Starting to Unload the Big Guns

After all this character business I think a well deserved break from characters is in order, so during this week I planned on starting my tank mesh to animated and implemented into the cinematic. The way in which I've decided to do this is by making one half of it in order to again save time as need I remind you that the milestones are approaching which are below.

Friday 15th March      - Press pack for Outer Eden

Friday 22nd March     - Outer Eden cinematic completed with audio

Friday 19th April        - Outer Eden level completed

Friday 26th April        - Outer Eden Production Blog conclusion

From this I haven't started any production of marketing essentials for Outer Eden's press pack as I've decided to focus on the cinematic as the work parameter seems to be on a larger scale, but time management could be the real restraint here. I am unsure at this stage whether or not I'm on track.

Below is Tanks progressed and as you can see its just half shelled at the moment

Next Week

• Tank modelling completion 

Enemy Skinned

This week all I achieved was that of skiing my enemy character and the reason for what you might see as lacking in these weeks in terms of production is because I am not very strong at skinning characters and it takes time to adjust to. Below is screenshot of enemy skinned and ready to animate.

further explorations have been declared with my cinematic is the additional factor of modelling futuristic energy powered hover tank to include as part of the patrol in order to have something else to flesh out ratio of elements featured within the scene and in my GDD I do mention the tank and it would present further expansion on that front.

Next week

• Start production of tank model

Problem Shared is a Problem Solved

So last week another issue stunted the growth of this project when myself and Ross Fielding a fellow student  came face to face with weighting characters as It completely went over my head and after long determination to figure it out myself and Ross Fielding  eventually decided to confide in someone. So we asked Mike White about this issues a tutor at Confetti that works with animation and he provided us with the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-awe14FQBY

Proved to be a valuable asset as I now fully understand  weighting and below is an image of the results of my weighting which at this stage aren't professional standard but I believe it to be a decent attempt for a first one .

Pushing on I will cast our minds back into the world of audio as I haven't really digressed into that area of things because I actually haven't produced anything at this point due to being to wrapped up with finalizing the general idea and problem solving with 3D aspects such as weighting


Next Week

• Move towards rigging and skinning enemy character

OH DEAR!!!!!

Right I'm back again and this time like a few weeks back I have stumble across a problem or a difficulty as I think it should be addressed. This difficulty is with skinning characters as I really don't understand how it works at all in terms of how its interface as a whole and the colour system and how certain colours affect certain vertices and I've spent most of this week trying to understand but haven't got anywhere with it as of yet.

On an upbeat note I have successfully capture all of the animations for my cinematic and I have even collected animations for the game that follows such as idle, running, etc. In order to kill two birds with one stone .


Next Week

• More research into skinning characters

At Long Last

Hope from last week is here to be delivered this week as I stumbled across my idea for the setting and scenario for my cinematic to display to represent a sequence in my game concept Outer Eden.

Further promoting this concept I would like to say that its places the main character Zak in the desert like outlands of Mars where he survives evading the governments military order that patrol Mars. So in this scene you will first see Zak looking out towards the vast land mass of Mars until his devices alerts him of incoming enemies; urging him to flee. With that in mind Zak hides behind a rock in order to wait for the patrol to pass but one of the soldiers hears movements from the rock in which Zak is hidden, which ignites an action sequence.

I choice this idea because it gets across how the game feels as a whole and it doesn't require me to construct a great deal of assets for the environment and that's not down to laziness its just simply in place to ensure I'm hitting milestones.

Taking in that I now have an idea to work with I felt as if I could move on towards researching environment and rigging characters as character animation protocols are something I have never before encounter, so it's going to be interesting.

For now I can leave you with an image of my main character with all the bones of the biped in 3D Studio Max in place ready for skinning.

Next Week

• Fully Skinned Character
• Motion Capture Animations 

Slow and Steady

Unfortunately  unlike the past few weeks I cannot bring cheer through work completion as I haven't really developed much this week due to the frustration of not coming up with an idea for my cinematic.

This has had a negative effect with the project as a whole because creating the two characters were definitive elements however the world that surrounds them is yet to be drawn and with not having a world I don't actually have any actions to take place.

Bringing me onto the factor that I have had the opportunity for the first time to witness motion capture in full flight.....but when it came to Outer Eden I didn't have anything to record because of the previous issues.


Anyway I'm going to have to leave it there for now but I really hope next week has more in store.


Next Week

• The drawing board with cinematic plan

Back to Work

Another steady week for me as I deliver on last weeks aims and a bit extra on the side and what I mean by that is I managed to completely finished my enemy characters. However I will not claim that it was difficult as for my enemies I recycled the armour which was originally going to be solely allocated to the main character by 3D modelling a helmet to sit on it's shoulders instead of my head which has been generated using a piece of software called FaceGen.

This was done in order to save time as I felt at this stage a lot had to be done and some aspects were elements that I'd never looked at ever such as rigging these characters to be animated. So, all in all I wielded my head to the armour mesh, created the enemy helmet to be used with the armour set and in result of this I had to put together two separate texture maps for both characters. All of which are displayed below.

Next week

• First look at motion capture
• Starting to build environment for cinematic