CAGD 495: Game Production

Sprint 5/6 Review:

These past few sprints, I worked on my clumsy animations for the victory and the intro. I initially had an idea for the clumsy victory animation that went like this:

After I got some feedback, Sam suggested that he falls over instead of recovering his balance, which I thought would be pretty funny. So i made him fall over and I made him put a thumbs up with a broken arm (I intentionally broke the arm because I thought it might be more funny). After that I struggled thinking of a concept for the clumsy Intro. Initially I just wanted a simple sway back and forth, but it looked too much like a drunk personality (and not a clumsy one), so i over exaggerated it to make it look like he was falling over again. Here’s what I have on that thus far (I’ll have to see whether or not it gets put into complete):

Now I’m currently working on the joker intro. I have a few different ideas and I’ll have to flesh them out, but I think to stick to the theme of jumping and mocking opponents, I’ll have the joker do Lindsay’s chicken dance from Arrested Development:

Sprint 4 Review:

For this sprint, I had to once again transfer my animation to our new (and as of March 15) and final rig. However, some default setting with the hands was changed and my animation broke and I couldn’t rotate my hands to fit the direction that they needed. So I had to reanimate the hands on the new rig from scratch using FK instead of IK. I had a lot of trouble and finally figured out that it looked somewhat usable when I put on the Euler Filter. It’s not as great as it was before, but it’ll look fine from a distance and I won’t waste more time trying to fix it. Here’s where it’s at:

Before I had to go back and rework the push, I had actually already been working on the jump. I got most of it done but my priorities shifted and I had to fix the push. Because of this, it made it look like I hadn’t done any work in two weeks, when in fact I had completed 90% of one thing and couldn’t finish it until I fixed the push. I digress, here’s the jump as far as I understand it:

Now, I’m currently working on a “clumsy character” victory screen. After that I’ll work on an intro animation for that same character.

Sprint 3 Review:

For this sprint, I continued transferring animations from the concept to the new rig. We’ve had about 4 or 5 different rigs, and each time I reference I’m not too sure why we have so many different rigs. It wouldn’t work in game and we need to determine how to get an IK controller onto the model (or else a couple of us will have to redo our IK animations and make them FK). This makes it harder because animations that are meant to be done in IK shouldn’t be done in FK. It’s difficult to emulate one with the other and the animation itself can come out looking wrong.

I digress, here’s what I got done these past couple weeks:

This is the first idle I created, but it was scrapped for something that moves in a more side-to-side fashion:

This is the final idle animation. I also made a push animation:

We’ve also had a few problems with communication between rigging and animation. Our current “final” rig is all in FK (including the legs, which creates a workflow that feels really bad). There is no switching to IK so my push got delayed until further notice. Re-referencing the rig also causes some problems, here’s what my push looks like inside of Maya on the new rig:

The animation looks really fun and exciting, but is definitely not what’s supposed to happen. It shows up fine in Unity though, but I still don’t have any animation on the arms because they are no longer in IK. That’s what I’ve been working on this sprint.

Sprint Review:

For this first sprint, I worked on a concept for a push that could be implemented into the game at a later stage. Currently, we don’t have a rig so I decided to animate it on the bodymech rigs for visualization purposes.

This push was pretty mediocre, but I plan on refining it and making it better when we get our models rigged. Next I was tasked with doing a victory animation, and I have a lot of fun making them so I decided to assign myself 3 different animations for a victory screen. The first one is a spin-jump into a thumbs up.

I like the camera and the beginning poses, but the final pose is something that I struggled with. I think when it comes to creating this same animation on the builder rig, I should be able to solve that problem. the second victory animation is just a simple lean against the victory flag with folded arms.

As seen in the video, it’s a much more simple animation and the camera is something I still want to work on, but it definitely gets the point across. I’m still in the process of designing the third victory animation, and then I’m tasked with putting the push animation onto the rig.