Archer Stoneheart Animation

Click here to watch Archer Stoneheart

Final Product

The Future is Uncertain

This week was the hand in week for the Cut Scene and it was a stressful week, it was a week of changing ideas and uncertainty. We managed to get the animations off the motion capture PC however when we applied them to the models they were all messed up, we had no idea why probably because we rushed them as we had little time to get them off and there was a fair few.

Over the weekend I created the environment, this is where my idea ended up changing because originally I wanted to create the castle from my Game Design Document but I think I was being a bit optimistic when I had that Idea. It was after watching an episode of Game of Thrones did I come to the idea of having my two guys just meet in a throne room where they would fight but due to my animations turning out all wrong I had no choice but to make it very simple.

Luckily our tutor had provided us with a folder of animations where I had obtained a walking animation from here I chose to make my Cut Scene very simple and from there it was just going to be two guys walking up to each other in a thrones room and they exchange some dialogue. Now the audio side pretty much got sidelined throughout the whole project because it was my belief that you couldn't really make an effective audio side when you're still developing the 3D side and because of the way the course was laid out the production of the 3D ran till the deadline and with certain aspects being where they were it wouldn't have been possible to get it done any sooner. 

That being said I managed to during the week prior to the deadline I managed to book out a computer with audio software and quickly produce a soundtrack which I made 1 minute long. With the intention of taking a section that liked depending on how long the animation turned out. The dialogue was a last minute decision especially on what I wanted to say, it was pretty much a last minute job with the audio.

The animations definitely caused a lot of heart ache not only did they not work properly but they effected the weighting of the characters and I found myself constantly having to re-weight them depending on the animation which I thought was highly annoying at the time. So in the end I just left the walking animation as the most complicated and weighted around that animation and for the rest I key framed.

However in the end I managed to put it all together even though the week before I wasn't feeling confident in its completion and even though so many things had gone wrong It turned out OK and I was pretty proud of what I had made especially for it being my first character/animation piece of work.

Milestones:

• Research and practise Rigging and Skin Weighting for 3DS MAX (On Going)
• Watch tutorials on XNA and begin working on the Basics for the 2D Game
• Add screen bounds, scrolling background and enemy spawns
• Weight characters (On Going)
• Start work on second Character
• Book out the motion capture and record animations
• Book out motion capture to obtain the animations
• Create the environment 
• Render animation
• Complete 2D Game in the first week of the Holiday - sort out enemy spawning, add colission and add scoring system
• Work on 3D Game - add characters in, environment and weapon

It's been a Motion Blur..

So this is going to be a short post to basically say that we managed to book out the motion capture and me some other students used it to record out motion capture and it seemed like it went very well. However not much else can really get done on this until we book it out again in order to get the motion capture of the machine so we can apply it to our models as well as completing another assignment for the up coming week.

Milestones:

• Research and practise Rigging and Skin Weighting for 3DS MAX (On Going)
• Watch tutorials on XNA and begin working on the Basics for the 2D Game
• Add screen bounds, scrolling background and enemy spawns
• Weight characters (On Going)
• Start work on second Character
• Book out the motion capture and record animations
• Book out motion capture to obtain the animations
• Apply animations to the characters
• Create the environment 
• Render animation

Motion Capture

Motion Capture was pushed back by a couple of weeks due to a CryEngine workshop week that we had to do and because it was Industry week the following week. This provided me with some more time to get my characters weighted to a reasonable standard or to a standard to which I though they were OK, as I'm no professional it seemed what I had done would work and I was surprised with some of the ease especially with the second character. Because they had a similar shape and assets it was pretty much the case of doing it the same way I had done it for the first character. 

The main issue I found with the weighting would be that the values of the vertices would change on there own and would make life a living hell as I found myself constantly going over the model weighting the same areas over and over. In the end I just had to settle with what I had, however I won't really know how the weighting is until I get an Animation put on there. 

Now Confetti has built their own Motion Capture using 2 Kinects and using some motion capture software, it was definitely an interesting experience however I had trouble going from T pose into the action for the motion capture as that transition for some reason felt weird to me. Not only that but it felt kind of rushed which is understandable as we had only 2 hours to work with and a fair few people in the group.

It is going to be the case of booking out the Motion Capture and going after Confetti hours to use it and hopefully we'll have some good results. 

Milestones:

• Research and practise Rigging and Skin Weighting for 3DS MAX (On Going)
• Watch tutorials on XNA and begin working on the Basics for the 2D Game
• Add screen bounds, scrolling background and enemy spawns
• Weight characters (On Going)
• Start work on second Character
• Book out the motion capture and record animations