Sprint Blog #4

     This sprint was dedicated to finishing up my Wendigo Model in order to be ready for rigging and starting animations for Duck Bob. The retop process took a lot longer than I initially expected because I ran into issues when it came to the fur. The fur was necessary for the model because it's such a defining factor, but since the original sculpt has such a large volume of fur it was a rough process zremeshing it while also keeping it's shape. At the end I managed to get it to a low enough polycount to export out while retaining the shape, and then finished the retop as well as the texturing. 

 

Originally I was supposed to rig it but after talking with my teammate who's the only other animator, we decided to pass him the card so he'd not only have more things to do but also get the opportunity to learn rigging. We then slip up our "DuckBob" animations because we wanted that as a priority. 

 

    To be frank, that card is giving me quite the bit of difficulties because it's throwing me through a learning curve.  At first it was simple enough, parent the IK handles of the hands to the steering wheel and mimic driving. The hard part came when it was time to have DuckBob pick up his hands. As it turns out, when one keys frames with an IK handle that's the item being driven by the steering wheel, it stops being the "driven" and instead takes on it's own action. 

    I attempted to solve it by using a "film" animation trick, which would be making duplicates and then turning off and on the visibility when needed, but my teammate advised against that since it wouldn't work within a game engine. How unfortunate.  Luckily, after a lot of brainstorming we came up with the theory of turning the viability of the IK handle on and off, a theory I will be implementing this next sprint. 

 

    For other work I completed this sprint, that would be two character models for our "scare monsters". The first being La Llarona. She was a bit rough to figure out because of the clothing, but that same difficulty came with a perk; not having to model the whole body. Instead, I made the clothes, hands, head and hair. I was originally going to make the clothes in Zbrush but after discussing it with another professor, I found a better program; Marvelous Designer.  


 Marvelous Designer made things so much easier after the brief learning curve. After I made my fabrics and tested them out on in-built models, I exported them out to Zbrush to refit, and details. 


 My last character of this sprint is one that's on the back burner of the game, but since it looked simple enough to do I made it so we can populate our levels more. Because of the simplicity, I also got through the retoping process this sprint. 

Next Sprint I'll be finishing the DuckBob animations and implementing them within the game, as well as retoping and rigging La Llarona. 
 

 

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