is right now it requires a wheel model. Maybe wheels that look like air exhaust or something . . . hmm I'm going to think about it some more
Hehe glad to hear it spawns cool ideas!
Just sent you a link to the model. It's a bit of a mess, it being a conversion...
I'm thinking about making more simple, cute models like animals and such. Keep you updated!
the face is a little grey I know, I hacked in a color mask for the skin tone and the hair and I could have tweaked it a little better.
I will make sure this girl works with the garage editor when we release it then I will give it back so you can see the format and change whatever and see how it fits with everything else. There is a .mesh exporter for max, so you could make stuff straight from there once you are able to throw it into the garage to see it.
I also separated the material for the helmet so it can be a stand alone item and I tweaked the geometry of it just a little so it fit properly on all the other characters.
not in a straightforward way right now. We are just getting around to making the idle anims on the kart scale with speed, so if you had the tracks animated as an idle and then we have those settings available in the xml for the item - then I think it might be possible but it would not be actually physically correct. It might look ok though.
I would really like to make a little tank, if I ever get to it then I will figure it out in the process.
ive found the perfect ref for a tank for this, if ive read the thread correctly you have an idle, right and left turn anims?? are these blend shapes, or anims that blend? bones or seperate meshes with transform keys? sorry for the load of Qs im enfussed
ever thought of using animated uvs for the tracks?
Oh cool. As for skin tones I would suggest the following :
You could have the 'main' tone driven by a multiplied color (over a very bright greyscale painted face), and another layer on top of that that adds the needed coloration. (red in the cheeks and nose for instance). A couple blending modes in photoshop allow to do that just fine and I hear they are easy to replicate in an engine. (multiply mode might be a bit too dark for such subtle shifts)
Oh cool. As for skin tones I would suggest the following :
You could have the 'main' tone driven by a multiplied color (over a very bright greyscale painted face), and another layer on top of that that adds the needed coloration. (red in the cheeks and nose for instance). A couple blending modes in photoshop allow to do that just fine and I hear they are easy to replicate in an engine. (multiply mode might be a bit too dark for such subtle shifts)
Edit : hehe just saw the eyepatch! NICE haha!
ah, thats a great idea Pior!
right now (and this may not be final) the karts have turn_left, turn_right, and idle skeletal animations which are all blended by the engine.
Animated UV's would make it look like the tread is moving, but right now we don't have any way too hook the scroll rate to how fast your kart is moving. I think it would be a good idea for us to make it so that you can designate a name in the material file of the scrolling texture in the item xml, as well as a multiplier value against the speed of the kart, so that it will scale the scroll value based on kart speed for that texture. We have also talked about opening up a lua script per item so that it would be easy to implement this kind of stuff yourself ( with a little scripting knowledge ) but I am not entirely convinced if that would be a good idea or not.
You said you didn't know what to do about hover car NOT having wheels since the anims (or something) needs them.
I've done this with game models before to 'trick' the engine, maybe it'll work. I'd love to see a hover car.
Just hide a triangle inside the car somewhere. Could be very very small. Name it the wheels name and link it to the wheel bone. That should make the engine think it's got wheels.
Replies
also, check out these things - I want to buy one and make it into a Zero Gear-mobile sooo bad. http://www.lusseautoscooters.com/bcarpics.html
I will have to model one for the game at least!
I like the HUD as well, very clean, and I (personally) wouldn't change too much. The only thing that I think you could play around with is the power up , more so the size. I think it would be cool if the actual power up icon was popping a bit out of the box, or maybe when the player gets a power up, you could incorporate an animation that expands and then contracts with some follow through could add a nice "cartoony" touch. This could be done with the numbers as well (when you change positions or completed a lap) but subtlety may be the answer
Anyways, I just wanna say this is looking great, each update gets me more excited for the release
Keep up the great work!
http://nimblebit.blogspot.com/2008/06/mini-map-with-maximum-enjoyment.html
during the 3-5 second mark of that video i can tell that THOSE CARS HAVE NO BOTTOMS!!!
hehe j/k but yeah... they ARE lacking bottoms for wen they flip up like that
so:
float fresnel = SolveFresnel (http://developer.nvidia.com/attach/6664);
fresnel *= diffuse*2; //simple overlay expansion
that will reduce the desaturation of your scene and allow your diffuse component to show through and not be so washed out
1 square map for the bodytight suit,
1 square map for the hard armor (includes shoulder pads, legs aso + helmet) and hair,
1 square map for the visor (ideally I would love to have a nice cubemap reflection on this part, no painted detail),
and 1 square map for the head?
for the cubemap you could use the one I use all over in the game, or you could create your own. Eventually there will be a limit for the size of all total assets for each item, but I don't know what that is going to be yet.
Are the helmet, visor and character going to be separate items?
Not sure if this was answered or not - are you two working full time on this? Self funded?
Looking great guys! Can't wait to make some custom content!
-Tyler
Hey, anybody out there that has 3D World issue 106 that just came out, there should be something in there about our game - if someone owns a copy, a scan would be much appreciated, I can't find it out anywhere around where I live.
All I can say is I realllyyy wanna play this badly, you guys are doing such a good job.
Awesome!
give it a brown color and make a nice monkey:)
Yea, when I am preparing every model to go into the game I set them up to use color masks for the parts I want to be customizable. Almost every single kart, character, accessory, hat, and wheel has 1-6 customizable colors on it.
The sock monkey will have 3 customizable colors, 2 for stripes and one for it's button eyes.
Hey marsh i was wondering what maps im allowed using in my model? can i use spec,alpha,normal maps at all?
trying to keep it simple simple simple!
*edit* custom wheels for the shoecar?
[ame]
Very nice. I can see people having the whole "Only one of us can be him!" argument.
personally i'm not a big fan of the shininess of everything in the game. i think its the rim lighting shader that makes it look a bit too plastic.
maybe some more ao and a shader that makes it look more like rubber would suit the game a bit better?
thats the only crit i can offer but its more of a personal preference i guess
We still have not experimented much at all with shaders or any kind of actual lighting on the characters, which is something I would like to do eventually but like so many other things in my head it is on the "when we have time" list.
an easy combo of some of the existing ones,
next,
also,
Here's what I have. The colored bits (ref and green here) come from a multiply layer. I have a few different mouthes (with and without lipstick, smiling and neutral = 4) but also have variants with the cast shadow of the visor painted in. It could go without tho.
I guess I can make you a .ma?
here is one last accessory for today:
*edit* I just thought of an awesome kart to go with that futuristic character. Some kind of f-zero-sh wipeout hover kart deal, complete with scrolling texture hover jets - and the cool thing which I wasn't actually planning on when I set it up - is there is a turn left and a turn right animation on all the karts that is blended in depending on on speed and sharpness of turn. Right now we are using it so that the steering wheel turns when the kart turns, but if there was a kart that was "hovering" then you chould have the entire kart tilt side to side for that animation. There is an idle animation as well so the kart could be bobbing slightly up and down. I am not sure what to do for wheels though, since at least the way the system is right now it requires a wheel model. Maybe wheels that look like air exhaust or something . . . hmm I'm going to think about it some more
Just sent you a link to the model. It's a bit of a mess, it being a conversion...
I'm thinking about making more simple, cute models like animals and such. Keep you updated!
video of it in game soon.
Face is a bit grey tho!
I'll send you the hard-edged mesh asap.
i wish i had time to make a kart. i bagsy a tricked up mobility chair
ah just read your last post when i posted, hard edges on the ears?
I will make sure this girl works with the garage editor when we release it then I will give it back so you can see the format and change whatever and see how it fits with everything else. There is a .mesh exporter for max, so you could make stuff straight from there once you are able to throw it into the garage to see it.
I also separated the material for the helmet so it can be a stand alone item and I tweaked the geometry of it just a little so it fit properly on all the other characters.
I would really like to make a little tank, if I ever get to it then I will figure it out in the process.
ever thought of using animated uvs for the tracks?
You could have the 'main' tone driven by a multiplied color (over a very bright greyscale painted face), and another layer on top of that that adds the needed coloration. (red in the cheeks and nose for instance). A couple blending modes in photoshop allow to do that just fine and I hear they are easy to replicate in an engine. (multiply mode might be a bit too dark for such subtle shifts)
Edit : hehe just saw the eyepatch! NICE haha!
ah, thats a great idea Pior!
right now (and this may not be final) the karts have turn_left, turn_right, and idle skeletal animations which are all blended by the engine.
Animated UV's would make it look like the tread is moving, but right now we don't have any way too hook the scroll rate to how fast your kart is moving. I think it would be a good idea for us to make it so that you can designate a name in the material file of the scrolling texture in the item xml, as well as a multiplier value against the speed of the kart, so that it will scale the scroll value based on kart speed for that texture. We have also talked about opening up a lua script per item so that it would be easy to implement this kind of stuff yourself ( with a little scripting knowledge ) but I am not entirely convinced if that would be a good idea or not.
worst comes to the worst and you have to have a gta tank (wheels)
http://vimeo.com/1220911
trying to keep the item train rolling . . . got a mohawk
I've done this with game models before to 'trick' the engine, maybe it'll work. I'd love to see a hover car.
Just hide a triangle inside the car somewhere. Could be very very small. Name it the wheels name and link it to the wheel bone. That should make the engine think it's got wheels.