Running

I'm moving onto a running animation. It's more difficult than walking in my opinion, but still relatively easier since I'm mainly just animating the legs. Luckily the character will be holding onto a spear with both of his hands, so I really only need to animate the swaying of the shoulders. This goes for pretty much every manual animation.

Key Framed Walk Cycle

With an updated spear mesh and helmet I started working on the key framed animations that we couldn't get with motion capture. I think it's a good challenge doing it this way. While motion capture may be easier, manual animations have been more comfortable for me. I still think that the animation team could have done all the same animations manually. It may seem faster, but I've noticed that trying to fix motion capture data to fit your plan can be very challenging.

Updating the Helmet: Low Poly Count

One rule for modeling video game characters and assets is that they should remain at a relatively low poly count. Depending on the system used, the polygon count can fluctuate. One issue that arose for our project was the spear character helmet. While the original helmet looked nice; it was definitely not suitable for gaming engines. the poly count on the original helmet was near 40K polygons. If we wanted to use the helmet that poly count needed to be drastically reduced. I decided to remake the helmet, but still try to maintain the original design. I managed to remake the helmet with about 800 polygons total.