sprint 6

this sprint I was tasked with completing a model rig and animations for a guide character to be added to the game. The character is a traffic cone with arms legs and a face so I after being given the cone I started by making the rest of the pieces I needed.

The animations I needed for this character were a pop up, an idle with talking and without, a wave, and a tuck back in.

My favorite animation I did for this character was the tuck in animation where the cone jumps up spins around and tucks in all of his limbs. I think this looks the most successful and it has had the most positive reactions from others.

I really like how all of these animations turned out but my favorite one was the tuck in. I think this was by far the most successful one out of the set. It is a pretty quick animation but it looks good and I think it will be very satisfying in the game. 

Last but not least I made an animation reel off all of the animations put together so that my producer can present it in class. I like how this looks and I'm glad I have it because this rendering could be good to use in the future for my resume.

Sprint 5

For this sprint I started off by listening to the ideas that my designer had for a gun pickup item that could be in the game. Based on his ideas I created these ten sketches to help narrow down the look we were going for. I went for as much variety as possible in these sketches to give my designer options and in the end he liked a mix of two of them so I think it worked well.

After I got the final idea that we wanted I drew out a concept sketch of how the final prop would look and got approval on that so I could get ready to model.

This model took me a little bit longer than I would have liked, It took me a second to get back into the groove of using maya and modeling as I haven't done either this semester. After a couple of tries and revisions I got it to a place where both me and my producer were happy with it.

finally I rigged and animated the object into a sort of idle animation so the player can notice it at pick it up. Overall the rig was the hardest part of this project, I think I will like rigging with a little more practice but for now it is still mostly a mystery to me. 

lastly I re-exported some of my previous drawings so they could be placed into the middle of the gun pickup model so the player can have a preview of which gun they are picking up before they grab it.

 

sprint 4

 

This sprint had a bit of difficulty for me which led to not getting as much done as i have on average but I think i still did well with the circumstances at hand. I started off by drawing the slingshot leg and all of the assets that go with it. After a bunch of sketches my producer and designer picked this design and I think it fits very well into our game.

For this leg there are a lot of moving parts. there is the lightning in the chamber that was a separate image sequence I added on top of this animation, the refill of the chamber which was a simple semi transparent layer, and the energy orb that is getting shot out of the cannon.

for this model there is also the little arms at the end of the rig that are animated individually. all of this together gives the shooting animation a level of detail that makes it look really nice.

Just like the other gun legs this leg has a deploy, idle, shoot, and un-deploy animations. Even though there is the same amount of animations I think the ones for this leg were much more in depth and they look very detailed

I think the most difficulty I had in this animation process was with the shoot animation. There was so many moving parts during it that I had to go back through many times on each of the layers to make sure it was all matching up and each layer was following the leg movement properly.

finally for this sprint I finished off by compiling all of my animations into a single video to allow my producer to show it off well in the sprint review. It was helpful to see more clearly how each animation flowed into each other.

Sprint 3

For this sprint my main goal was to finish off all the 2d animations that will be needed in this game. I think this went pretty well and was a reasonable goal to push me to finishing more cards this sprint than in the last one. 

I started off by drawing the machine gun leg as well as drawing a short animation to be used when the gun was firing. My producer and designer really liked these and had minimal touch ups to be made before I could get into rigging this model. 

The rig for this model went very smoothly. It was very similar to the previous gun leg I had done so I think what I learned from making that one really helped me out here. The only complicated part about this rig is the firing animation which has a gif of the bullets firing as seen above attached to the top of the rig so it can be seen during the animation.

The animations that were needed for this rig are the deploy, idle, shoot, and un-deploy animations. Since there was only four animations to make it went by pretty quick.

overall I think these animations were easier to do than the previous ones because I had the timing and feel of what the producer and designer wanted for them already. The only edits that needed to be made were based around the shooting affect that we were going for here. Since this is a 2d model and cant spin we had to make that affect with vibration and transparency.

Next I got started on the sniper leg to round out the 2d animations on this game. This one is the most different from the others so it was fun to play around and see what looked good.

The rig for this model was a little more tricky than the last one because of some buggy system problems but after a couple attempts I got it and I think this one turned out just as good as the others.

For this model we had the deploy, idle, shoot and un-deploy just like the rest of the gun legs. I had slightly more of a difficult time getting the look right on this one because its a weapon that only shoots once at a time and it needs to look clean and loop as it goes.

I had the most fun with the shooting animation because it has a very cool effect that I created by warping the shooting frames to make it look like a sniper bullet.

Overall this sprint went super well and I am really proud of what I got done. I'm also excited to see what I can start working on next with the 3d animations in this game.

Sprint 2

To start this sprint off I was in a really good spot based on what I had completed. I had 2 full rigs which means I was able to jump into the first couple sets of animations immediately and get a lot done.

I started off with the pogo leg because it had the most animations that needed to be made and the most complicated rig out of the ones I've made so far. This was by far the most complicated and time consuming process of this sprint because on top of the normal time to animate and make edits based on my producer and designers input I was also learning to animate and be efficient in a new program. 

Thankfully based on my knowledge of maya and animation in general it was pretty quick to pick up the animation in this software though it did take a little trial and error. The main struggle I'm still having with this program is that it doesn't have an adjustable time slider so if I have all my animations on one file I cant view each of them one at a time I have to watch them all play all the way through. This is not a serious problem but I can be a little annoying and take a little bit longer than average.

I think this rig worked out really well for the amount of previous experience I had before making it. If I were to make it again I would have not worried about making the rig so technical and complicated and focus on making it just functional for me because I am the only person animating with it so it. It doesn't need to have all the extra quality of life parts that I would have if I was making this rig for someone else.

For this model I needed to create a "deploy" animation to show the leg coming on screen, a "ready" animation for when the player holds right click to show that the leg is ready to bounce, and idle animation in the ready and unready state, a bounce animation, and an "undeployed" to get the leg off screen when the player is on the ground.

Overall I really liked how these turned out and after I had these ones done it was a lot easier to understand the vision my designer had for all the animations in the game.

Moving on to The shotgun leg the first thing I had to do was draw and rig a quick "firing" addition for the rig I had already made. this was nice and simple and I really liked how cartoonish it turned out. I think there could have been a better way to make this if I had done it at the same time as the rest of the process but this rig works perfectly fine for what i need it to accomplish here.

The animations for this leg were much easier than the pogo leg. Since this leg only needs to go onto the screen and shoot it got broken down into four simple animations. These ended up going much faster too once I had the hang of the whole process. It worked out perfectly so that I finished these towards the end of this sprint so I can start up with a new rig and animations on the next one.

The animations for this leg were the deploy and undeployed similar to the pogo leg and then an idle animation and a shoot.

I love how these turned out and I'm very excited to tee them implemented into the game.

Exporting and formatting these animations was quite a challenge for me. It took a ton of trial and error and was very frustrating. I had to export the mp4s along with the image sequences so that I could make sprite sheets for unity. The exporter in this program is very unintuitive but I powered through. Now that I've completed it I think I've figured out a process that works but I will be prepared for the amount of time it will take in the future. 

Sprint 1

For this sprint I started out with the concept sketches for both the pogo leg and the shotgun leg. Luckily I was able to work on this during class so I could quickly check in with my designer after each iteration and change until I ended up with the sketches above and below. I had a little bit of a hard time picturing the idea my designer had in mind for both of these legs but I made sure to check in regularly do I didn't get too far into the rendering process without the right look we wanted and it worked out well for me.

After I had both sketches done I moved onto the final rendered versions of each leg which you can see on the left side of both images above. With all of the preplanning and revisions that went into the sketches for these I was pretty confident in my ability to make the renderings look just right. The only difficult part about this process was keeping in mind that these drawings were going to have to be rigged in the future so I had to think a lot about which layers needed to be separate in order to move properly and where I should extend each layer to to account for movement of other layers. In the end I only went back to fix one thing once I got into rigging and realized what needed to be changed so I count that as a success.  

Once all the drawings were done I moved on to rigging them to get ready for animation. In order to make these 2d rigs I used a program called Moho which I have never used before. It had a bit of a learning curve to try to learn to rig a 2d model especially with the specific movements I need for this project. I think I did pretty good for my first attempt at this program and one of my first attempts at rigging in general. Luckily I am the only person who is going to be animating with either of these rigs so I can compensate for my lack of rigging knowledge with my animation skills.  

I think overall this is a slower start to a sprint than I would normally like. During this sprint I also took or found a bunch of reference video for my animations. I only had cards for 7 days of this sprint and the rigging took me a little longer than I would have liked but I think I have created a good base that so I can hit the ground running for the next sprint.