Animation Refinement

Smoothing things out

I was late today but in the time I had at class I smoothed out some of the arm movements because they were a bit extreme for an idle animation. It made the swinging of the arms as the NPC looked both ways. I'm currently working on relaxing the hands. 

Jerwin and I tried the legs with IK but with the time we have left it would be too hard to stabilize the feet and we may as well leave the legs be. 

Idle animation

Character Animation

Large NPC looking around

The goal is to have a nice subtle animation of the man looking around vaguely threatening.

I didn't finish the standing animation today but I animated a lot of the core. I'm learning about keeping things small but trying to put as much character into the animation as possible.

Idle Animation - Research

List of thing that need to be animated

Background Character

• walk cycle, 1 for each
• idle animation
• smoking
• drinking
• sitting down
• looking around
• looking frightened

Resource Links

• idle animation tips
• 10 best animation tips and tricks
• 10 killer tips for better character animation

Self Reflection

Today I got my grade for Assessment 2: Environmental Game Asset Summative (20%). I'm disappointed in my final grade being a B- (66%). Whilst I did "good work overall", I feel as though I could've done better. I stand by my decision to use nurbs because I wanted the player to walk around the signs and I don't like it when you see the edge of a sprite in a 3D game, I always find it a bit world breaking personally. The polycount was definitely too high, I completely forgot to reduce the polycount which is something to keep in mind for the next time I model. Always keep things optimized.

The concept art was not polished enough. I'm struggling to find a balance with concept art, a common problem in my portfolio is that it looks too illustrative. Next time I do concept art for a project I should search out concept art of games in a similar vein as the project I'm doing at present so that my standard is what's necessary. A challenge was rendering neon tubes, I was unsure how to show this. I understand that concept art is focused on conveying ideas and materials, I didn't do this effectively because I drew for very low poly and untextured. 

Ultimately, the thing to take away from this is that everything could potentially contribute to your portfolio, so it's worth making something as nice as you can and going that extra mile.