The Nightmare Before Christmas
Return of The Boogie Man
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The Concept: 2
It has been years since “Jack - The Skeleton King”, defeated “The Boogie Man” as part of his Christmas adventure. But there is no rest for the wicked and “The Boogie Man” is back, this time in an attempt to get revenge over Jack and “The Town of Holloween”. “The Boogie Man” has banished all the residents of “The Town of Halloween”, and locked Jack into a tomb. Jack’s powers relies on the greatness of his kingdom, so therefore Jack needs to get them back, in time to prepare Halloween and restore everything to their natural order. The game takes Jack through tiers of environments, where order needs to be restored. Ghosts need to be sat free, friends found, residents freed, pumpkins lighted up and alliances formed with the myths of the other seasons, taking Jack to Lands of joy and celebration. The opening level starts with Jack breaking out of his tomb, but he is to weak to escape the environment, and therefore he needs to take on quests of restoration, which will make him strong enough to control “The Hills of Halloween” and advance to next tier.
In order to escape “The Hills of Holloween” and regain his power, Jack needs to free the spirits of the cemetery and find Zero - Jacks faithful ghost dog who floats about freely and follows Jack wherever he goes.
The Tools: 3
For making the first level (or tier) we will use the Program “Unity”. The advantages of this program, is that we can model the terrain and use the “Asset Store” to accomplish us with pre-designed models, like tombs and graveyards. There will also be scripts for making the game controls and camera views. But as it is not everything we can get from the “Asset Store”, things will have to be modeled from scratch and imported into Unity. Objects like; the hill Jack needs to control, in order to escape, pumpkins, Zero - the ghost dog - and a variety of different game content. Jack him self is essential for the ‘feeling’ of the concept and we were in luck, that someone already made him, so he ‘just’ had to be animated in Unity. Photoshop is also being used for making texture and skins that can be imported into Unity and applied to materials. The gameplay will be made in “Playmaker”, as a part of Unity.
The Modeling: The following will take a tour through some of the models used for making the first tier of the game.
Jack Skeleton
3D modelling made by Bubles Studio
Like mentioned earlier, Jack is the core of the game. He will be the 3rd playable character and will have to be authentic in order for the project to succeed. To our luck, Jack was already modeled and made public on the web, so we could import him into Maya and assign texture to the model. He was then exported from Maya and into Unity, where the textures had to be re-assigned. But before that, he had his bonestructure made at mixamo.com. This could have been done in Maya, but Mixamo is more processed for a fast regging. From there he got a third-person-controller setting merged with the model (controls that we got earlier in the class). He now workes as a playable character.
The Maya process of Jack Skeleton (and Mixamo)
4 The Cloth for Jack
The skin for Jack
The untexturized model of Jack
bone-rigging of Jack
Pumpkins:
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Around “The Hills of Halloween” pumpkins can be found. They are one of the elements to turn the cemetery into a part of “The Town of Halloween” rather than just an ordinary cemetery. It is the idea that the pumpkins are going to be a quest for Jack to find and light up, but it is unsure if they are going to have that function in the release level. They are made in Maya from a modified sphere with a cylinder on top. The texture is made in Photoshop.
The Hill: The Hill is an iconic part of “The nightmare before Christmas” and even though it doesn’t get a lot of play- time in the movie, it is still remembered by a lot of fans, when they think back. The Hill is alive like a plant, and it’s going to be the key for Jack to escape the cemetery, as he can control it and form it into a bridge taking him to the next tier. The Hill is made out of a box (rectangular), morphed into the spiral known from the movie, then smoothen and rigged. It’ll have a bone structure as Jack needs to transform it at the end of the level, to escape the cemetery.
It turns out, that rigging a spiral (like this one) is a lot harder then rigging a humanoid, so the examples are not included in this report, as it took many tries before it came together.
Zero:
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He will appear in the first tier, where Jack will get a quest to find his loyal com- panion; Zero. Zero is Jack’s faithful ghost dog that floats about freely and follows Jack wherever he goes. Hisnose, which is in the shape of a jacko-lantern, also doubles as a bright light. Zero is going to be a companion of Jack, that will follow him through out the game, helping him solve the obstacles emerging. The modelling was made with a rectangular, which was morphed into the dog step by step. Later the collar, nose and eyes were added to make the complete model. As Zero is a ghost, it’ll need to hover when it follows Jack around. Just like the hill, the rigging is a lot more complex than a humanoid, but the hover effect was accomplished, by making the end of the “legs” and “tail, along with the ears, weave. This animation is very simple but it creates the illusion wanted for the beta project.
Lights, Meterials and Sounds: Lights:
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An important part of this game was the lighting. If you notice the sky, you’ll see that is an unnatural night at the cemetery. The Boogie Man is laughing down upon you from his place up in the moon and the pumpkins are glowing all around. The main obstacle is the snow, making everything lighter than normal. The way the lighting was made was simple. And indirect light source was placed in the scene and the intensity was turned down, as well as chanced in its color range.
Materials: The tier is set in a snowy cemetery. The snow was important as it referred to a scene in the motion picture. What that did was that it made the light settings a bit more complicating, as it supplied a background lighting making the tier brighter than intended. One of the ways we tricked this, was to apply a black fog in the tier. This helped making the horizontal more defused and creating an illusion that faded out the endless fields of whiteness. This was a decision founded in the scenography of the movie, as The nightmare before Christmas, is a poppet movie and therefor uses the black screens in the background, making a similar effect as the fog.
Sounds: The sounds chosen to the game are in two parts. There’s the theme music, made as a medley of all the melodies from the motion picture. This medley will play throughout the entire tier and contribute to the atmosphere of the game. The other part is a set of indication sounds, which will help the player notice that the game is advancing. An example of this is the click sound that accurse after releasing the souls from their tombs, indicating that the gate to the forest now is open. There are also a handful of sounds setting the mood for some animations, like the ghost escaping their tombs.
Codes: 8
A lot of codes have been used in the creation of this game. from the animation of jack, over the quest trickers in each mission, to the behaviour of Zero that follows you arround. Put although the codes are complex and very long, we haven’t been programing or scripting at first hand. Scrips has been supplied from Unity itself or from the asset store. From there it’s all mixed into Playmaker and attached to each other so they’ll give out the This is how the script is build desired behaviour. Playmakup. As one would notice, it's er even works as a drag-nlike javascript, making it a bit nerdy and complex to drop interface, so we rarely work with. see the codes behind.
Above we see have the codes are made in Playmaker. It’s a bit more visual minded. Probably a good idea when the users many of times could be designers more the programmers.
Post production and comments: 9
This project has been a beta over the concept “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. As it is a beta and an presentation for a game concept, it’ll have its flaws. Animations are rough as is the environment. In the future work with this project, a fine-tuning of the details, would be mandatory. The quest lines needs explanations and more assignment would be featured as well. The animation of jack is not ideal as it doesn’t really capture the movement of him, know from the motion picture. The whole project is gathered on a website featuring both the game and the report.
http://f13optional301.keaweb.dk/rotbm/
From game: The Boogie Man is laughing down opon Jack as he finds his way around the cemetery.
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The Nightmare Before Christmas return of the Boogie Man is a school project from KEA - Copenhagen and does not have any link to
either Disney nor Tim Burton
This project was made by:
Andreas DAm Cold Camilla Dominique Eriksen Christian Dyring Poulsen