Download AnimTexBuilder.ms

Towards the tail end of Vicarious Visions‘ work on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 for the 360 and PS3, I contacted my old boss Steve Derrick and asked if he could use me for anything. The timing was right – they were a bit short on folks to do FX production. Since I had some experience with the tools and processes at VV, Steve asked me to come on and build some cutscene FX.

This was a blitzkrieg of a job. Entering crunch from the word go, it was 3 weeks to get set up, learn the new system, and produce a series of effects. For the most part, the scenes were entirely set up and just waiting for particles and corresponding effects, like lighting, screen flash, and physics chunks. I was given some solid direction by Brent Gibson and I had creative freedom in deciding how to execute the work which kept my motivation level sky high.

As with any large project, there’s significant overhead in integration. Checkins were only allowed after a team member had completely validated their work locally. This means lots of syncing, lots of building, and lots of waiting. At that stage of the project though, you do not want to be the sucker that breaks the build. Luckily I escaped the ire of Aaron, the lead engineer, and my checkins all cleared.

Overall, I would’ve been more productive had I been local for the duration of the contract, but with my wife ready to go into labor at any moment, I wasn’t able to go on site except for a day to ramp up and pick up a devkit. Still, what I was able to provide even under those circumstances was a win for everyone and I enjoyed the work immensely – even carrying a rekindled love of particle explosions into the creation of Detonator after my son was born.

Detonator was created originally for the Unity Summer of Code 2009 – Major releases are hosted on the Unity website.

Download Detonator 1.02

Instead of replicating the documentation here, which will change over time, here’s the webplayer that shows what Detonator can do.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Bug Reports

If you find bugs in the package please report them. Either drop a comment in here or even better, head over to the Assembla page and create a ticket.

Open Source – Help improve Detonator!

Visit the project at Assembla.com

The Detonator project is written in C# and is hosted with Subversion on Assembla.com. There’s integrated bug reporting and wiki for documentation.  Please join up for free and help expand the project! Some ideas for contributions:

• Texture packs
• iPhone version, probably a wizard, that snapshots a Detonator explosion to an animated texture
• Prefabs
• Additional DetonatorComponents.
  • Camera Shake
  • Decals/Blast Marks
  • Screen Flash
  • Explosion Chaining

Right now only the C# source is hosted, but if you’d like to contribute art or prefabs, we can set up a section for .unitypackage downloads. And of course when Unity 2.6 is released, it will have SVN support that (hopefully) will make this type of hosting even more productive.

Once we started doing Interiors with the system, it became apparent that folks needed a better way to make an OBB and AABB for selected geometry, so I created a tool in Maxscript that let them easily do so. I can’t share the code, but below is a video that I made while I was working there to introduce the PaintOBB tool to the artists on the team.

The idea was to let the artist invoke the tool, then paint over faces on the selected model. The tool would then generate a first pass bounding box based on the selection. Then the user would move their mouse along the desired axis, and the box would shrink wrap to fit around the geometry, creating the most efficient OBB with minimal work.

My work on the weapons system in Syphon Filter: Omega Strain was pretty broad. I headed up weapons modeling, weapon integration with the character hardpoint system, weapon FX, and some scope artwork. There were around 60 different gun models and I got into a nice groove with modeling production, doing about 3 a day. They were built in 3DSMax and would average around 300 triangles. Our texture budget on SFOS was amazingly tight, since it was a 4 player online-coop game where each character could have a completely different outfit and weapons. So I opted for many guns to go with what at the time was a novel texturing approach used by Metal Gear Solid where the highlights and shadows and specular reflections were painted in and high frequency details were often left to geometry. To up the vertex count to support this detail, it was vital to have efficient tristripping, so I’d just shoot a planar projection through the side of pieces of the gun to keep all the verts continuous.

Here’s a short clip showing one of my favorites to model, the FN-P90 – Watch Video

The weapons were also front and center quite often because of the hardpoint system. When characters stowed their guns, they’d go to one of four places on the skeleton – back, thigh right, thigh left, or chest. Since it is a third person game, the back hardpoint would really shove the gun right in the player’s face, so detail was important to maintain. Still, the texture resolution in multiplayer mode was set to half that of single player, and things would tend to get blurry. Luckily the geometry did much of the work, and considering that the models were all lit by the world, this didn’t end up being that bad.

Weapon FX had a bunch of different components. The gun flare was an actual model that was turned on and off, and was positioned via the gun’s skeleton. Yes, guns in this game had skeletons! Initially, the game design was more of an online RPG and had called for a crazy weapon customization system where players could purchase scopes, silencers, and the like. Most of these elements were dropped in the final design, but the gun skeleton was still used for a few things:

• A bone to align the character’s trigger hand to dynamically
• A bone where the support hand would go
• Positioning of the gun flare
• A bone for FX to emit from

As far as the FX, smoke particles were created and would shoot out of the tip of the gun. A light was also turned on with each shot. Turns out that the system also supported spawning a particle emitter on the bullet as well. And another one when it impacted! This was crazy, the amount of calculation that was being done. Bullet hits were tracked per bone, with ellipsoids around each one. You could shoot a guy in the arm, leg, head, and it would all be tracked. The character programmer even turned the vertex color red wherever a guy was hit. You know, cause that’s what blood looks like.

So, with that in mind, I got busy with the system late one night and hacked up a flamethrower, and it was awesome. It still is one of the only flamethrowers in-game that I’ve seen that properly splash fire on a surface that it hits. I’d get a video for it but the designers put it in the very last level of the game, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to play SFOS all the way to the end now. Besides, I guess they just turned off the online servers recently.

Overall, this project had huge problems and the reviews were pretty harsh – yet they were fair. The game lost its way and didn’t excel in any area at all, most importantly in its core mechanic of running around and shooting. The team learned a lot from these failures and put those lessons to use in future titles.