Its Monday.
For our Academia project's first real week of production, now temporarily named "Prism", we need to have two different characters in the game. We chose to have similar silhouettes to simplify the animations as well as possibly have a single control rig. However, we decided to have a different torso for sake of character design diversity for almost no additional animation required aside from transferring the animations over to the second rig.
For the rig, I decided to use the standard 3DS Max Biped since i'm pretty experienced with it and it has pretty much all the required tools to iterate the animation process. Before attempting skinning, I tried looking around for scripts that could accelerate the process since its an easy long and repetitive task. And where there is manual repetition, it exists automation for it. This free SCRIPT takes the skinning process up to a 90% completion with under 15 minutes of work per characters just adjusting boxes around the mesh.
At this point, all FBXs (44) for both the Bulk and Slim characters have been made with correct naming conventions. What is left is the implementation of the anims in Unity which I have yet to figure out how to do. Some talk with our programmers is in order. There is also some uncertainty regarding how to do the animations in Max to add those anims as animation layers in Unity (Ex: take damage, cast spell - while moving, strafing, etc).
This week will be spent integrating the anims in Unity, map the controls to the player controller and chose an interesting camera position. I will also have to skin Ian's HiRes meshes pretty much at the last minute since they will unlikely be done until late this week-end because of heavy time constraints. Hopefully it will only take 2-3hours to do both. If I have time, I will make a camera animation at the start of the game to showcase the environment/players prior to a match.
Here is a work in progress off all the animations:
For our Academia project's first real week of production, now temporarily named "Prism", we need to have two different characters in the game. We chose to have similar silhouettes to simplify the animations as well as possibly have a single control rig. However, we decided to have a different torso for sake of character design diversity for almost no additional animation required aside from transferring the animations over to the second rig.
For the rig, I decided to use the standard 3DS Max Biped since i'm pretty experienced with it and it has pretty much all the required tools to iterate the animation process. Before attempting skinning, I tried looking around for scripts that could accelerate the process since its an easy long and repetitive task. And where there is manual repetition, it exists automation for it. This free SCRIPT takes the skinning process up to a 90% completion with under 15 minutes of work per characters just adjusting boxes around the mesh.
At this point, all FBXs (44) for both the Bulk and Slim characters have been made with correct naming conventions. What is left is the implementation of the anims in Unity which I have yet to figure out how to do. Some talk with our programmers is in order. There is also some uncertainty regarding how to do the animations in Max to add those anims as animation layers in Unity (Ex: take damage, cast spell - while moving, strafing, etc).
This week will be spent integrating the anims in Unity, map the controls to the player controller and chose an interesting camera position. I will also have to skin Ian's HiRes meshes pretty much at the last minute since they will unlikely be done until late this week-end because of heavy time constraints. Hopefully it will only take 2-3hours to do both. If I have time, I will make a camera animation at the start of the game to showcase the environment/players prior to a match.
Here is a work in progress off all the animations:
DemoKP All from Marc Tardif on Vimeo.