Kiss From a Berry

Great strides have been made during the course of this week. James' (the fish guy) finally has his UVs all mapped out. This time around, I didn't run into as many errors with the UVs as I did with the canons. Despite that, there were waaaay too many instances where I had to sew each individual plane together to make a decent map. While I'm not exactly sure what I did to wonk up the UVs to that point, it'll be something to watch out for in the future. Now it's time to get to Zbrush-ing all the details on each part of my fish dude! 

shAZAM.

As for animations ... I've been working on improving both the running cycle & pose to pose jump I blogged about before. Originally, we were also supposed to work on idle animations this week. Since we have our MoCap lessons coming up on Wednesday (yay!) that add-on to our assignment was cancelled. I opted to do two idle animations anyway to get some practice in on them and they turned out to be the most difficult ones so far. Maybe I was just overthinking everything, but there's something challenging of having to keep a character still while still in an interesting motion. They were a great deal of fun!

be looking heavily like the animations in sonic adventure DX.

this guy be copping some serious 'tude.

As for my improved running & jump cycles, here they are! I'm still working on finessing them (nitpicking ahoy!) so I can shove them in a decent-looking demo reel. I think I'm improving!

GOTTA GO FAST.

shout out to chris for recovering my lost keyframes when i thought maya deleted them forever.

NOW. IT'S FINALLY TIME TO TALK ABOUT THE SECOND ROUND OF RAPID PROTOTYPE PRODUCTION. THIS ONE WAS ENTITLED "LOST IN THE FOREST". Yes, all caps was necessary for that.

It's been almost a week since we have turned in our second Rapid Prototype. The reason I have yet to blog about this or shamelessly promote it is just chiefly due to my inability to post it online (as I'm extremely incompetent with all things Unity still and haven't figured out a way to upload it to my Wix site). So, I did the next best thing and recorded a PLAYTHROUGH to give a look into the look and gameplay.

This time around, I was grouped with Larry, Samantha, Gordon, and Jonathan. That's right. Three - COUNT THEM THREE - artists. With this round's theme being "storytelling", we ended up being slow to start our game's production. The "story" part of the project, since it was the most important part, ended up making us indecisive during the first few days and that had a trickle-down effect to every other part of the prototype. These two weeks taught us an important lesson on organization and planning.

One of the most important things to take away from this all is: don't be afraid to produce absolute crap in the beginning phase. Don't be afraid to take over if things are going stagnant. Don't be afraid to make shitty character designs or pisspoor level layouts. They can ultimately be changed and refined later but it's extremely important to start generating ideas to get the ball rolling early. Nothing's going to be final in the beginning.  

Despite this tangent, I think we made a pretty good prototype that had a positive reception. Check it out!