Prep and progress for Week 3 Presentation:

Manny took on the task of designing the main protagonist and Jack took the main antagonist modelling the Alien.

Because we had decided the rough story and plot we discussed giving the main character and love interest names (Aliens were left with the creative names of “Aliens”). Manny pitched the idea of Siobhan for the main character and Jack suggested Roisin for the love interest. I honestly didn’t like these names all that much as I knew we didn’t have any Irish influence for the game and I prompted more gender neutral names moving forwards because it meant the player could relate with the character regardless of the gender we are stating of the characters. Manny decided on Riley and I prompted Alex for the love interest which everyone agreed was better moving forwards (Also meant we could keep naming conventions straight).

 

We determined a prop list which held all the types of models we could need for the project and left it as open as possible so people could  choose what they worked on (This prop list was added to multiple times throughout the process of development)

At this point Manny had asked for the 3rd time for help with the Style guide as they were unsure about what needed to be put into it I clarified that I couldn’t do much because I wasn’t on the design team but knew they needed help and wasn’t going to avoid them.

During this time my main focus was on rigging as my experience was very minor I began building a rig off of the Riley character base mesh Manny had made. I looked into basic rigging as seen  below, this form of rigging and animating technically was more ideal for the style we were aiming to achieve as it meant the model was made of all separate pieces (This was the idea we were aiming for but given the approach to modelling Manny and Jack took the model ended up in less pieces and meant I had to rig more traditionally with a bipedal model.  

I made sure I had a consistent naming convention from the start (Very Tedious) I also made custom controllers and altered the colour of them so there was no chance of getting confused during animating as it was clear character right was blue and character left was red etc. For the animations it was also discussed that we would have effectors to better angle the legs and arms but also an IK/FK switch so we could blend animations together depending on what the games design guys needed from us. This rig in particular gave me lots of issues as I didn’t know how to get the rig the fully commit during the switch so I researched other tutorials that covered it and finally found out my issue so it could be resolved.