Crabs and Penguins Launches {

Finally the day has come! "Crabs and Penguins", a game I worked on this last year for Coca Cola, is finally available on the AppStore for iPad and iPhone. It will be releasing for Android, PC and Mac standalone soon. We also made a cinematic commercial of the story behind the game. Be sure to check it out at the website link below!

As lead programmer at Ember Lab, I was tasked with the game programming for the main 6 levels. This includes the player controls, player movement, collectibles and power-ups, graphics and shaders, level block-ins, and game-play testing. The primary development tools were Unity3D game engine with C# programming language. I also used some CG and ShaderLab for shader programming, as seen in my Water Shader post.

Screenshot of "Crabs and Penguins"

The game is free so if you have an iOS device, go download it and tell me what you think!

Here's the link to the Download, the Website, and the Facebook Page.

If you have any feedback, comments, or questions on how anything was done for the game, please comment below! I'd love to do a tutorial or explanation on how we made this game. Try to be specific so I can give you a detailed answer.

"Leave a crab. Return a hero."

-K

Soft Feet {

I'm currently working on adding details to a quadruped rig from my senior thesis film "Gauntlet". I didn't get as much time as I wanted rigging him, so I decided I'd enhance a few parts. One part that bothered me about this character was his feet's interaction with the ground. So I set out to fix it by adding deformation to the foot to simulate the pads squishing on the ground. The animator can get the foot relatively realistic and with minimal clipping, but having a touch of deformation sells the impact.

The simple approach would have been to just create some NURB deformers and give the animator control of the squash and stretch of the foot. However this would add even more work to the poor animator who is tasked with a walk cycle of a quadruped. So I decided an automated/simulated solution was ideal in this scenario.

Now I needed to avoid the messiness and expense of making the entire body into an nCloth. The body mesh is quite high poly, and I only wanted to simulate the feet. Thus, I decided to only simulate the pads of the foot and use those as influences on the main mesh. The pads are extremely low poly, so they simulate almost real-time. And they also more correctly describe the foot of a lion (my inspiration for the feet). The one trick here is to make sure you check on "Use Components" in the skinCluster of the main mesh being influenced. This means it will use the components of the influence object and not just its transform.

Here is a quick video showing the deformation effect:




And here's one on a more bumpy surface (it is simulated after all):


So, to replicate, follow these steps:

Water Shader {

Here's a quick demo of a mobile water shader I wrote for an Ipad game (I'll post it when it is released). I used Unity3D with ShaderLab and CG for the shader writing and C# for the scripts. I will try to package it and upload it to the Unity Asset Store soon so others can use it.


Features:

• Efficient shader optimized for mobile devices
• Realtime refraction of anything on opposite side of water plane
• Sin blend between 2 normal maps for smooth normal animation
• UV Panning normal maps
• Reflection Cubemap
• Renders in Opaque queue with no expensive transparency cost
• Separate settings for fog over and under water
• Separate settings for far clip planes over and under water (quality)
• Controls for Transparency, RefractionFactor, ReflectionFactor, RenderTextureSize, Tiling, FogSettings, etc

Here's some more screenshots and a video: (Sorry for bad quality)

And here's the relevent vertex and surface shaders (in CG):

So It Begins {

Today the blog begins! I will be posting cool tricks and interesting solutions on both Programming and Rigging topics as I learn them. I hope to use this blog as an informative and helpful resource to others in my field, and as a sample of my work.

I also reserve the right to stray a little from Rigging and Programming to show some of my work in Modelling, Rendering, Simulation and FX, and other 3D Art.

So please check back often! Hope you enjoy it!

-K