Super Mario 64 HD – Completed!

Due to requests from Nintendo, this project is no longer available. Head over to the Mario 64 HD page to read more. The original blog post is unaltered below. Below is a video of the mod being featured on cobanermani456‘s channel.

StartingArea1

Bob-ombs are my favourite Mario character, closely followed by the loyal Bob-omb Buddies

Given the amount of time this took to build, I’m going to do away with the usual preamble typically accompanying these posts (or is it too late already?). For the time being, I’m finished working on both the Super Character Controller as well as the demo for it, Mario 64’s Bob-Omb Battlefield. Since the Super Character Controller is (was?) the primary focus of this project, I’m planning to post a write-up and retrospective on it, including what could be done to improve it in the future. Both projects include a PDF fully documenting them. In addition to the using the Super Character Controller library (written by me, but adapted from code by fholm), Mario 64 HD also uses a couple other libraries from the community. All references to these (as well as sources for any art and sound assets I did not make myself) can be found on the downloads page, but since some people may never make the pilgrimage there from this post I figured it would be nice to include them here. Pixelplacement’s iTween was used to help animate the rolling metal balls as they path around the mountain. Since Unity doesn’t expose the InputManager to be modified at runtime (another one of it’s lovable quirks), a heavily modified version of cInput v1.4 was used. Past version 2 cInput is no longer free, but since it looks like the author has been working on it for awhile I suspect there are tremendous improvements from 1.4, which wasn’t all that difficult to integrate anyways. Probably worth the $30 on the asset store!

BobOmbValley1

Most of the art assets that were not constructed by me are from Mario Galaxy, but I did all the animations for them. Sound assets likewise were primarily ripped from different Mario games, or acquired from freesound.org, a very useful (and free, in case you didn’t pick up on that from the name) online sound library. If anyone sees (or hears!) any assets in the project that they themselves made, please contact me so I can give the proper credit. I imported the project to Unity 5 and fixed all the errors that cropped up, but none of this project was developed using any of the new tools available, like Global Illumination or Render To Texture. For anyone wondering what tools I used, they were as follows: Unity (duh), Photoshop, 3ds Max, and Adobe Audition. I used Adobe Premier and Fraps to make the trailer above, as well as the capture videos from the original Mario 64 to use as reference for animations. I used the N64 emulator Project64 for this, which I also used to capture sounds directly from the game. All of the mesh files are currently in the .max format, so while you will be able to open the project without issue, unless you have 3ds Max you’ll be unable to edit the files.

GoombaPlateau

get rekt m8

I probably am not going to expand on this project any further, since it would be insanely time consuming to continue any further, and my primary motivation to build this was to drive development on the Super Character Controller and provide a demo project for it. That said, if anyone wants to continue working on this, feel free! The project is open source and can be used for anything you like, short of selling it. If anyone is interested in playing the original (and superior) version of Mario 64, it’s available on the Nintendo 64 as well as the Wii’s Virtual Console.

Super Mario 64 HD! – Custom Character Controller Update

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted on here, and for good reason! To ensure that my Customer Unity Character controller is able to meet a wide variety of use cases, I figured it would be best to create a demo character implementing the tool. I wanted to pick a character that would be reasonably complex, since I figured a simpler one wouldn’t highlight it’s features (or help me discover it’s problems) as well. To that end, I decided to base my implementation on…

Super Mario 64 cover art

The best

Super Mario 64! Aside from being one of the best games of all time and one of my personal favourites, Mario boasts a wide range of moves that would test the limits of my Character Controller. Initially, I planned to grab a Mario model from somewhere, do a couple quick animations and build a controller that would implement a fairly small subset of his moves. However, things quickly got out of hand…

Super Mario 64...now in HD

pls no c&d ninty

…and before I knew it, I had added in virtually all of the moves from the original game, a fully animated Goomba and Bob-Omb, and had begun to build an HD version of Bob-Omb Battlefield, the game’s first level.

Current progress on Bob-Omb Battlefield Redux. Got a ways to go...

Current progress on Bob-Omb Battlefield Redux. Got a ways to go…

In addition to being a huge time sink, this project is serving two purposes: demonstrating the character controller, and helping me learn the ins and outs of 3D art. The Mario model I’m using is borrowed from Mario Galaxy, but it didn’t come with bones, rigging or animations, leaving the task to me. This was made infinity easier by this terrific tutorial I found on character rigging using 3ds Max.

Super Mario, master hula-hooper

Super Mario, master hula-hooper

I plan to release the project on this page sometime in the near future, and hopefully it will help others build their projects!

Editor shot of the same scene as above. SuperCharacterController with three debug spheres enabled on Mario.

Editor shot of the same scene as above. SuperCharacterController with three debug spheres enabled on Mario.