Finally Getting Somewhere

After a serious amount of hankering and running around in circles, the contraption game has kicked off. The original script, being too vague has been replaced with a more definitive one with significant help from Nitin and some from Kaeyur too. I am attaching the original sketch that I drew up.
The Script consists of the introductory level of the game, divided into 5 sublevels.

• Objects involved : in this level are are a ball and a domino.

• Objective : Hit the Domino with the ball.

• Elaboration : The starting position of the ball is atop the inclined pedestal. Using various building blocks from the vault provided, the player has to provide a pathway for the ball to go and collide with the domino.

LEVEL 1A:

The ball starts atop the pedestal with the target domino directly in its line of motion. All that the player has to do is add the ramp to allow the ball to smoothly slide down.








The image alongside shows the level being played in the Game Engine.

LEVEL 1B:

The idea here was to raise the target domino onto a pedestal itself so that the player has to add 2 facing ramps allowing the ball to climb up. Here is the first cut :







Both the starting and ending pedestals are at the same height. What Nitin and I discovered is that since the Game engine provides real world physics, the potential energy of the ball is not conserved, which is why it cannot climb upto the original height. (The ball in the GE mode on the right is at its highest attainable height). So we tried to overcome the damping effect on the SHM by setting damp and rotdamp to 0, to no avail. On Nitin's advice I posted the problem on Blenderartists.org where I got a temporary fix:






The height of the starting ramp is increased, fixing the problem.


LEVEL 1C:

The target domino is shifted out of the line of the ball's motion.









One simple solution for the player is to add the pamp and a few dominoes in such a way that consecutive falling of the dominoes finally hit the target domino (highlighted in pink).


LEVEL 1D:

The domino, out of the ball's path has been raised onto a pedestal. The player can add 2 facing ramps and dominoes to overcome this. The level has not been completed due to the same problems faced in level 1B, and will be posted when completed.


LEVEL1E:

The final stage of Level1. The target domino is in the ball's direct path but is atop a flight of stairs.
One simple solution is to add dominoes on each step so that due to the 'domino effect' the target domino falls.










Another idea that I had is to have a camera fly through (as seen tby the ball) in case the player has successfully placed the blocks. The idea is to play the contraption in perspective view if the arrangement is not accurate and then directly have the fly through if the target is going to be hit, so that the player directly knows he has succeeded the moment the fly through begins. A minor variation to the standard way of things, this remains to be discussed with my team

Another important thing is the deadlines. I am reposting the original schedule here :

8th January - Create a Wiki space.

12th January - Survey of games by Bhairav and team.

18th January - Design of Interface to be submitted.

23rd January - Script of the Game

7th February - Modeling of Objects

14th February - Texturing of Objects.

21st February - Lighting

7th March - Game Engine and scripting

28th March - Rendering Starts

5th April - Testing of game

15th April - Final Product

Although we have been off, I think we can be back on track before the 28th March deadline for the commencement of rendering.

The lack of documentation shall be made up for too, so expect frequency of posts to go up.

Chirag Nitin and Kaeyur.

Modelling Progress

Progress in Modelling and Texturing :

Progress has been made in modelling..finally, and the materialisation of the game seems a lot more feasible. the models have been found on various noline repositories and have been suitably modified. nitin's first contraption has been made, and the few glitches have been solved to an extent. The 'Anisotropic' button is used to reduce friction in specific directions. Reducing friction friction in the z direction thus makes the bowling pins behave more realistically. Further progress will be posted subsequently.

Chirag Nitin and Kaeyur

First-Cut Of Contraption

The first step toward realizing weeks of conceptualization for our game occured with the creation of a pseudo level 1.

The landscape bears a slight semblance to the blocks seen at the start of the 'clik-clak' video.

Since this is intended to be a start-up to the game, we wanted it to be a simple- one step contraption- half of which has been created alongside.

Here's a brief simulation :
The ball falls down the slope knocking out the pins. The falling pins set in motion a series of adjacent dominoes that follow the arrow in the still above reaching the end point.

The model for the dominoes had not been finalised upto this point; hence the absence of the domino section.

Nitin has come up with a new contraption which shall be put up shortly.

Chirag

Second Assignment...

hi everyone...
about second assignment, its done...i showed render images to gokul and he replied....that's what we have to do...actually when he explained me about the assignment i didn't understand completely that what we want ? and after that he told me to start with a spot light and how in auditorium a spot light works, create that in blender u will come to know about it...

now about how to create that...follow the steps....

first create the studio like re size the default cube and delete the three front phases like this....

and after that add a new cube adjust the light source and than add a lamp as a spot light, in default it will look like this....

render image....

render image without additional light source.....

the spot light in its default setting, we can see the a light spot around the object but we don't know where is the light source exactly place and we cant even see the light rays on the studio wall also....

now press F5 and go to LAMP BUTTONS, in LAMP BUTTONS go to SHADOW AND SPOT and enable halo button and render the current frame...

in this render image u will get answers of are previous doubts, about source of light and light rays on studio...

as you can see in the render image there is a gap between spot of light and light cone....

here we cant remove this by changing the intensity or by resizing the cone of spot light in any of the axis....in this we can even change the halo intensity, i mean intensity of light cone, even that wont work here...

for this light cone to extend further more and to fill that gap, i tried many things, i have put spot light through different angle,changing intensity , resizing , i search about it on google but didn't got anything but than some how i just change the distance and it worked...the thing we never used up till now...in lamp BUTTONS go to lamp, besides the name of lamp there is a panel called distance....change the distance and u can extend the light cone without resizing it any scale...so here is the final render image...here distance is 31 (default value is 20)

now with some little bit of changes, put light source at some angle....

and render image...

so this is all about assignment 2....

Nitin Ayer

Problems in making a video

while making a video in game engine (the one which i posted last time with cube), cube falling down on a plane...on cube i have put different pictures...
but while making this video i came across few problem some of them i solved like i tried to make make video and i started animating all 250 frames are done and than i saw avi output but it has nothing than i i came to i didnt recorded in IPO and...

another problem cube was falling ion a plane, i gave cube as a dynamic substance and plane as static but when cube was falling down it intersects the plane at some extends and than it stops like this....

i dont knw why this is happening and in avi output the background in dark orange is that is permanant or we can change ? and how?

when we are working on blender simultaneously one dos file is also running, when i was making video i was watching how many frames are done in dos file after few frames i just watched the video in that instead of red colour i got blue and in dos file this message appeared

Detected GL_ARB_texture_env_combine
Detected GL_ARB_texture_cube_map
Enabled GL_ARB_multitexture
Enabled GL_ARB_vertex_program
Detected GL_ARB_depth_texture
Detected GL_EXT_separate_specular_color
shaders not supported!

after every animation it was saying "shaders are not supported !"

than i found it was because of graphic card and graphic cheapset of motherboard it will occur because of those cheapset who doesnt support open GL graphic system....so if any buying new graphic card make sure about open GL system....

and new version of blender is out version 2.48a, in 2.48 there were some bugs in game engine....

so if anyone knows about plane and cube intersecting problem than please inform me...

Nitin Ayer

Assignment

Assignment:- to place different picture on each sides of cube...

this assignment is done here are the steps to do it....

The first thing we need to do is bring up the UV Image Editor. Usually we want this displayed at the same time as our cube. We can accomplish this by splitting the display area. To do this, right-mouse click on the top of the display area (where the resize cursor is visible) and selecting “Split Area”.

Once you split the display, you’ll want to set one of them to display the UV Image Editor. Once you’ve got the UV Image Editor displayed, it should look something like this:

The first map we’re going to create is the simplest - one image for all sides of the cube. To set this up we first need to switch the cube’s display to the “UV Face Select” mode. this mode is not available in blender new version 2.48a it was there in in version 2.45...but to work with this select "Texture paint mode" and then come back to edit mode.

When you enter "edit mode" , you’ll notice the display o

n the left turn blue. This represents all the faces on your UV map. You’ll want to make sure all your faces are selected. You can do this by hitting the ‘a’ key on the cube display a couple of times. ‘a’ will select and deselect all items on your current display. When the faces are selected, the UV map will be blue, if nothing is selected, the display will be black.

Now that our UV map is set up, we can give it an image. take an 512x512 resolution image and open the image in UV Image Editor

open the image in edit mode after opening image go back texture paint mode there u will see the image applied to all the faces of cube....

If you render this scene, you might notice your texture doesn’t show up yet. That’s because the material hasn’t been told to use it. This is configured in the materials menu and click on "texface" button and now render

One image for all the sides of the cube is good and all, but usually I want a different image on each side. To do this, we’re going to have to “unwrap” the sides of the cube onto our UV map. Unfortunately, Blender has no idea how to unwrap an object - even one as simple as a cube. We have to give it a little help by defining some seams.

for this go back to edit mode and select edge selection mode and deselect all the edges by pressing a key

Once you have the edges selected, click ctrl-e to bring up the edge menu and mark the selected edges as a seam.

After the seam has been created, select entire cube in edit mode and got to UV Image Editor and click on UVs button and than unwrap the cube...

After the cube is unwrapped, the UV Image Editor should look something like this:

after this we need to save this unwrap cube for this in UV Image Editor click on UVs button and than select script......

a new panel will open in this we can change the size from default 512 size and than click on ok and than give the file name and path to save UV FACE LAYOUT it will save this layout in .tga format convert it into .jpeg and than place the pictures in the unwrap cube using any image editor like photoshop....

now i have this jpeg file and i want wrap this around cube again...

now to wrap this image again on cube go to UV Image Editor and in image option click on open and than select the image and open it...and after this go to texture paint mode and u can see image wrap on the cube.........

now render image

and now if we want to place different picture than in unwrap image we can place are images.....


but now the problem what i came across when i was placing picture was that if disturb the size of unwrap image from 512 to something else while placing the picture....you want be able to wrap that image back on cube....

next one is while saving .tga file if you save it as standard 512 resolution u cand add image of bigger resolution like of 800 or 1600...because it disturbs the resolution of unwrap image...and after that we cant wrap it around cube again....so u need to use the image of same resolution what you have selected earlier....

now i have made one this is the unwrap image....sorry i didn't had better picture of size 512

and this is actual cube........

i was supposed to make video of this but i couldnt make it because one problem that is next post so for now this assignment is done...and i am starting with second one...

Nitin Ayer

short cuts

this is few short cuts what we came to know from satish...and what i learnt in just last few days...

-> Ctrl+Alt+Shift+M - to see the folds in the model if folds are there in model then it disables the baking process in fluid simulation

->H key - to hide the selected object or selected vertices or phases or edges.

->Alt+H - to unhide the object

-> From INLIST AND MATERIALS we can give name to the selcted group of vertices.

-> Shift+G - To select the vertices in the same plan or surface or of same area.

-> Ctrl and + key - if there is a ring of vertices is selected than if we want to select the adjacent ring for this use CTRL and + key is very useful instead of selecting individual vertices

-> Ctrl and - key - same as previous one but this time to it used to deselct adjacent set of vertices.

-> Alt + B - it enables axis like we have in border select tool (B key) and use of this short cut is also in the similler way...just select the part of the object and press Enter and the selcted part will hide and we can see the unside part of the object basically this shortcut is sueful to see the cross section of the object.

-> Shift +B - To select the part of object which we want Render without actually rendering the entire object...

-> Propotional falloff tool whish used drag a single point from mesh with influence of adjacent vertices to use this toll first turn on propotional edit button from editing panel and than we can see a new button of falloff. There are many fall of available like smooth , sphere, root ,sharp, sphere Falloff . after turning on Propotional edit button , select any of Falloff and selct one vertex and pree Bkey twice and drag the mouse...after adjusting the falloff press left mouse button or Enter key. In this if we want to increase or decrease circle of influence than scroll middle mouse button.


-> L key - It used to select the phases and it can be used in vertex or in edge mode also... just take your mouse pointer on the phase and press L key the phaces which are attached to current mesh all will get selected.

->Y key - When a set vertises is selected and we want separate that part of object from the actual mesh for this press Y key.

-> In MESH TOOLS there is button for REMOVE DOUBLE is given which we using with W key and beside that button there are two more panel are given as THRESHHOLD and LIMIT in this by changing the value of THRESHHOLD and LIMIT we can increase the range of REMOVE DOUBLE TOOL.

-> To draw the phase normal tool is availble in MESH TOOLS AND MORE .Draw normal after enabling this tool all the phase normal will be visible...and above this tool one panel is given Nsize to increase or decrease size of normal...and below Draw normal button Draw vnormal button is there to draw the VERTEX NORMAL.


Nitin Ayer

Blender Presentation

For the Presentation we have decided Wednesday 24th september 5:30 pm as this time is suitable to most of us. If this time is not suitable ,than kindly inform us so we can look for another time slot.
Thanks
Nitin Ayer

Spiral pipes

so finally done with spiral pipes all credit goes to bhairav....it was his idea and he actually made it but i made it again with thickness....for this take a normal cylinder and circle then extrude the circle along the cylinder for this use rotation and grab method but after completing one round just copy and joint.....

nitin

While editing...

while editing some pipes in model made by bhairav unknowingly i deleted one little surface but after doing some editing in the model i resaved that file than i looked once i found that i deleted one surface so now i have to make it again for that i tried shift+F method but i didnt get the surface way i wanted than i did it with exrude and grab method than coinciding each vertex and than remove by pressing W and REMOVE DOUBLES method but it is very much time consuming so people if u find some other and better way than please let me know...

and to make anything spherical or a set of vertices forming a loop into circle shape there is tool called TO SPHERE is available for that we need to select the loop of vertices after that make the CURSOR->SELECTION by doing this 3d cursor will come at the center of the selected loop of vertices and after that press TO SPHERE tool in MESH TOOLS...it will form a circular shape and the 3d cursor will act as a center for that circle..

Nitin

To Remove Unwanted Edges

on first look it appears there is some edge is there than after we thought its because of some bug in blender...than we left this problem but its not a bug in blender its actually something else which even i dont know but we can remove it by increasing subsurf level or there is another method which i got from video tutorial thanks karan for that..so for that select the object in edit mode than press Ctrl+N and than say OK for RECALCULATE NORMAL OUTSIDE after doing this those unwanted edges will disappear take a look at this pictures now


Nitin