Graphics

Hey Guys, 

     I have been tasked with building out a fully functional double elimination tournament bracket.  I have the scene built with respect to layout and on-animation, and am starting to think about functionality.

     It occurs to me that the functionality for something like this could get waaaaay convoluted in hurry.  Here is an overview of what is needed:

    * Match Highlight - They want to be able to activate a highlight state on any number of matches at a given time

   * Player Highlight - Winners need to be able to highlight and then some manner of gimmick needs to be employed that shows both the winner and the loser names moving to their respective brackets.

   * Bracket -> Player Profile -> Bracket - This will obviously need to employ the dreaded Transition Logic, and I *think* I know what I need to do here, but it is worth mentioning as it is part of this functionality map.

   So I am wondering here how to make all of this functionality in such a way as to make it user friendly for the operator.  I was thinking Dashboard might be a good call, given the massive number of options possible, but I have never used Dashboard, so that has me worried  a little.

   More than anything I am just trying to wrap my head around the most efficient way to make all this work.  This is not the first double elimination tournament in history, and I am certain these issues have been worked through before, so if anyone has done something like this and has any tips, I would be very grateful for the assist

   Thanks All, 

     - Willie 

Wowee this is a good, but perhaps daunting challenge. I'll start with the last one since that seems easiest to me. I don't see a reason why you need to have the bracket to a profile and back to a bracket within one scene. I've done several draft shows in my career and this would likely just be a separate player profile scene. How you animate out of one scene and into the next is just a matter of how clever you can get. I'm sure you could build that functionality in there but the cost doesn't outweight the benefit when doing it was one scene. So as far as transition logic, I don't know that you need a whole lot of it. In fact you could just run the player profile scene on a layer above the bracket so it transitions over it and then take it offline when you need so it would just be a standard In/Out transition logic solution.

The immediate thing that I can think of would be using an XML or CSV file and an OnSetText script to trigger certain animation controllers in individual boxes with each winner. So that ultimately you would just have your bracket on a Framebuffer and your operator would be just updating a CSV file rather than having to worry about manipulating anything in the scene or some template options. That would require a Datalinq solution though.

Alternatively you could do that probably by using global lists and selecting the winner from a pulldown within the template scene.

I would go the XML route. XML Notepad is free to download and you can prebuild your schema and fill it in.

This I would totally start out by creating a flowchart and wireframe before even touching Xpression to truly get a sense of what needs to do what and when.

Willie, I'm in the off season and this could be a fun one to tackle. I agree with using a dashboard. Pie in the sky you could lay out the dashboard panel with your bracket as the background. Click on the winner of the first matchup and it would trigger a specific animation sending winner to next bracket. However, your second round would need all new custom animations and so on. We did a little bracket for our mascot bowling event and though it was simple, it worked well. The XML idea or CSV idea sounds like a good one too if the operator is up to the task of editing the data "live". I'm not that good at it so I would program out my shortcomings on the dashboard. Good luck, let me know if I can help.

Thanks guys, 

    Yes, this is definitely the ideal use case for dashboard, but i so much as I have 0 experience with it, I am hesitant to open up that can of worms, when this is but one part of a package which needs to be wrapped one week from today,

  Since I don't know how to script this kind of thing, I have started setting up a fairly complex VL rig to do the do.

Basically it starts with the 16 names.  I have published radio buttons with a 0, 1, or 2 option for each match, with 0 being no winner (yet), 1 indicating the person in the upper position of the plate wins, 2 indicating the person on bottom wins.  That drives the text in the next set of of match-ups to display the winner's name in the next stage of the winner bracket and the loser's name displays in the correct position of the loser's bracket

So, then I need some manner of animation on the match-up plate to denote a match has ended and contestants are advancing, So I have this bright set of 4 chevrons move through the panels.  This animation is on all the plates, but I have a second set of radio buttons which drives the visibility, so that when the operator has the results of the first match in the Winners Top16, they'll first click 1 or 2 from above to select the winner, then click on 1 in the Top 16 advance, and take the scene.  The winner's name will go from white to yellow, their name will appear in the top line of the Winner's Top 8 match 1 plate, the loser's name will appear in the top line of  the Loser's Round 1 match 1 plate, and the chevron animation will play in the full plate for the Winner's top 16 match 1, and then only in the top halves of the winners top 8 match 1 and loser's round 1 match 1 plates.

It's a rather intense setup, and so far seems to be working, but the operator will need to make sure that the status of 3 buttons are set correctly before taking the scene.

Hey Willie,

I'm working on a panel for you. It will toggle the visibility of the names in each bracket, and give you a drop down for each bracket, then give you a toggle on for gold/silver/bronze

Can you email me the background image of the first photo, and a separate image of the blue and green squares? If you can give me a red one also I'll make it flip the toggle for that. Or else we can just use generic dashboard buttons (probably easier).

The toggle buttons all have a state of 0 and 1, so you could trigger a scene director to animate on. I'll also have a NONE state for your data so a specific bracket can be invisible.

From there its all key framing and what not. You'll still have to be particular for the operator, but you could just program all your major CG controls into the panel (REP IN/OUT / BUG /ETC). I'll make sure everything is tabbed.

Email:

PeterP@rossvideo.com

I'll try to finish this Monday evening

Hey Willie,

If I remember right you're in LA. I'm in LA from the 19 through the 24th. How about a quick run through of Dashboard. You buy lunch and I will make good on the original offer to show you a few things.

Malcolm - Sounds like a plan, I'm in!  Looking forward to it.  I'll PM you my... oh wait, there doesn't seem to be a PM system on this new forum.  You can e-mail me then at williefrazier@gmail.com, and we can suss out the details.

Peter - You are a prince among men.  I'm drafting an email you to in 3...2...