This is Rubbish.

Today was Proof of Concept (PoC). There are many words that I can use to describe it. All of them good and bad at the same time. Our build of the game had hiccups, bugs, and glitches. But nether the less, I still thought it was really awesome that we got that far in only 2 weeks time.

Especially the programmers, they kicked ass in the las two days. They managed to get assets and animations into the game. Super sweet! The only problem was that our animations, mainly mine, looked horrendous in the game. And it wasn't the programmers fault. For some reason when exported out of Maya, some verts glitch out and go all over the place.

At first we thought it might be the exporter tool, but then we tested other teams animations and they worked perfectly. Then I thought that it may have something to do with our earlier rig hiccup that we had.

No matter, I had a new Daft mesh and rig to be tested this morning. It still didn't work. What the heck?! I've done everything the other teams have done and then some but my animations still glitched out. Even from my previous class, my three legged character worked, but not Daft.

Then breakthrough! I did not bind the God Node to the mesh, every other team had done that! This must be the issue we are having! So I re-rig and test.

...It still breaks. ??????? Why??? I have no idea what is going on at this point. I've even had other people look at it and they say I am doing everything correctly.

The only other thing I can think of is ask our Art Producer tomorrow on what he thinks, but if that doesn't work, my only conclusion is that the script that makes the rig must be making some other random node somewhere in the deepest darkest depths of Maya that it's breaking my half decent animations! Whew, that was a mouth full.

Therefore, I am going to either use a different script, or make my own rig. Now if we only had 1-2 characters, I would be OK with rigging it myself, but we have 9 characters. I don't think we have time for 9 rigs!

I am a little flustered right now with this rigging/animating malarkey, and that my throat still feels like its getting squeezed by some tiny little gorilla every time I swallow. It's OK though! Tomorrow will be a new day, and I will find a solution!!

Throat Lozenges

So since my last post, I have gotten all animations completed, bound to a game rig, and ready to be exported to the game! Thanks to Aleasha's help of course.

Today was to finish the death animation, which turned out pretty well I suppose. I have always been a person who never really liked his own work, or praise on his work. I would rather someone look at it and tell me what I should fix. That's the best way to respond if I ever show you some of my stuff. Haha. On a side note, I hate it when people thank me, I don't know why, I just do.

So anyway, the programmers are having trouble importing my animations into the game. I have been trying to figure out if there is something that I did wrong when exporting the animations? I'm not sure, only they can tell me. Until then, I will be helping out on finishing the asset list.

I had a meeting with Chops (our AP) about our Asset list which only had up until Alpha filled out. We have been working on it since then, but "A" priorities are the most important to us right now. It didn't turn out as bad as I thought it would. Most of the issues were prioritization. I believe once everything is in the asset list, it will be much easier to prioritize. And once we get that done, nothing but production from there on out! We will hit Light Speed in terms of creating and finishing assets!

On another side note, my throat has been killing me all week, and I've been a little slower than usual on working. It's really been bother me, so I went to Target today and got some Cherry Throat Lozenges. What's a lozenge?!?! All it looks like to me is a candy that doesn't taste very good. It doesn't even taste like a cherry. I think they put pictures of fruit on medicine just so people think they are safe and won't taste like ass. But they do taste like ass! Name one medicine or vitamin that taste good besides Flintstones Vitamins. None!

By the way, these so called throat candy lozenges cherry flavored aren't helping. Maybe I'll go see a doctor in a few days if the pain doesn't go away. At least doctors tell you if their prescribed medicine tastes like crap. They aren't sneaky.

Quite a Setback

So I have been knocking out animations for our main character Daft. They aren't the greatest but will have to suffice for Proof of Concept (PoC) turn-in which is Monday, April 26th.

I had gotten the run, jump, idle, light attack 1-2, and air hit cycles done, when I realized I had animated them all on the animation rig. Uh Oh. So me and my group mate Aleasha spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to make the game rig similar to the animation rig, transfer the same weights to it, attach them together, and then when exporting the animation, delete the animation rig altogether.

I assumed this wasn't that much of a problem since we were ahead a couple days of schedule. The penny dropped. If we couldn't figure this out, I would have to re-animate all of my animations and then be behind schedule. This was a total bummer.

We tried to get some help from the teachers present, they helped us figure out how to transfer weights in Maya, but my weights were not transferring correctly. Then I sent an e-mail out to some of our previous teacher that might know how to fix the issue. But, it could take a couple days before they even got back to us because they have busy schedules. This was turning out to be an issue. I admit, I was getting frustrated and felt lost. But I wouldn't give up that easily, I would take a break from the issue, and hit it head on with fresh head and fresh ideas the next day.

I went home and was trying to calm down. I get a text from Aleasha that she had figured it out but the only downside was, that I would have to re-paint weights. Awesome! I love painting weights, and that she figured it out was fantastic. Way to go Aleasha!

Kick-ASS!

So! I just got back from watching Kick-Ass and to be honest. It was AWESOME! I felt as though it was hilarious, but could be serious when it wanted to. The movie had a bunch of funny references and one liners. It also had great action sequences with none or little of shaky cam. Shaky cam confuses me too much to see the appeal of it. Sorry for you shaky cam fans out there. Haha.

But, I'm not here to give a review of the movie. If you wanna see it, go ahead. It is super sweet. After watching it though, I feel like I should go out and fight crime, or at least get into a near death fight. It would just make me so much cooler and solve all of my problems! Probably not. Haha, who am I kidding? I don't wanna fight crime, I wanna get my ass kicked! This is what violent movies do kids, they influence you and make you want to do stupid stuff. Bad idea!

Ah I should probably go to sleep, I have a group meeting tomorrow and I wanna get ahead of schedule so I can help out with the asset list. That is probably what I will do. Yea! Goodnight!

The beginning

So as this is my first post, I should explain why I have created this blog. There are a couple reasons for this decision.

First of all, I thought it would be a good a idea to have one during Final Project at Full Sail, and track my progress through this five month arduous journey. I'm excited!

The second reason is I want to analyze my thought process and see how I encounter problems and how I figure out solutions to these issues. For this to work correctly I will obviously have to post more than once. Haha, let's hope that works out with my schedule.

The last reason is that I have always wanted one, and because of previous stated reasons, I have a reason to write one! Yay!!

So let's move on to an actual blog post.

Today was the first official day of production and I began animating our main character, Daft, for our game. O boy. I haven't animated in 3 months, and I had no idea what I was doing for the first half hour. I was totally confused. But, after some messing about and getting my feet wet a bit, it all started to come back to me.

My task for the day was to animate a run, supposedly one of the more difficult things to do in animation. The whole process took a couple of hours, but I finally finished it. Of course I'm not 100% done with it. I had gone home half way through the day, so my group wasn't around. So, tomorrow I plan on showing everyone my animation, get some feedback, and fix those issues. There is also more room for improvement. Yea!! Now that I remember some animation, I'm excited to keep going and start on the others. I wanna make our game AWESOME!!

Another thing I realized today was that when our whole group is together, we can bounce off ideas off of each other, but for everyone to be together, we require a large space. Usually we meet at school, but for us artists, it's a bit uncomfortable because we work on our laptops and have limited space for mice and tablets. But, sometimes you gotta take one for the team. In the beginning half of the day, we had gotten a room, but after 1pm we were kicked out and there were no more rooms for the day. Us artists decided we should go home and work because we can't really work at the lobby like the programmers can. We need a little more space like I previously said.

As it turns out, I worked at Lightspeed at home! I had my dual screens, bigger monitors, and a comfier seating arrangement. But, once I was done, I couldn't get feedback from the others, unless I wanted to upload the whole animation on alienbrain and wait for someone to look at it. But, I feel like that would have bothered the others a bit. No matter, I can do it tomorrow. So there are pros and cons, I guess you kinda just have to pick and choose what is right for the task at hand.