New Job.. I hope I never leave.

I've been at  Kixeye  for about a month now..... and I love it. For starters I get to work with amazing people that have had years of experience in the industry. People like ex Blizzard, Pixar, Disney....etc. I never feel left out and it's such a weird feeling having people appreciate the little things that you do. At my old company I was promised pay... and it never came. On top of that I had to work late to crunch for a paycheck that I would haven ever receive. At Kixeye I really do appreciate the pay, but in all honesty this companies philosophy about creating games is game development at it's purist form. I don't feel corrupted, nor do I feel like I'm creating a copy of a game. I enjoy the product that I am producing, and I wish that all companies shared this passion.

I LOVE MY JOB!

Thing 2..

~this .. thing... I need to practice some more~

Getting back into drawing a monster a day...

~Say hello to Meh.~

Shading Midterm

Shading midterm :)

Day 3 (Surface Shaders)

Wohoo, really tired right now but I am committed to completing these 7 days.

Writing Surface Shaders

Surface shaders in Unity is a gcode generation approach that makes it much easier to write shaders using low level vertex/pixel shader programs. The code just generates all the repetitive code that it would have to be written by hand.  (can be written in CG/HLSL)

Here is how it works

1) Define a surface function that takes in any UVs or data you need as input and fills in output structure SurfaceOutput. SurfaceOutput basically describes properties of the surface. (can be written in CG/HLSL) The shaders compiler then figures out what inputs are needed, what outputs are filled, then generates actual vertex&pixel shaders, as well as rendering passes to handle forward and deferrend rendering.

Standard output structure of surface shaders is this:
struct SurfaceOutput
{

     half3 Albedo;

     half3 Albedo;

     half3 Emission;

     half Specular;

     half Gloss;

     half Alpha;

}

Surface shader compile directives should be placed in between
CGPROGRAM

and
ENDCG

For more information reference here Surface Shaders

ShaderLab Day(2) (Passes)

Day 2 learning all of this stuff, just as a recap of what I did the yesterday

I have learned about Properties and how they should be implemented.

Syntax

Properties

{

     Available parameters

     Float, Color, Vector, Range, 2D, Cube, and Rect

}

Subshaders are essentially used for rendering and it is required for the graphics card to read all of passes that make the shader what it is.

OKAY so new lesson today..

PASSES

The Pass block causes the geometry of an object to be rendered once.

Syntax:

• Pass
  {
       [Name and Tags] Reference: Name and PassTags
       [RenderSetup]
       [TextureSetup]
  }

This basic pass command contains an optional list of render setup commands, optionally followed by a list of textures to use

Name and Tags:A pass can define it's Name and arbitrary number of pass tags - name/value strings that communicate Pass intent to the rendering engine

Render Set up

A pass sets up various states of the graphics hardware, for example

Should alpha blending be turned on?

Should fog be used?

Here are the possible components that can be used:

• Material { Material Block }
  Defines a material to use in a vertex lighting pipeline. 
• Materials include:
• Diffuse Color
  Object's base color
• Ambient Color
  The ambient color component. This is the color the object has when it's hit by the ambient light set in the RenderSettings!
• Specular color
  The color of the object's specular highlight
• Shininess Number
  The sharpness of the highlight, between 0 and 1. At 0 you get a huge highlight that looks a lot like diffuse lighting, at 1 you get a tiny speck.
• Emission Color
  The color of the object when it is not hit by any light
• Examples can be found here  Materials
• Lighting ON | OFF
  Turn vertex lighting on or off. Reference: Materials
• Cull Back | Font | Off
  Set polygon culling mode.
• ZTest ( Less | Greater | LEqual | GEqual | Equal | NotEqual | Always)
  Set depth testing mode
• ZWrite ON | OFF
  Set depth writing mode.
• Fog { Fog Block}
  Set fog parameters.
• AlphaTest  ( Less | Greater | LEqual | GEqual | Equal | NotEqual | Always ) CutoffValue
  Turns on alpha testing.
• Blend SourceBlendMode DestBlendMode
  Sets alpha blending modes:
  SourceBlendMode
  DestBlendMode
• Color Color value
  Sets color to use if vertex lighting is turned off
• ColorMask RGB | A | 0 | any combination of R, G, B, A
  Set color writing mask, Writing ColorMask 0 turns off rendering to all color channels
• Offset OffsetFactor, Offset Units
  Set depth offset. Note that this command intentionally only accepts constrants
  (Not really sure what this does yet... )
• SeparateSpecular ON | OFF
  Turns separate specular color for vertex lighting on or off 
• ColorMaterial AmbiendAndDiffuse | Emission 

Texture Setup

After the render state setup, we want to specify a number of textures and their combining modes to apply using SetTexture commands:

SetTexture 
texture property {[combine options]}

The texture setup configures fixed function multitexturing pipeline, and is ignored if custom fragmend shaders are used. Reference: Custom Fragment Shaders

Details:
Per-pixel Lighting
The per-pixel lighting pipeline works by rendering objects in multiple passes. Unity renders the object once to get ambient and any vertex lights in. Then it renders each pixel lighting affecting object in a separate addictive pass. Reference: Rendering Pilepine


Per-vertex Lighting
Per-vertex lighting is the standard Direct3D/OpenGL lighting model that is computed for each vertex. Lighting On turns it on. Lighting is affected by Material ColorMaterial and SeparateSpecular commands.


There are other variations of passes that are similar to the Pass command but different.


UsePass
The UsePass command uses named passes from another shader.
Syntax
UsePass "Shader/Name"
This inserts all passes with a given name from a given shader. Shader/Name contains the name of the shader and the name of the pass, separated by a slash character


Some of the shaders could reuse existing passes from other shaders, reducing code duplication. For example, in most pixel lit shaders the ambient or vertex lighting passes are the same as in the corresponding VertexLit shaders. The UsePass command includes a given pass from another shader.
Example:
UsePass "Specular/BASE"
Name "MyPassName"

ShaderLab: Day 1 (Properties & SubShaders)

For the next 7 days I will be blogging about my ShaderLab findings,

PROPERTIES
Shaders can define a list of parameters to be set by the artists in the material inspector.

Syntax:there are a only few things I need to look out for when setting up properties:

• When setting up Properties you begin the section with:
  Properties
  {
         Property [Property]
  }
• Some of the properties that you can include are as follows:
• name = variable Name that is used in code
• display name = the name that is showed in the inspector
• name( "display name", Range (min, max)) = number)
• example: _WaveScale("Wave scale", Range(0.02, 0.15)) = 0.07
  // sliders default is 0.07
• name("display name", Color) = (number, number, number, number)
• example: _RefractionColor("Refraction Color", Color) = (0.34, 0.85, 0.92,1)
  // this is a color, where the last value is the alpha color
• name("display name", 2D) = "name"{ options }
• example: _Fresnel{"Fresnel (A)", 2D) = "" { }
• name("display name", Rect) = "name" {options}
• example: _ReflectiveRect( "Reflective Rectangle, Rect) = "" { }
• name("display name", Cube) = "name" {options}
• example: _CubeMap ("Cube Map", Cube) = "" { }
• name("display name", Float) = number
• example: _RippleFrequency( "Ripple Frequency", Float) = 2.0
  //2 is the default value
• name("display name", Vector) = (number, number, number, number)
• example: _InfluenceVector("Influence Vector", Vector) = (0.2,0.0,0.0,1.0)
• *Special Note: in the options field -> { options } here are the available options
• TexGen texgenmode -> Automatic texture coordinate generation mode
  for the texture. TexGen is ignored if custom vertex programs are used.
• LightmapMode -> Texture will be affected by pre-renderer lightmap parameters.
  That is, the texture to use can be not  in the material, but taken from the settings of the Renderer instead.

SUBSHADERS

Each shader in Unity consists of a list of subshaders. When Unity has to display a mesh it will find the shader to use and pick the first subshader that runs on the user's graphics card.

Syntax:

• SubShader
  {
       [Tags] [CommonState] Passdef [Passdef.. ]}
       //defines the subshader as optional tags, common state and a list of pass definitions
  }

A subshader defines a list of rendering passes and optionally setup any state that is common to all passes. Additionally, subshader specific Tags can be set up. All tags can be found here: TAGS. When Unity chooses which subshader to render with it renders the object once for each Pass defined. As each render of the object is an expensive operation. The shader must be defined in the least number of passes possible. Sometimes on some graphics hardware the needed effect can't be done in a single pass.

References:
Properties
Subshader
Subshader TAGS

On my journey to graduation I need to compete the following:

Create a Water Shader that utilizes Caustics, Fresnel, and Refraction
Create a Motion Blur environment
Create an all purpose shader
Finish a few rigs

I am almost there... :)
Here are a few references that will get me to my goals
Overall ShaderLab syntax
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/SL-Reference.html

ShaderLab: Pass
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/SL-Pass.html

ShaderLab: UsePass
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/SL-UsePass.html

ShaderLab: Grab Pass
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/SL-GrabPass.html

ShaderLab: Writing Surface Shaders
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/SL-SurfaceShaders.html

ShaderLab: Writing Vertex and Fragment Shaders
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/SL-ShaderPrograms.html

ShaderLab: Advanced ShaderLab Topics
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Components/SL-AdvancedTopics.html

Wish Me Luck :)

Now I can work on multiple computers with ease

http://synergy-foss.org/
This program allows you to share a keyboard and mouse on multiple computers. AWESOME!!

Don't have to pull overtime tonight!

Finally I get a night to myself, tonight is going to be the night where I play some Street Fighter X Tekken. Or Should I work on my demo reel... decisions decisions.

This is how I feel right now...

So.. Tired...

I am soo tired. And I thought last quarter was hard balancing 6 classes and a few small jobs. This quarter tops it off with my full time job + 4 classes + being a peer mentor. GRRR I don't know what to do, and it's week 2. I think I'll be fine. I just need to focus and relax a bit, so that is why even though it is going to be 10:43 I will be playing at least 1 game of League Of Legends.. SO ha beat that.

Btw before I forget, this is a useful link for getting a list of possible attributes that you can access at any time.
http://www.cgsutra.com/autodesk_maya_tutorials/mel/chapter_07/ch07_mel_attributes.php

AUTO RIG (REDESIGNED)

So I have spend most of my weekend thinking about the things that I should do for my portfolio and my auto rig came into mind.

The progress that I have made to it is essentiall

• Dolling it up with colors and buttons.
• I made it so that based on a naming convention you can add or remove components
• I also have it so that you can either use the location based system or have joints aready within the scene.
• Lastly i am working out the error that i had with my IK FK Matching

Hoping to get the arms and the legs done by the end of the week. :)

New TOOL

Currently working on some UNITY TOOLS!!

The toll will allow you to spawn objects on any surface and each color will be associated to a specific object. When you play the game in real time it will spawn the object based on a scattering algorithm. This will optimize the placement of secondary objects :).

WOHOO GO SIXITS!

Start My new Job Tomorrow

So I start my new job tomorrow and I am very excited about it. I can't wait to see what kind of people I work with and I am excited to see what new techniques I can learn. The only issue that I have to deal with is that tomorrow I am immediately thrown into crunch mode, which is not cool but that's okay. I now will know what "crunch time" means and what it exactly feels like. I know that I can make this deadline and I know that I can make it happen. I will try to be the best and most valuable person on the team so lets get a move on :).

Updated My Website

So right now my website is coming along nicely going to try to add a few things right now, what I worked on so far for my demo reel is an auto rig that works with whatever character you have. I eventually want it so that you can have wings and a tail attached to the character but that comes later :). Only 5 more weeks till I turn in my stuff for graduation and I'll be ready and set to go.

Oh and one more thing remember that job I got at sixits. Turns out that when I start on Monday I'll be crunching like crazy because they are trying to meet this deadline.. o well :)

http://nolane3d.weebly.com/about.html

GOT THE JOB

So I finally got the job at sixits :). I have heard a lot of stuff about sixits in regard to how much they pay and how much they push their workers, but in all honestly I cannot judge a company from what I hear. Just so happy right now :)

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sixits.com%2F&ei=uHFlT5vtL8awiQLttKyiDw&usg=AFQjCNGhoj-ypnQceKKM52h96eU_WcnT_Q

Maya api..

I hate Maya Api... The set up is ridiculous. I'm still in search of a really good tutorial but no luck, everything tutorial I find is either using the wizard (which is broken apparently) or manual set up which is also not complete. I need to find a good tutorial SOON! I wanna do some portfolio stuff in it.

But as far as my portfolio is concerned I have some great tools lined up.

One is a playblast tool. I found a video of this guy creating a playblast tool and I thought that I could make a better one, and I really like his approach to it so I will try to make a better one.

The second one is a Riggomatic machine that will allow the user to create pieces of a rig and combine the rig together like puzzle pieces. This is ideal for bipeds, quadrupeds and other things.

The last piece I can do is a few shades that will be done in renderman and a few shaders that will be done in 3ds max as well as my own raytracer. This will be fun ;O.

Graduation ... Now What?

So I'm here trying to figure out what I really want to do in the industry. I want to be a technical artist, but because of the structure at the school that I am currently attending I have become a strong game play programmer.

The Pro's of becoming a Technical Artist are....

• You get to work with lots of people and is not confined to one project
• You architect code that hasn't been done before
• Creativity is a possibility
• You learn the way tools are created and you learn to understand the flaws of most of the tools that you used in your education.

The Pro's of becoming a Gameplay Programmer are....

• I have been doing it for a while
• I get to learn more about Artificial Intelligence
• I get to work with some hardcore programmers that I know are probably better than me
• I also get to develop my programming skills as a whole..

I am still weighing out the pro's of each but for now I am leaning towards being a technical artist... 7 weeks and counting.. Pray for me :)