Week 8:

With week 8 I began weight painting the new model, which this time proved much easier and finally worked, allowing animation to finally begin! The texture Harry completed was added…

…And I began immediately…
…and found a bug…

The texture was deforming whenever I tried to move the model around. Mentioning this to Harry, who had much more experience than myself in modelling in Maya, he said he’d take a look and get back to me. While he was doing so, I continued to work on the asset list (which people had felt did not contain enough information, and so looked to deepen) for the project and on some of the other coursework due in around that time. As I finished these he had found the issue, which was my not delete the history of the model. I had stopped doing this as I had found deleting the history of a weighted model would wipe the weighting, meaning the modeller would need to start over. Harry however managed to find a way around this and fixed the bug, allowing me to continue the animating.

An example of the animations being made with the model.

Week 7:

By this time thoughts were beginning to turn to assembling a final build for our presentation before Easter. Until now our completed content was separated amongst several different builds and we had never actually brought it together. This meant that completing any unfinished material was top priority…including our enemy model.

Unfortunately all attempts to correct the weight problems on the model had failed; with the legs how they were, the system would never be able to make the correction, and the way the model had been constructed meant that moving the legs into a new position was proving just as impossible. Therefore, the decision was made to remake the model from scratch in a straighter more outstretched pose, so as to make weight painting and animating possible. Fortunately, as I had already created the first model in the past, I was able to speed though production of the new model, and had the base model rigged and ready for texturing and weighting by the end of the week:

A quick test of the model to check it works in Torque engine.

Prior to the rigging, Harry also asked me to make sure the model was scaled for the project, as he had noticed it to be far too big in the past. For this I downloaded Hannah’s Chrono model, and used it as a scale, comparing also to an older diagram drawn nearer the start of the project that compared the sizes of our three characters:

Also, I was asked to produce an asset list by Brendan; a list of all the elements that had to appear in the game for it to work, along with their file name and any properties that may be important. I worked on the first version of this on an evening over the weekend and uploaded it to the site. As with the questions list, i suspected that this would be a file i updated over the course of the project.

Week 4:

Week 4 saw the beginning of production of the Enemy character model. Hannah provided a coloured image and ‘T-pose’ sketches of the character design for me to use as reference for creating the model:

Model production in Maya was greatly eased by the use of the “image plane” feature a colleague showed me, which allows a flat image to be inserted into the workspace. I was then able to insert a sphere into the workspace and manipulate the vertices of the model to line them up with the model and sculpt the model out of the sphere, which was added to using the extrusion feature to sculpt the limbs and extremities of the model.

As the design was (except the radio antenna) a symmetrical model, I decided to create one-half of the model, and then use the ‘mirror’ feature in Maya to clone the other half and merge the two together.

Testing the finished mesh in the Torque engine.

As production of the model continued, I also began considerations concerning the character animations for the project, focusing on matters of how the body moves in real life when walking, running or jumping etc. This was then compiled into a word file and posted up on the site for the team to refer to as needed. Our course has seen us undertake many animation-based modules (namely one in the first year), and use of Maya in previous work meant the team had a solid understanding of animation within Maya.