Week 8: Baby steps

Back to animating this week, and it's been a tough one. I've been trying to make headways on my body mechanic cycles, starting with the crouch move forwards. After some attempts and a conversation with a tutor, I've found the crouch move to be very challenging with the rig we have, as well as not fitting the character well. With that in mind, I've decided to switch to doing walk cycles. These have the advantage of being slightly simpler, whilst also giving me the opportunity to add a great deal of character and uniqueness.

I'm allowing myself a slightly extended period on the walk forwards, as it should inform the other walks enough to speed them up considerably.

Week 7: UDK Setting Up

Matt and I both seem to find the Ogre rig to an acceptable enough standard to animate with, and honestly I'm cautious of putting much extra time into rigging at this stage. I do need to get the character into UDK though, so this week I've been mainly doing that. Its taken longer than I anticipated, but he has mirror tables and is set up with materials and he's fully working with all the animations. I've also made a start on a PhysAsset, which is a necessity both for ragdoll and for hit detection.

Week 6: Finally Animating

So I'm starting to animate now, at last. I'm concerned about time restrictions and depending how long I anticipate spending in UDK I may have to drop my personal project animating the deer and simply work take UDK and rigging as separate sections.

So far this week I've been working on a melee weapon hit and a death. The death animation is very roughshod, but the melee animation is starting to come along. I like having a club as a weapon, as it implies a good hefty amount of weight, which is good practice for animation.

Week 5: Ogres and Animators

Having now recieved the Ogre model, I made it my top priority to get it rigged fully and skinned, in order to give the animation team, myself included, the maximum time to suggest changes and get to grips with the rig. I managed to get the rig created, and have skinned the character to it. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the result, though it seems a bit slow. We've disabled the constraints in an effort to speed it up a bit (they also struggle to calculate the skin when the animation plays through inside max).

Just a matter of animating now, as rigging has taken too long. Hopefully its not left me too behind, as I still have a lot of UDK work to do to get the characters in a working state for the game.

First is the rig I created, including the underlying layer the animation will be baked on to, and the physics bones that will be animated in UDK.

 

And this is what the animators will see when animating the character. I tried to keep it as simple as possible to make animation easier.

Week 4: Character 1 in!

Okay, so I've managed to get the first character rigged and put into UDK. The second one is on the way, rig-wise, but it needs to be skinned properly and imported. The Ogre model is almost ready, so with any luck we can get that skinned and do the final import soon.

Hopefully I'll be able to be through with the rigging side of the project soon, as the time its taking is going to cut into my other three projects quite badly if it takes a great deal longer.