There was some major communication issue between our team which unfortunately caused a few set backs from some of the assets I made never seeing the final iteration of the game to major changes needing to be made for the rigs as the game development guys told us the background creature models were now going to be directly interactable with by the main character with Riley walking and jumping over them to progress the level. This along with the layout of the map changing multiple times cause many points of stress and confusion.

We discussed the reasons for these communication issues thoroughly through a weekly meeting in hopes to prevent any further issues from arriving and thankfully it meant that everyone was a lot more on the same page moving forwards with the only potential issue being a section of the game we hadn’t seen due to bug fixes the games development guys were trying to solve, this is the section my models were all supposed to appear in to begin with.

 

I moved onto the final version of the rig for the alien model and managed to pass with the basic skin weights maya provides with little touch ups thankfully. Some issues remained within the model such as the antenna as there are not any edge loops so the IK handles to bend them don’t actually work and just break them and the leg controllers should have just been one joint as it caused deformation issues. then  I also completed additional features for the Riley rig such as a IK/FK switch (which took ages to get working correctly) I added in a look constraint for the eyes to allow for eye tracking (which became more important because the scale perspective of the game shifted majorly from wide side scroller to over the shoulder free camera. I also added a mouth control for basic mouth movements but the Riley rig didn’t end up needing it and there for no inner mouth was made to make use of it. Each IK on both models used a Pole vector to adjust the arcs of motion and allow cleaner animation.

 

 

The Snurt rig needed last minute bug fixes because I use the wrong hierarchy and therefore some of the controllers caused animation issues I also looked through my iterations and noticed Orna was using an older version which had incomplete weight paints. I also at this point offered in person feedback for Orna and Jack while waiting for feedback for my animations. (Although I recognize my animations could have been improved at the time it was low priority because some models still needed finished and other animations needed completed enough to use in game, my feedback also did not explain any necessary changes that needed made).