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.

Spear Armor Updated

I decided that I wanted to change the spear armor a little bit. I felt that the colors didn't work as well as I thought. I mainly removed some of the excess colors and well and added more geometry to the jacket and pants. I didn't bother adding geometry to the gloves or boots since I figured those parts would most likely not be seen up close too much.

Mocap Data

We finished capturing all the mocap data. Next we have to clean the animations.  There were some animations that we were not able to get data for because of how the body suit was set up. The person had to remain tethered to the power source. We will have to do manual keyframed animations of walking, running, and possibly jumping.

The photo below show the raw .bvh file uploaded to a biped in 3ds Max. The mocap data is all FK type of animations hence all the individual keyframes.  The picture below is just a portion of the list of raw file animations we captured.

Second Half: Class 1 Armor Modeling

With some concepts to choose from, I started modeling possible armor pieces for the class 1 character. I'm a bit unsure about creating separate pieces and then applying it to a biped. I'm used to making an entire mesh with the clothes/armor modeled into it. However, I can see the advantage of doing it this way.

A New Character

I finished up a few concepts for the class 1 character. I was working on the class 2 before.  This character was a jetpack man and had influences from Star Lord and The Rocketeer. It was a bit difficult to come up with ideas, but I think I made a few good concepts to work with. I'll have to see how the teammates view these.

Testing in Unity

I have a decent understanding of Unity, but I definitely could get better. I had exported my model with the animations. I had difficulty getting the animations to run. It was later on that I found out that I needed to also have scripts to run the animation sequence. After many attempts and with the help of Nevin and Mike, I managed to get a functional crossbow in Unity.

From my initial Unity Test