Doing audio was probably one of the most enjoyable game jams I have been to in terms of the work. I put in a lot of hours in, but since I used my ears as much as I used my eyes, I didn’t have that blurry, disoriented feel when I was strolling out at the end of the night.

I recently purchased Pro-Tools MP9 a couple of weeks and have been fervently learning it to use. The hours spent paid off pretty well as I composed audio sounds and music for a few games. I felt some of the ways I did things were inefficient, but didn’t want to spend more time figuring out more buttons. Mixing and mastering was an area that I wish I was more familiar with. Recording sounds with differnet output levels and messing with automation and signal processing can adversly affect the song when it get longer. Certain parts end up being quieter than you want, while other parts are abnormally loud or out of place. Turning the mix setting on the interferce could have helped to really hear all of the abnormalities with the song.

I will probably do audio again for at least one more time. I will make an effort to be significantly better and more prepared for the next one.

If you haven’t heard of the Global Gam Jam, it is an event that is held every year that takes a whole weekend where you get together with a bunch of people and make games!!  Groups are best if there is only 3-5 people, but sometimes you can work on multiple groups depending on your skill set.

Audio and music is generally need of help, so I helped out with three games this year. Hear are a few songs that I composed this weekend.

Note: If the music doesn’t have any sound when you are playing, try to adjust the volume on the player. It worked for me using Firefox.

Title/Theme -  Copperhead Jack and the Cave of Snakes

Level Music – Towel Fight of the Gods

Background Music – Ra: Eternal Fire

Here is the illustration that I did for the modeling. It took me about 20 hours to do. Most of the time was spent dealing with the character details and balancing the different aspects of what I think is in good character design.

One of the parts that gave me the most trouble was the scarf, which had a texture and feel that I really struggled with. The first few rounds of trying to paint it, I was taking a pointillism approach to simulate the fibers. The approach was making it too detailed, and gave too much attention to it. I later started creating custom brushes that took woven crocheted patterns. This created some of the feel that I was going after. I later emphasized the highlighs and shadows using more of the pointillism approach. I tried making the color stripes fairly soft along the edges to help it be consistent with the rest of the scarf.

I really liked the original example and how it shows the details of the arms. Showing the arms at different positions and angles is better than showing the classic “T” pose you see in other work.

Adding a painted concept art pose with the character sheet seemed to give the character more life, and helps give the modeler a feel for the personality and demeanour of  the character.

One thing I noticed near the end of doing this was the amount of digital painting functionality that doesn’t work in the 64-bit version of Photoshop CS5. The mixer brush and new brush engine photoshop has only works in the 32-bit version of it right now. Would have been good to know when I started. Oh well…

To make me feel better I spent some money buying a new character development book using Blender 2.5. I have never actually read a book on modeling and rigging a character before, so I am hoping it will give my next characters some much needed polish. I have only taken one 3D modeling class in college, so I am pretty excited to take my modeling skills to the next level.

As for witch training, I still have all of the code and I really liked the direction it was going. I might make a new witch character (a sexy one!) and start rebuilding it and refactoring the code.

Creating a whole game was really feeling overwhelming with all of the different aspects to it. There are so many skill sets you need to do a good job. I might just focus on the art and interactivity of everything for now. I will see what happens. Just have to take one day at a time.

By the way, if you get the Kindle version, it is easier to read if you make it display horizontally. The code examples are really hard to read if it is in vertical mode.

I have read through most of the other Unity books as well as going through most of the tutorials on the Unity website, so I have a decent understanding of what’s out there. After reading the whole book, here is my assessment.

Topics and Critique

I think it is best to break the book apart into sections, as each section seems to be written differently and it teaches concepts in a different way.

The main topics the book goes over are the following:

• implementing a 2D sprite character  in a 3d world
• framework for character  stats, inventory, and GUI system for RPG game
• importing a 3d character and configuring animation states
• Writing surface shaders and CG
• Going into depth with how a 3d character controller and camera works
• creating and implementing a rocket launcher
• creating basic AI
• destructible environments (using triggers and PhysX rigidbody controls)
• setting up a ragdoll
• Optimizing tools (Statistics and Profiler)
• high scores using local and web technologies
• Appendix (this is better than you think)

Certain topics were very engrossing like the 2D sprite character, RPG GUI system, writing shaders, and creating high scores on the web. Other parts such as the 3d character controller, ragdoll, importing a 3d asset, and the rocket launcher section were less interesting. I have seen a few rocket launcher things out there, so I was surprised a section like that was chosen for the book.

Some topics I haven’t seen before were the RPG GUI system and the sprite animation system. They are both pretty code heavy, but I thought they were particularly interesting. I haven’t seen many “sophisticated” GUI system examples or tutorials, so it was nice to see how the writer architected the code to make it readable and flexible with the different screens.

screenshot from GUI RPG system

The first chapter that goes over the 2D sprite framework was also pretty good – especially the engine that managed all of the different states of each animation.

As odd as it sounds, I thought the appendix was a great section at the end of the book. So good, that I thought that some of the content should have been used in the chapters — especially the shaders section. I usually think of appendixes being API references, but there was some good explanations about the more intricate parts with how Unity works. I imagine the writer put it at the end because he probably didn’t write some of the content. I still think the content is too valuable and informative to just stick it at the end in an appendix.

For the improvement areas, I wish the writer would have covered less topics and went into more detail. Some concepts were mentioned, but then just referenced the Unity website for more information. A little more information on CG scripting and  AI programming would have made my day. What was written about each section was pretty informative, so the sections still felt complete on there own .

Most people that are “advanced” probably know about the Unity website for the API reference, so it would have been a little more helpful to give book references to learn more about a given subject. The books probably wouldn’t have “Unity3D” in the title, but I am sure most “advanced’ users would understand that the concepts would carry over.

One of the things that is good to know going into this book is that some sections are VERY code heavy. With some of the other books that I have gone through, I usually write all of the code. I feel like it helps me understand some of the nuances of the concepts better. For this hotshots book, when I got about 40% done, it felt like it would be  better to use my time analyzing the finished code – so that is what I did. The book felt less cumbersome taking this approach.

Conclusion

For the price, I would recommend the book highly. I am sure you will have a different experience based off what you already know about Unity3d. If some of the topics he covers pique your interest, it is worth the money to grab a copy.  Speaking of topics, knowing what topics are covered in the book is essential to know if it will be a good fit for you. I don’t do 3d programming for my job, so there were plenty of concepts that were new to me. My criteria for a good book is based off how much I learn — and I think this book did a pretty good job.

Final Score:

Dang! I am excited.How did I not know about this earlier? How can a book like this just pop up out of nowhere?

I am tired of learning about how to use the terrain tool or create materials from beginner books. I don’t know what the HOTSHOT means in the title, but I guess it is like only bigshots can handle this book. Bring it on!!

Here are a couple of links to descriptions and one review so far on Amazon. You can do a search on it just as easily as me, but I am a proponent of being lazy with just making a link available.

Amazon Link  Pakt Link

I had to buy it of course. Read and worked through the first chapter today. Here are some points about my first impression of what to expect.

• Advanced – Goes right into the meat and potatoes without any explanation of basic concepts.
• Kindle version is hard to read the code and no bolding (a little more challenging to sift through code to see what changed).
• A few bugs in the code, but I kind of like it because it makes you think about it. When you have to fix something, you take more time to understand how the code works.
  
• Little to no fluff! I hate fluff and all of the superfluous chatter that some books have saying things in round-about ways. Great for marketing, bad for learning.

Just by clicking through the book (I have the Kindle), the book is looking very rich in good content. Can’t wait to read the rest.

Has anyone else read this book? I would love to hear what their feedback is on it. It seems to be pretty good so far.

In the first post, I covered getting the right gear, hardware, and software get up and running. This post will continue talking about audio driver issues, learning about the software, and diving into the fun world of sound fonts, banks, and other intersting ways to improve the sound quality of your compositions.

Hopefully this will help people thinking about getting started doing audio recording. I added a little sample I made with what little I know. Hopefully you can get up a running in no time!

Audio Driver issues

Something I don’t see much in posts about audio recording is the amount of driver bugs that happen when you use audio software. Sometimes it works, other times it turns off and you can’t get it back working. The audio recording software just seems to ignore the drivers and instruments sometimes.  This was the most frustrating part for me when I first started working with this new hardware. Some things that work for me to conquer these bugs are:

1. make sure your drivers are up to date
2. waking your computer up from sleep seems to really confuse the audio interface. Best to turn your computer off and restart it if it goes to sleep
3. When you start the computer, unplug the interface USB cord from the computer or it might not recognize it
4. After the computer is done starting up, insert the audio interface cord to the computer
5. start the audio editing software and cross your fingers

That seems to be the magic formula that has worked for me under Windows 7. Not sure if other people have those issues, but it seems like something a computer would get confused about.

Learn the software

The software is installed, but it won’t take long to see that you have no idea what you are doing. There are a thousand buttons and outside of hitting play, pause, and stop, most everything else is going to seem weird. What I did was grab a copy of the user manual for Cubase LE and put it on my Kindle. These manuals aren’t that exciting, so I would read a little, then try and apply that knowledge tinkering around with the software. After about 30-40 hours of going back and forth between reading and playing, you should be getting pretty familiar with the ins and outs of what the software can do. Different software has different featues, but I am sure most of them share the basic functionality. The last part of getting started is by the most difficult, but also the most fun.

Sound Banks and Sound Fonts

Unless you have a uber expensive synthesizer, a lot of the sounds probably won’t sound that convincing. Synthesizers have decent sounds that come with it, but if you try and record something and ask someone, they will probably tell you that it usually doesn’t sound that real.

Sound Banks and Sound Fonts to the rescue!!

Sound Banks are more of libraries that have tons of sound effects and one-off type of noises. Sound fonts are usually people playing instruments and mapping each note to a key on the synthesizer. Sound banks are more like sound effects, and sound fonts are more like extra instruments.

There are some AMAZING sounding sound banks and fonts out there. So much to the point that you really believe you are listening to a symphony or a rock concert. After all, real sounds have to be digitized anyway before they go on a CD, so it is really just techniques to reproduce that.

You can pay bookoo bucks buying these sounds, or there are some pretty good free alternatives if you don’t have much money for more professional tools.

It is important to find out how to install these sound banks and drivers. For Cubase, they have these “VST” insturuments where there is a GUI that is mapped to the sounds and processing effects you can do with each one. There is a specification for sound fonts like SFZ. Some of the sound fonts have DLL files that help the program create an interface and give it functionality. There are creators like this one ( http://audio.clockbeat.com/sfZed.html) or this ( http://carrieres.free.fr/sfz.htm ) that can help you create your own sound font.

As you can imagine with the internet, there are always FREE stuff out there for sound fonts. A few good resources to get started are the following:

http://sso.mattiaswestlund.net/ – Great compact symphonic library

http://vst-plugins.homemusician.net/ – has a bunch of VSTi plugins

Audio stuff gets pretty technical, so it is a good idea to learn more about things like oscillators, LFOs, Resonators, Reverb, and other audio tech speak. When learning about them, it is just as important to actually hear what they as it is to read about them.

There are a bunch of premium sound fonts and software to create crazy good sounds like

East/West

Vienna Symphony

Spectrasonic

M-Audio Prosession

There are are a bagillion of these things out there. To find out what professionals use, I picked up a clearance book at the now closed borders for a few bucks. Complete Guide to Game Audio. It is more of a business book about the audio industry, but it has a bunch of great interviews with professionals who explain how they set their studios up.

This is definitely the “kid in a candy store” part of the process.

Studying and Arranging

I read a book on music composition as well as reading through a book on arranging. One of the things that I am seeing more is how important it is to actually hear and try what they are talking about. You can read a book cover to cover, but still not really grasp what is going on. Knowing how to build up tension and actually creating a song is a very hands-on approach. Some things like timbre and the range of an instrument can really only be understood by actually grabbing an instrument or listening to it.

Here is a quick orchestral type of song I made in a few hours.

I don’t know if I would want to do this for a living, but it sure is fun as a hobby. Does anyone have any other tips on getting started? What about some Virtual instruments or sound font resources that you have really liked?

Beginnings

The first thing that you need is some type of instrument that could talk to the computer. I play the piano, so I thought getting a synthesizer would be the best fit for me. After reading more about them, that is actually a great instrument to use for recording. Here are the reasons:

• pluggable in to a computer via USB
• have a bunch of instruments for variety
• easy for computers to translate into digital format

So I bought a Roland Juno Di Synthesizer and started reading about all of the different buttons and knobs to know what it can do. It only takes a few hours hours of playing around and reading the manual to understand how it works.

It came with a USB output, so I plugged it into the computer and installed the drivers from the CD. It didn’t really explain what the drivers were for, so I just installed them thinking I was going to hear something come out of my computer speakers.

Wrong.

Nothing happened.

Audio Interfaces and Software

After reading from the manual, I found out that the USB input for the computer is the same thing as a MIDI input in terms of what gets transferred. All that gets transferred to the computer is information like what key was pressed and how I hard I pressed it. None of the instruments in the keyboard transferred to the computer. Just arbitrary numbers that have the potential to be mapped up later. Dang. More research.

To get the instruments on the keyboard to work right, I needed two things

1. Audio Interface
2. Audio Software

Audio interfaces are boxes that you plug instruments into and it can convert an analog signal to a digital signal. That translates to making my keyboard sounds be heard by the computer. Not only can it take my keyboard’s sound, but it can take an electric guitar, microphone, or a number of different input devices.

Lexicon Audio Interface (only $60!)

For the audio interface to work, it needs an audio program on your computer to process the information. No other programs seem to work that come bundled with Windows.

Some of the options for audio software are Audition, Sonar, Cubase, ProTools, and Garageband. Just do a search on audio recording software and a bunch of options will show up.

The first thing you will notice is that software is expensive. For just wanting to learn and figure things out, I was starting to go down the torrent path to see which one I liked best. Someone else must also see this as an issue for hobbyists, because many of the audio interfaces come with recording software. Not the full-blown version, but a pretty good version to learn some of the bells and whistles. Good enough for me!

I got the Lexicon Alpha. It is great because it has a few different hookups for instruments and also comes with a version of Cubase LE. The combo came in at a crazy $60, so I was a bit skeptical of the price and quality. Some audio interfaces are very expensive, but they seem to do a lot of the same things that you can do with the audio software. All it needs to really do is get the sound to a computer. Reviewers on sites said it worked good. Sold.

Hooking up!

With an audio interface, there are a few ways to hook up your instrument. The simplest way is to use a 1/4″ cable and go from the mono out of your keyboard to the audio interface mono in. I have two 1/4″ cables and use the stereo out to plug it in. My keyboard sounds seem like they were made for stereo out, because it sounds better. Either work though. I bought a nice set of monitor headphones (I bought mine for $40 from Tony off Craigslist). Monitor headphones are just nice headphones that reproduce the sound more accurately than ear buds or cheap headphones.

1/8" to 1/4" converter

The audio interface is really a sound card, so when you plug it in, it will override everything and take control of all of the sound. You will have to put your headphone jack into the audio interface to hear anything.

A lot of hook ups seem to need converters from 1/8″ to 1/4″ or vice versa.

Read the manual about what the knobs do. The strangest one is the monitor mix, which changes the volume balance of what comes from your instrument and what comes from the computer.

Once I got all of the drivers for the keyboard, audio interface, and audio software installed, ready to start recording.

Whew…that was a lot more work than I thought.

And Wait…there’s more!

Part 2 will continue on the quest of getting the audio interface to work and getting more familiar with the software. It is mostly written, but I feel lazy and probably won’t get it posted until later in the week. Gotta add some pictures.

Say you just did a line drawing of a scene with a nurse flying through a jungle. If you were to try and paint it, where would you begin? Would you block in the colors first, would you do a wash over the whole painting, a lighting study? What tools and settings would you use?

The amount of approaches to paint are pretty intimidating – especially in the digital world. As part of my learning process, I have begun to study illustrators and painters in a more scientific approach. Scientific meaning that it identifies processes in practical steps and progressions. There are no default formulas for  creating a great looking painting.

The post will talk about my studying behavior in trying to improve my painting skills.

Modeling behavior

From what I have read in many books across different disciplines and subjects, the formula for mastery in any given field is relatively the same.

Mental Modeling.

If you want to have the same results as someone, all you have to do is copy and understand their process. If you love the artist Craig Mullins and want to be able to paint similar to that, all you have to do is watch him paint and learn why he uses the tools he does. You won’t “become” him, but you will understand how to produce something that is similar to what you want.

The real key isn’t just to watch him paint, but understand why and how he is painting in that way. Here is a little example of a study I am still doing on an illustrator. Here is an example of how I study.

Video Study – Gonzalo

I took a video from the magazine “ImagineFX” and popped it in my PS3. Most of the videos from this magazine don’t have any audio, so it is usually best to watch it at 1.5x speed at the least. This issue has a reported 22 hours of video training. At a liquidation price from my closest Borders, this was a steal. This is the best magazine I have ever seen when it comes to developing and improving your art skills. The illustrator for the cover, Gonzalo, does an entire screen capture of his painting.

The main thing to do is break a painting process into chunks and make additional notes by each point if there is some special technique or information by it.

He seems to work in layers. One layer might be adding highlight to the whole picture. I watch the first few spots he will do the highlights. After that, he repeats the same technique over and over until he covers the whole painting. All of the repetition isn’t as interesting, so I usually will fast forward until it hits a point where he goes to his next step of the process. That seems to be the most efficient way to watch these videos in my opinion.

Here are the basic steps that I noticed while studying Gonzala’s workflow for this painting:

1. Make sure dimensions are right size (300 dpi and inches are correct)
2. Ink drawing on layer above ( have more line weight variance around face and eyes)
3. fill in the silhouette of character with base color and lock the transparency
4. draw only light values and fill them in  ( do research on Brunaille)
5. develop mid tones (use the fade tool to fade back lightness values)
6. Use smudge tool for blending (use the three prong brush)
7. select each area and do hue/saturation/brightness to change the hue of each area
8. Merge layers and do smudging of hair or other parts that you don’t want outlines showing
9. Experiment with different lighting with curves tool to create different moods

Other Notes:

• Use lasso tool for drawing areas that will be painted (quicker for doing fills)
• With fabrics, switch to quick mask tool to paint selection
• do white highlights last and don’t smudge them
• when doing fills of highlights, just fill in once (don’t worry about halo, smudge will take care of it later)

I haven’t gone through the other 2 hour painting session where he goes through the background, but you get the idea. Taking notes and trying to create something with his workflow really help understand the process at a deeper level.

An important note that with these steps, they are more specific to things that I picked up and general guidelines. The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know. If I was much better than I was, my notes might look different. The numbered process wouldn’t change too much since that is his progression of how he slowly renders each “layer” of detail.

Here is a little painting I did using his workflow. It definitely isn’t the most exciting and dynamic painting I have ever done. But you know what…I learned a lot. That is the most important thing when it comes to mastering a difficult skill.

Conclusion

Art is an extremely deep topic and there is no single “formula” for making something look good. It takes time, energy, and sweat to develop illustrative skills that put you at a professional level. A great way to do that is by modeling and studying accomplished artists and learning from them. It is impossible to not grow when you take this approach. Observing, taking notes, and applying new techniques is the fastest way to become your best.

Enter Calibre! (It’s free)

If you haven’t heard of Calibre before, it is a great tool for aggregating and managing e-books and other digital reading content. I was introduced to it a few months back by the CIO of my company. It has changed the way I manage and think about reading content online.

In Calibre, if you click the “Fetch News” button it will give you a list of feeds pre-stored that you can use. Do a search for “Google Feed Uber”.

There is another Google Feed aggegator that you might see, but don’t use that one! I haven’t had any luck with it and it doesn’t seem to work right whenever I use it.

When you select the uber feed out of the list, you can type in your google account credentials so it can log in and grab everything. Hit download and be AMAZED!

Sweetness!

I have done it a few times already, and it still gives me goosebumps when I hit “download now”!

If you have a lot of different blogs you follow, it takes a little while. Some blogs don’t work well with how it grabs it. For example, the Gamasutra blog has a teaser post when you first enter an article, so Calibre only will grab the teaser paragraph and not the whole post.

Boo!

But I forgive it. It does such a great job with everything else. There is probably some way to configure it to take oddities into account.

Has anyone found a way to grab feeds that have teaser posts in them? There has to be some way to let it know that the post is one level deeper within the feed item.

I call him Bang-Bang since he “bangs” things. I am thinking he will run like a gorilla and have long, strong swing. Maybe it could make the camera shake the closer he gets. He isn’t a “boss” type of bad guy — just a normal bad guy.

ohhh…another idea, when he punches you, you will go flying back. When you hit a building, particles will go everywhere like the building is damaged. That would be cool.

For the animations, I am thinking just an idle, walk, run, and a couple of punch animations. He is too heavy too jump and his feet are small anyway. I will probably be studying gorilla movements to try and mimic that. Maybe exaggerate it a little to make it more fun and comical.

Here is a few screenshots of the progressions.

Menacing indeed. I could have spent a little more time refining the detail, but I am not getting paid for it, so mehhh..

I should do one more small bad guy that you can kill a bunch of. That way the first enemy won’t make the game too intimidating at the start.

Hmmmm…what would be a good idea for a regular bad guy? He would have to be weak and make you feel like you are strong at the beginning of the game.