Wednesday 23 November 2016

INTERACTIVE :: 23/11/16 - Final Touches

Spent today preparing the moth assets for integration into Unity!  I decided to make both a pants/no pants version of the character, since putting pants on the moth was a happy accident in the first place.  I really wish I'd had more time to make variations on the character, though unfinished UVs for a Royal Walnut moth variation exist - He's missing the correct markings on his wings.


While I was at it, I also did a proper 2D turnaround sheet for my current moth, and colored in the reference images I used while sculpting it.  Looking at them, the character has remained overall the same through the concept and finalization stages.





The Unity setup was easy to manage once I got a few pointers on how to go about making transitional loops.  I also refreshed my knowledge of booleans.

A few of the animations had to be edited though, due to the loops not being completely smooth.  The walk cycle has had a frame shaved off the beginning and end of it, and the jump animation was split into a jump and fall cycle.  It went pretty smoothly and I'm really happy with how the end result turned out!

Here's a playtest the animation states:



The last thing I did for the project was worked on a quick introduction sequence to familiarize the player with the backstory of the game.  I went for a sort of scroll-esque, history book feel, similar to things like the ending sequences of the early Fire Emblem games and the introduction to Zelda: The Wind Waker, so I have gone with a sketchy sort of line style and sepia toned images.





It has since been compiled into an intro video and will play at the beginning of starting a new game.




With that, I've more or less finished everything required of me for this project, which I'm actually quite surprised about.  I did not expect the process to go as smoothly as it has, and while I feel as though I fell behind schedule for a good amount of the process, I've made it to this point and feel very calm and prepared for the whole thing.  The project itself has been a very good learning experience, though admittedly my involvement with the Unity aspect of it feels minimal, but I have been able to draw on experiences and practices that I learned last year, and discovered that I could create a model a lot more quickly than I have before.  

There were very few, if any snags in the process, and things largely fell behind due to my own time management than any issues with the programs, concept, or group.  I messed up in a few places when I was rigging the character - the arms don't bend at the right angles, and I had issues with his knees due to not creating the slight bend in the bones where the knee joint should have been.  These were all adjusted and overcome relatively easy though, and I had no issues with the animation process at all.  I'm still not 100% with creating what I believe to be fluid and realistic animations, but for my second time animating a character, I feel as though I did pretty well.

In terms of development, I feel as though the character concept was pretty solid throughout the entire process - the team did not have anything negative to say about my moth, and he did not need much in terms of refinement, beyond a slight change in body shape.  I do regret that I wasn't able to make extra color variants of the character, as I would have liked to have seen a whole spectrum of moths, but I may do these in my own time.  The creation of the moth's pants was a happy accident, and I feel has been the only major change in the design process.

The team has been wonderful too!  We all worked extremely well with one another, each of us assigned to an area that has been completed within the timeframe.  I feel as though we're all ready for presentations tomorrow, and am confident that our game will look really good once all the coding has been sorted.

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