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. 

Game Assets being made

Today I worked on making a simple low poly window based off an image of New York apartments. I also made a grate for the side of roads. The idea was that this would be part of a modelling kit that can be placed around the city to add low level detail to certain areas.

Asset Image Refs

I've spent this morning gathering some relevant photos of balconies, doors, grates, and windows that are all art deco. I made Trello cards for everyone so that we can have all this research in one place to talk about what we're doing easily.

To keep to the low poly style our group has decided on for the game I selected art deco designs that were simple. The idea is to make assets that we can drag and drop into scenes. A modelling kit if you will. I chose to focus on more art deco elements in this city of different designs because I'm interested in the strong shapes that are made with art deco design. I think art deco as an architectural style would translate very well to low poly modelling. We plan to model in maya, assemble the building in another maya file, and then take it into unity after that is all done.

I'd like to see what other images people have to determine if the images I've selected to model would be fitting for the city. I think it will be fine as long as I keep my choices simple.

I'm thinking ahead excitedly to making unique smaller assets for our setting. Making some plant pots and rubbish bags next to bins would be fun.

Planning for Assets

Had a talk with the group about making assets for our game Neon/Noir. We've made a timetable on trello and put up some cards so that we can write some asset ideas down for what we'd be interested in find ref pictures for to model.

Inspirational Artists

• Skottie Young
• Sean Galloway
• Tradd Moore

Chats with Jerwin about art are good