STAGE PROCESS

 

UPDATES

Update, summary and decisions made

The difficulty of the pipeline comes from the randomness of the Lithtech 3.1. Some of the errors are not repeatable, which gives us a hard time to track and solve it. For a while, we are convinced that moving the positions of puppets that have skeleton assigned in MAX will cause huge problem to its movement in Lithtech. And yet at the end, this constrain seems to disappear mysteriously. Things get more complicated when Max and Maya come into the picture.

The current pipeline is that modelers create the models in Maya and then convert everything to Max, then assign skeletons to them before the models get passed to Lithtech. The reason why so many software packages are involved is that Maya is powerful in modeling, but Lithtech 3.1 is too old for Maya 4.0 to find proper plug-ins that can export the Maya files into Lithtech. There are guesses that if we move back to a early version of Maya, it might work with Lithtech 3.1, but it can also give us unpredictable problems with the modeling, since none of us are familiar enough with Maya. Let alone that early version of it. So we decided to get help from MAX. This seemly complicated journey is actually quite robust; especially most of us are experienced with MAX already. Later, we managed to us the later version of the Lithtech plugin to Maya. But the different scales used by Max and Maya made it a headache to standardize all puppets into the same size. So we kept the MAYA-MAX-LITHTECH pipeline.

stage 1: not generic and subtle enough

stage 2: too many primitives and too boxy

 

Stage 3: columns are in the way and background are drawing too much attention

Stage 4: the curtains are too low and not enough room left for the puppet

Stage 5: final

Building a proper stage for all those puppets is another challenge for us. Hard work has been put to research the space, form and color of the overall design. But when the 2D concept art drawings were turned into a 3D model with puppets in it, other issues arose. Although the puppets should be the focus of the experience, the environment they are in helps to establish the context. When we put in some really simple boxy stages so that people wouldn’t be distracted, the puppets actually looked like standing in the middle of nowhere and it was hard to tell where the puppets were and how you were supposed to interact with them. But when we came to a graphically perfect theater, there were not enough room left for the puppets, both spatially and emotionally. This was a contradiction. To solve it, we compromised the two aspects. We pulled off the curtains and change the ratio of the arch. Although the stage might not contain the golden ratio any more, it establishes the theatrical environment we want while not taking too much attention to itself.

During the development of the puppet theater, we encountered another Lithtech problem, which was the lighting. In Lithtech, things are poor lit and flat-looking. Given the fact that kids are less picky on how physically realistic things look, we decided instead of spending hours doing trial-and-error in Lithtech, we just pained those shades into the model directly.

HANDOFF/WISH LIST

1. Upgrade to higher version of Lithtech so that you don’t need to deal with Maya and MAX at the same time.

2. Stick with one single version of Lithtech. Things might be completely opposite on different versions.

3. Put some idle animations such as blink to the puppets.

4. Sound detection, so that the puppet will move accordingly when they speak.