Last Check

This week I mainly worked on just Wednesday before demo day.  I helped mainly with making sure the animations were in unity. I also helped with cleaning up some of the last minute motion capture animations. Also did some play testing making sure things looked good in engine. The level wasn't uploaded at the time so the scene is pretty bare.

Running with Style

Strafing. This has definitely been one of the harder animations that I have done. Rather, I thought it was until I looked differently on the situation. My main concern was about the legs when the character does the strafe run. In my head I was picturing the legs crossing over and maybe having the feet turn the direction the character is facing. I actually looked at in game models of characters strafe running. The main example I used was a human for the World of Warcraft. I spent a good amount of time just walking, and observing how these in game models walked; the characters would mainly have their body turned while having their legs/feet in the direction they were moving.

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.

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.