It's safe to say that the week of our return to school was essentially the week filled with meetings upon meetings so the Ley Lines team could achieve a speedy and efficient trajectory towards our end goal of shipping by early June. Essentially, this means that "art freeze" should occur sometime in the middle of May. This task seems daunting in and of itself. With that deadline in mind, that's precisely why we have scaled back on a few enemies (now we only have the main boss and one extra Shellek), our master asset list, and we are simplifying our art style to match something closer to Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Necropolis. The heart of our visual style is still there, it will just be present in the game in a more ... simplified manner. And it gives us the opportunity to make some more tweaks to the design after a large chunk of the non-art faculty wasn't really feeling it. It's small set-back at the current moment, since we were unable to start on actual asset production ... but it's something that will speed everything else in the long run, and make our end goal that much more feasible.
In any case, these were some of my passes at Vala! I was messing with some different simplified art styles and some costume changes while keeping to the heart of her initial design. Also the polygon lasso tool is so much fun for concepting. :B
We had our first MoCap session towards the end of GDC week and will be having our second one this coming Tuesday. We recorded most of Vala's actions to get our actress used to the entire process. Afterwards, I took it upon myself to clean the data in Vicon Blade, then begin the editing process in MotionBuilder. In the latter program, I was able to successfully loop each animation with the Story editor and fix a large chunk of the imperfections present in the data transfer. Animating the fingers will be done in Maya - along with parenting Vala's bow to the rig when we get to the point of having our own character mesh, rather than the filler one I'm using now.
Anyway. Here's some animations that I was able to work on between everything else we were working on this week.
An idle cycle.
A walk cycle.
The walk cycle was the first animation that I finished a first pass for, so I chucked that in the unreal engine to see if it worked properly. Good news? It does! YAY.
As for homework on the animation front ... I've almost finished the chair animation. Thank. This assignment has been particularly difficult for me simply because I don't like looking at it. If I had the time to start over and try something else (which is probably what I should have done weeeeeeeks ago) then I'd feel much more positively about it. It's not as bad as I'm making it out to be but, hey, you're your own worst critic. :3
Things to do? Still, clean up transitions, fix poses, and end at the beginning pose so it can loop.
Our new assignment is one that focuses on overlap (something I need a lot more work on!). For this homework, we're using a pendulum - BUT DON'T BE FOOLED, this assignment deceives you by APPEARING easy when it's hardly that! You have to be very mindful about overlap, physics, and what to push so it looks good rather than purely go for realism. This go around, I aimed for something a lot more simplistic so I can focus on the topic itself. I didn't want to make something long and purposely difficult just for the sake of it when uh ... I've been in desperate need of bettering my overlap. Like a lot. I need to get away from that "mechanical" feel that's BEEN PLAGUING ME FOR A WHILE.
In any case, this is my first pass at this assignment! The base of the motions are there. For my next pass, I'll be able to add in some finer details to pull it all together. :3c
That's it for this week~
