Pre-production Produced

Pre-production is finished! So now we can move on to the meat of the project. Pre-production went pretty well, although I lost a crucial file containing all my rig diagrams on submission day, which will no doubt be a knock to my grade. Other than that, hopefully it went pretty well, though I likely could have balanced my workload into the grading areas better.

Genevieve's Games

As I'm currently waiting for models to rig, I'm getting started on a little bit of blocking out for the little girl. The character was an interesting one to animate. My initial impulse would be to animate her playfully, but the character in Echoes is supposed to be an almost immortal being, with an ambiguous past. The main focus of the character is the juxtaposition of these aspects, and the interplay of her mischievous demeanor and her sinister motivations. She leads the player into more and more dangerous situations, but also appears like a cute little child, so we want the player to be confused about how to view her.

The first clip is a simple wave from on top of a fountain. I'm not really too pleased with this one, I need to rebuild it to have more body motion and weight. I posted it here to show what I'll be working on, but its very early days idea blocking really.

The second clip is her playing on the ruins in the level. We wanted to get the girl interacting with the environment as much as possible, so this was a good way of achieving this. I quite like the animation overall, as its big enough to read well (the player will be relatively far off when they see it). The main problem is the occasional jerkiness and some unusual poses. I'll iron these out and finalize the animation in the coming weeks. For now though, I'll be leaving this to work on some other blocks.

 

Unity! AI! Little Girl Monsters!

It turns out Unity is pretty fun, and I'm finding it much easier to work with than Unreal. That's probably because we're building our own stuff rather than trying to crowbar stuff into already existing frameworks. I've been building some AI with Playmaker. I've developed a couple that we'll be refining for the actual game. The dragon AI flits between trees then zips to the player and attacks. Its set up using a node system, so I'll just paste them to the trees once Ruth has built the environment. The centaur has a few ranges of aggro. There's idle range, then the range at which it attacks you from afar, then the range at which it charges, and finally the melee combat range. 

NOTE: The little girl is the only Unity ready model we have at the moment, due to the fact we've not started pre-production yet. Don't worry, she's fine. Stretchy limbs came in useful.

Drawing Drawing Drawing

So, we're back on to pre-production now, with yet more drawing. Not my strongest suit, but so long as it helps me think about poses then its not too bad. I've been doing a few for each, but mostly been focussing on the attack animations for the player character, since they're the most fun.

Christmas has somewhat slowed my progress, but I've also started playing around in Unity, the results of which are looking promising (if a little freakish). I'll post that stuff here when its in a more developed state. But until then, drawings!

Death Cow

A brief interlude between now and finishing Major Project pre-production, part 2 of the specialist animation module. The first week of this module's been to do with scheduling and agile scrum development, and its had us refining the GDD for Echoes.

But now we've moved on to more practical aspects, and started scripting in Unity. We've also been using Playmaker, a visual scripting tool available on the asset store. I got on quite well with Playmaker, its essentially like working with pseudo-code. That said, when we actually dived into javascript I found I wasn't too thrown by it.

We decided the project would best slot into Echoes if we used it to make puzzles. Fortunately this also gave us a good scope for stuff to do in this module too. I used a mix of Playmaker and scripting, and came out with a few decent results.

The most complex was perhaps the psychic death cow. I scripted a small AI which wanders the environment till it sees you, then attacks. I'm mostly pleased because I got it not to walk into/through walls without using a node system. The lack of nodes does mean that it can't pathfind, just wander randomly till it gets lucky, but its workable as a relatively thick AI.

Majorly Projecting

Okay, so we're back on to Major Project Pre-production. I've been mostly working on thumbnails and rig setup for this, though progress has been slow, as I've not got a great deal done over reading week.

I've got lots of thumbs to do, with a centaur, a humanoid faerie character, a dragon/lizard, a little girl, and a giant crab monster.

Here's a few of the thumbs I've been doing today for an idea of what I'm up to.

Specialist Animation: Part 1 Complete!

This is my marking reel from Specialist Animation part 1. There are elements I like and elements I dislike, but overall I think it went fairly well, considering the three week time-frame. Having not had much experience animating in Maya, I found there were some idiosyncrasies that took some getting used to. Though overall I prefer the package to Max for rigging and animating (my artist colleagues disagreed with my software preference).

MotionBuilder was a tricky one. We had to learn and use the package in under a week, so I wasn't able to really get to grips with the program and learn all its ins and out. I found it quite difficult to work with, but I suspect that was more a fault of my inexperience than any failing on the software's part. That said, with just a little more time, I'm sure I could easily grasp using MotionBuilder a lot better.

Back to Project Development for a while now, till we start Specialist Animation 2 in 2-3 weeks time. I'll try and keep the blog updated with my progress in pre-production.