http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/ Recent content on Assembly Dev Notes Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Mon, 28 May 2018 12:00:00 +1200 http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg6-audio/ Mon, 28 May 2018 12:00:00 +1200 http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg6-audio/ We worked to limit audio layers, but with full narration, a sound effects layer, and an orchestral score performed by the NZSO, we still ended up with a lot of audio. The sound designers really worked hard to meet us on our constraints, working up a nice system of fading feature segments in and out of loopable ‘vamps’ that filled the gaps. We ended up with a pretty declarative API that let us write, in our scene sequencing modules, things like this: http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg5-character-animation/ Sun, 27 May 2018 12:00:00 +1200 http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg5-character-animation/ Before we could say whether Oat the Goat was even a feasible project, we had to figure out how to get skinned character animation into the browser. We’d previously explored a few approaches for doing this – .fbx via a Python conversion script to a three.js .json format, Collada/.dae files – but not found anything we were particularly happy with for serious use. glTF Shows Up Happily there’s a new kid on the block, glTF, with a public spec, designed pretty well for real-time use. http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg4-3d-scenes/ Sat, 26 May 2018 12:00:00 +1200 http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg4-3d-scenes/ With the brief for this project being for a very illustrative style (as you’d expect of a children’s storybook), we didn’t have to worry too much about 3D realism, or lighting and shadows. We’re using mostly unlit materials with nothing but a color texture applied to them; sometimes those textures are tinted down slightly dark, and in a couple of places we’re using Lambert materials (simple diffuse lighting evaluated per-vertex) to give us some subtle lighting. http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg3-division-of-labour/ Fri, 25 May 2018 12:00:00 +1200 http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg3-division-of-labour/ System architecture is always a risk factor when you haven’t worked on a certain kind of project, or at a certain scale before. We knew we needed scenes to be pretty well separated, loadable and unloadable, and we knew we’d need some kind of separation within scenes between the nitty-gritty of shader setup, animation declarations, update-render loops, and the higher-level logic of a scene – triggering animations in response to user interaction, fading between music tracks for different parts of the scene. http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg2-bilingual/ Thu, 24 May 2018 12:00:00 +1200 http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg2-bilingual/ Oat the Goat is fully bi-lingual, with a counterpart Te Reo Māori version Oti te Nanekoti. Both languages have unique voice-over, captions, UI, copy, and a few 3D assets (image textures). Handling this was largely straightforward – there’s a few hacks in some asset loaders to decide based on URL which assets are translated and which are universal, and there’s a big ol’ table of alternative voice-over timings to keep captioning in sync, but mostly it was just a case of making sure our layouts were flexible enough to handle both cases gracefully. http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg1-beginnings/ Wed, 23 May 2018 12:00:00 +1200 http://assemblyltd.com/devnotes/2018/05/otg1-beginnings/ Assembly’s latest project, Oat the Goat, has just gone live. It’s an animated kids’ story about dealing with bullying, built for New Zealand’s Ministry of Education, and it’s a pretty large-scale use of WebGL. It’s one of the largest web projects I’ve ever worked on, clocking in at around 12 minutes of narrative animation, spread through 11 scenes, with a voice-over narration track (in two different languages, synced to captions), a sound effects layer, and an orchestral score performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.