DON'T STOP ME NOW!!!

DEMO DAY!!! I have found it very satisfying to see the fruits of my teams’ labor at the end of the semester.  After spending so much time working on this project, it is awesome knowing that we’ll have something cool to show to our fellow CSG mates!  Not only that, but we have something to show people over break and get some much needed feedback!  This winter break is going to be a very productive one. WOOT WOOT!!!

"It's so easy. Happy go lucky!"

For the last couple of sprints, it looks like the art team has been accumulated a bunch of technical debt.  This didn’t seem to make much sense since we were working our butts off.  After going through trello and revising the cards to correctly reflect what we have been doing, the art team is ahead by a sprint. That really helped with boosting our morale and confidence! Now all we have to do is finish strongly.

Ganbatte yo!!!!

"All I Need in this Life of Sin, is me and my Keyframes"

After working with Motion capture data for a while, the animation team would rather hand animate from scratch.  NEVER TAKE THE FUNDAMENTALS FOR GRANTED!!! In retrospect, if we hand animated character actions, we would have been done with the animations way before now.  At least we acquired some Mocap skills and will be better prepared next time.

"Planted Keys: The Animators Secret Weapon" OR "-00:00:13:29 to LIFT OFF"

So we’re starting to make sense of this whole editing Mocap data thing.  The biggest discovery for us, thanks to our instructors, is the planted key.  Planted keys are used to anchor parts of a character(hand, foot)while the rest of the character is moving.  We relied heavily on planted keys to keep characters’ feet from moving when they were supposed to be standing still and whatnot.

YOU! YOU!! YOU OUGHTA KNOW!!!

Okay…so I may have spoken to soon and had my expectations set too high.  Editing Mocap data is way more difficult than I initially thought.  I believe that the difficult part for me stems from the fact that every single frame is a key frame.  In order to make changes to parts of a Mocap animation, key frames have to be deleted/moved.  Also, a bit more hand animating is necessary when editing Mocap data.

MOTION RAPTURE

WE’RE USING MOTION CAPTURE!!!  That hopefully means that the animators will have an easier time applying the data to our 3d modeled characters.  Aside from the calibrating that has to be done with the Mocap equipment and the actor, it looks pretty simple.  I see this coming in handy when being used by someone with unique physical skills like martial arts and gymnastics.

COME ON DOWN!!!

So after pivoting from a destructive voxel terrain to a photorealistic one, we found $200+ worth of terrain editing software for less than $8. I should probably mention that the program creates photorealistic terrain with, wait for it, VOXEL BASED CONSTRUCTION!!! Thanks AXIS Game Factory!!! I have since switched to character stuff, but that hasn’t stopped me from cashing in on game development DOPENESS!!!

Vox for Naught? I THINKS NOT!

I’ve just been informed that we were going to switch from voxels to a more photorealistic art style.  It’s not a biggie, but it would have been nice to have found this out before a bunch of assets were made in the former style.  At least now I know about voxels and pretty good with MagicaVoxel.  In retrospect, at least we didn’t decide to make the characters in the same style.  QUE SERA SERA!