Finished Animations

I have now finished my animations and they are ready to be put in game. Here are the links to the playblasts of these.

http://youtu.be/9HR7W758Sng

http://youtu.be/nUSzjLeEKNg

http://youtu.be/iw6CgJ0xzL0

Adding pole vectors to rig

After animating a walk cycle for the creature a being immensely frustrated for hours by the fingers spinning around in crazy directions, I have found out about pole vectors and how they let me control the spin angle on the ik handles. Now I can animate much quicker and achieve much more natural looking movements.

Creature fully rigged and ready to be animated

Below are all the various stages of the rigging process for our games creature.

This is the model with the skeleton complete. I haven't worked on a humanoid 

shape before so I look forward to the outcome.

For the weight painting I used a dual quaternion weight blend to get the best of both

linear and weight blended so that the joints would bend in a realistic way and not 

stretch the skin in ridiculous ways.

I have now added ik joints and parented these to circles that I will use as my 

animation controllers. These are working well as the movements are looking 

quite natural.

New Creature low poly model

Jordan has finished the low poly model for the creature that will be hunting on our island. Now I can start rigging it up to be animated. Will hopefully get this done quickly as I am looking forward to animating it.

Below is the high poly version of what I will be rigging.

Work on the island visuals

So I have been chipping away at this island trying to get it looking the right way for our night time game. While Jordan is still busy building assets for the island I am working on getting the water and fog to look right. I managed to find that Unity pro has some really nice water hidden away in its assets so have applied that and it instantly looks better. It is actually transparent now and receives light from other sources unlike the old water. It also has small swells which is really cool and natural looking. For the fog I have been playing around with volumetric fog which looks great from some angles but looks absolutely horrible from others so I'm either going to have to find a way to tweak this or find another solution all together. I am considering trying out the cloud system for this.

Filling out the island with unity's standard assets

I used the basic assets that come with unity to fill out the island a bit so we could get a better sense of how it will look when it is done. These are just place holders at the moment but they look a lot nicer than an empty valley.

Island generation

So I have been using a program called world machine in which you set up as many different terrain options as you wish and then it generates an infinite plane of height map that I then look through until I find a section that I like for our island. I can then export the height map from here and take this into unity to edit further.

Quick sloth model and animations

So for the presentation to showcase what we plan to do with our game Jordan has modelled a quick sloth and I have done some really quick animations for it so that we can get it in to the game and show how we want it to act.

Renders

Side View and Perspective

Environmental reason for evolution

My characters environment consists of a lot of seismic activity causing mountains to emerge out of nowhere and fissures to tear the ground a sunder. This terrain is ill suited for a snake like creature so it has to evolve to have powerful legs so that it can jump gaps and sharp hooking claws so that it can climb.

Redone Evolution

Reactionary evolution

My creature starts out very snake like as its terrain is very open and flat. As this terrain opens up to reveal gaping fissures and towering mountains it must develop a way to jump to navigate these features. The tail splits in 2 and it rears back up on them. From here feet develop on the end and claws come through for gripping the rocky surface. The 2 tails form into the shape of legs much like that of a grasshopper and the head enlarges.

MDDN343 Game Proposal