Clothing deformation

So I'm continuing working on completely random and meaningless stuff and I started thinking about the best way to animate clothing, and then started implementing what might just be the worst way possible.
I wanted to make a system where the clothes could have their own rig and their own animation, but could easily be linked to a chacter and follow his movements. Then I got a crazy idea that instead of just linking the rigs, I would skin the clothes dynamicly to a character; that way it would actually be possible to make a character visually undress or get dressed.

So I skinned the clothes to a simple rig, then I created a skinweight map for the character, and used that to find out what joint in the players rig to connect each vertex to based on their current position.
Getting this to work on the pants went well enough but it turned out that taking of a shirt is a lot more complicated. Obviously he had to raise his arms before I could animate the shirt, but the shirts animation had to be relative to the bind pose. The problem then was that if I raised the shoulders in the bindpose, somehow the animations got screwed and the shoulders looked slightly off when in their normal position. I tried a lot of different ways to transform betwen the different bindposes, but nothing really worked. In the end I used a very ugly compromise so the shirt uses the matrices based off the normal bindpose whenever it's in it's default position, but as soon as a it starts moving it uses the other bindpose.

I'd probably be able to make it look a bit better if the exporter supported scaling joints or if I make a more advanced rig for the shirt. Anyway heres the result. The clothing items has a simple animation when he takes them off; basicly just moving up or down and squeezing a bit, they are then dynamicly skinned to the character every frame (all in the vertex shader).



While it does look quite horrible and half broken; I still can't help feeling that it looks absolutly awesome somehow. And of course, with a system to animate people taking their clothes off, I'm one step closer to achieving my lifelong dream of creating the ultimate porno game...

Working like crazy on useless stuff

Life away from work agrees with me almost a bit too well. I've become completely engrossed in what I'm doing, to the point where I forget to eat and hardly leave the apartment; though I have now replenished my cookie-supply so food won't be a problem anymore.

I kind of feel that I ought to be working on some epic project, or at least a small one that I'll be able to show someday, but instead I keep doing a lot of completly random and useless things. I've been working mostly in maya lately; doing some animation, tried making a simple facial rig and modeled some random stuff. It's nothing that's really worth showing or that will be usefull in any real project, but it's relaxing yet fulfilling, which is exactly what I need right now.

It's been pretty much decided that I'll be returning to work in january now, so we'll have to see if I run out of random ideas before then and start working on something more substantial, or if I'll just relax and eat ice cream.

Therapeutic Coding

After a long period of rapidly increasing bitterness I have decided to take a time out from M&D. It feels weird to leave the other guys in the middle of everything but I need to focus on combating my bitterness. I have devised a strict plan comprised of lots of icecream, nougat and coding.

Yesterday I felt a sudden urge to play around with some rendering code again, so I booted up my old shooter project and started tinkering on some water effects. After a lot of experimentation and eventually some googling I think it's starting to look somewhat decent. It has reflections, refractions, waves and some dynamic ripples when you're moving around in it. The code is of course ugly as sin, but what the hell; I'm off from work now.



Now I just need to figure out a game concept with a pool of water (the water ripple system only works on a small, limited area right now).

to blog or not to blog

Ok so the blog has been really dead for I while now and I'm not sure whether I should just let it stay that way or if I should bother trying to revive it. Originally the idea was to post stuff about my coding and game development, but soon after I started the blog, the ball started rolling with Might and Delight and I lost all motivation to keep working on my own projects. So basicly I just posted random stuff for a while.

Then of course I started working full time with Might and Delight, which I can't really talk about all that much. All the official news about M&D can be read on the company blog (which no one updates either), and I don't really want to write about anything related to the company behind the other guys backs. However, as most of my worries and hopes are centered around the company right now I don't really have a lot of other things to share either, so this blog is feeling a bit redundant.

Of course I can always keep posting stuff about Doctor Who and various video games (Kirby's Epic Yarn looks amazing by the way )
Anyway... I'll see if I'll bother to keep up the posting in the future

Running a company is exhausting

It's been about a week since we announces the existence of Might and Delight and the announcement has been a really big success. We've recieved a lot of attention on the internet and gotten a lot of positive emails from old BCR-fans, from the press and even from a few publishers. Overall things are moving along a lot faster than I had anticipated. But it's also really stressful, even though we haven't really started working a whole lot yet. We're mainly answering emails and doing some planning so far, and I'm hardly working full time, but I get increadibly stressed whenever I talk business.
Next week I'm going to Malmö for the Nordic Game conference and some pretty important meetings; I'm already extemely nervous and I think it will only get worse the closer we get to the conference.

Might and Delight

So now it's official. I'm now a co-founder and part owner of Might and Delight AB and our first press release is starting to make it's way through the internet. I'll refrain from writing any personal thoughs about it just now but here's our brand new website that went online today: MightAndDelight.com

Doctor Who

Maybe I ought to explain a bit about my previous post and my Doctor Who fandom as the show isn't really that well known around here or in most of the world. Basicly it's a british science fiction series that has been on the air since the 60s. I didn't really know much about it either until a few years ago when I decided to look it up after seeing some references where I felt my geek knowledge was a bit limited. Even though it's a bit corny and low budget and mainly aimed at kids I instantly got hooked when I started watching; it has a lot of british charm that's just irresistable to an anglophile like myself.

The story follows an alien time/space traveler called The Doctor, who picks up random british people (mainly pretty girls) and travels the universe/time vortex with them in his space ship/time machine called the Tardis which looks like a phone booth from the 60s. Also in order to keep the show going for decades, the doctor's race has the ability "regenerate" (change actor) which is what happened in the new season when the tenth doctor, David Tennant, got replaced with Matt Smith (who I must say fills the shoes very well).

I'm really looking forward to the rest of the new series. I still have about 15 seasons of the original series to work my way through though, but it feels a bit ancient at times.