Mobile Game Development Update

It has been almost a month since we announced our first internal mobile project called “Eat Sheep“. Though there is still a bit of work left on the game, I wanted to take this time to share some of the recent updates on production! So let me stop talking and get to the goods.

Monster Animations are in full swing!

Life is being created in this monsters by the talented Beorn Leonard. We had such a good time working with Beorn on his Animation Series, that we asked him to hang out with us a bit longer. Beorn is adding some of his skill set he picked up from working on Sintel and Happy Feet 2 into these hug-able little monsters. Check out the very “Work in progress” Animations below of the Melvin Monster and Sheep animations.

Art updates:

Creating assets for this game has been a bit of fun and a challenge. One thing we constantly have to keep reminding ourselves is the “players view”. Meaning model to the camera. You can see some of these assets could use a few more polys from the views we are presenting,  keep in mind the player is going to viewing them from an 85 degree downward angle. Most assets will render smaller then quarter on screen.

Engineering:

Teeth have been magnetized, sheep have been polarized and Melvin’s ready to eat! In addition to setting the little monster up with a new pair of chompers, the engineering team has worked on setting up some more intuitive behind-the-scenes controls and making database connections. They’ve also made sure that the monsters’ memories now last longer than a single session, and are beginning work on having monsters from all over the world share their wool income figures so they can do some number crunching. The developers also continued their seemingly never ending seach-and-destroy mission on bugs, diligently squashing them wherever they go.

Concept/Art

The art side has been focusing less on conception and more on user interface, menus, and buttons. Right now we are working toward playing a full run-through so on the art side I’m working on the main screen, level select screen, win/loss screen, and the actual in-game hud.
Here are the drafts so far of the main screen and level select screen below ↓

…But somehow another monster sneaked his way into the Eat Sheep World.

Meet Phillip.

He comes with a face full of cute and a full tutorial on creating him using Melvin’s base as a foundation. View the tutorial.

Newsletter

To stay up to date with the latest Eat Sheep updates Like us on the Eat Sheep Facebook page or subscribe to the Newsletter. Thank you again for the support!

In this video for 3ds max we’ll finalize the Tire in a puddle scene. We’ll start working in Realflow to find the best compromise between amount of particles and simulation time. Then we’ll start preparing a basic lighting and rendering setup for the scene set in 3ds max, and we’ll assign some materials to the tire, and the ground using the Arch&Design for Mental ray. Then we’ll be back in Realflow again to start working at the mesh exporting. We’ll add a particle mesh and we’ll tune the parameters as metaball size and the filtering options. When everything will be ready we’ll launch final simulation and we’ll create the mesh to be imported in 3ds max as .BIN file sequence using the Next Limits plugins. To render the water we’ll use a basic water preset in the Arch&Design and we’ll change a little bit refraction/reflection and diffuse color.

In this tip video for 3ds max, we’ll see how to use the FumeFX Burn WSM (World-space modifier), to create vertex color map controlling various data coming from FumeFX, using this modifier we can store on a vertex color map information to know how the fire or smoke will change temperature of a mesh or where fire and smoke will “touch” its surface, giving us the possibility to create some realistic “burning” or “heat” effect over its material  using these masks.

In this Citizen video for 3ds max, we’ll continue talking about fluid simulation in Realflow. We’ll start to take a deeper look at Hybrido engine, so we’ll see how to use the domain grid and how to work with its parameters, then we’ll see in depth the emitter topic and see how to optimize grid for simulation. At the end we’ll start to introduce secondary emission feature in Hybrido that give us the possibility to simulate spray and foam as a normal Realflow particle emitter, we’ll see how to add it to the domain, and how to start working with its parameters.

In this video for 3ds max we’ll take a look at how we can create sparks using particle system. We’ll prepare a really basic scene with some animated meshes simulating a tool colliding with an other object. During collision we’ll create sparks created by dragging. To create the sparks we’ll use PFlow working with simple forces as gravity, and detecting collision using the universal deflector and/or Krakatoa collision event. We’ll see how to tweak dynamic behaviour to obtain a good result in a fast way. At the end we’ll see a simple approach to shading and rendering.

In this tip video for 3ds max, we’ll talk a little bit about constraint in MassFX. It will be just a fast introduction to see that we have the possibility to constraint the movement of a rigid body object to an other one. We’ll see how to add a constraint in a dynamic simulation and we’ll talk about the sliding parameters over the 3 axys.

In this Citizen video for 3ds max, we’ll move forwad talking about Realwave again. We’ll take a deeper look at the crest particles emitter, to see how to use it to create crest foam and spray, how to work with it and with forces as gravity and wind. We’ll add more daemons to control particle life and visibility, and we’ll have a look at every single parameter to understand how to use it. At the end of the video we’ll start introducing next step in Realflow, preparing a simple minimal scene with Hybrido tools.

In this video for 3ds max we’ll see how we can create a puddle on the road simulating water dynamic with Realflow. We’ll prepare a scene with a ground mesh, the puddle mesh and an animated tire. Then we’ll export everything in SD file format to Realflow.  In the Next Limit software we’ll use the Fill Object emitter to fill the puddle mesh of water, then we’ll add gravity force and start tweaking various water parameter to find a good basic setup to evaluate the interaction between water and the tire. We’ll see how to set parameter to start obtaining a good quality result and how to optimize simulation time. In part 2 we’ll see how to set final quality simulation, how to export hires mesh and render it in 3ds max.

In this tip video for 3ds max, we’ll take a look at Collision Map node in Thinking Particles. It gives the possibility to check collision between objects inside the scene and record an animated texture with white area where is a collision. It can be applied to every kind of dynamic simulation done with MassFX, RayFire, Thinking Particles etc etc. We’ll see how to setup it using a simple MassFX simulation and then how to drive a PFlow particle emission with it.

In this Citizen video for 3ds max, this time we’ll start to talk about spray effects due to object collision with the water plane. To start working on it, we’ll prepare a really simple setup with Particle Flow using some particles linked to the falling body that will collide with the FR Ocean. When the collision event will happen, we’ll spawn the particles and using Drag, Wind and Gravity forces we’ll try to simulate the water spray. Our setup will work fine in viewport but at the end of the video we’ll try to render it to understand how it will works in rendering using Krakatoa trying to figure how we have to tweak and improve it.