Evolve!

So this past weekend I went to Evolve CG with a couple of friends. It is a job fair that is held in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Everyone would be going to this event to get jobs. This was not my purpose, I just wanted to meet some cool people and learn from them.

Well all I can say is that it was a Major success. I learned a lot from the various speakers there, especially Teagan Morrison who is the Lead Environment Artist for Naughty Dog. His lecture inspired me to revamp some of my techniques and try to make my Demo Reel as awesome as it possibly can. If I can make a Demo Reel good enough for Naughty Dog, then I am bound to be able to get a job somewhere.

Now I just wanna work on my Demo Reel 24/7 but cannot for I am still in Final Project and must work for the team. This is kind of a bummer, but I am going to try and balance the two. Team comes first, Demo Reel comes second. I do not want to abandon my team half way through Final Project. That just isn't cool.

Rolling through.

So I haven't posted in awhile and a few things have happened in the past 10 days.

First of all, I had fixed my rigging/animation issue. I re-rigged the character one last final time, but this time I was very clean and careful with everything. It may have been all of the minor precautions I took, but I believe that the reason it wasn't working before was because the mesh was on a layer. Even when deleting non-deformer history, a node was left by the layer. Those pesky layers. I was so excited when I fixed it, that I was speechless. It was an amazing moment.

Next is that my throat doesn't feel likes it's getting harassed by Donkey Kong anymore! This was also pretty exciting when it happened. Donkey Kong is cool and all, but I am not a fan when he is using my throat as his punching bag.

Lastly, I found out that we didn't do so hot on PoC (Proof of Concept) grade wise. I would have to agree with our teachers. Our level was just cubes and our animations were way out of wack. It was a functional game, but I believe we could have done much better.

Now onto current news. In a couple days, we are going to have Feature Frag 1. It is our next milestone and everything is looking pretty good. I am ahead of schedule and I finished all of my animations for FF1. My group mates are also doing pretty well. This time, we are going to do much much better. Our actual level is looking amazing. We have awesome looking meshes in there with character and a sense of style. We also have functioning animations that go well with our game. The programmers also seem to be in much better spirits. They are getting things done and seem to be confident for FF1.

My animations aren't exactly what I want for the final game. I had met with our Art Director the other day to have him critique my work. He liked some, but others he said need some work. I agree entirely. Our game design doc states that the heavy attack should be .6 of a second. But that just isn't enough time to make a good looking animation in 18 frames.

After our meeting having taken notes from his critique, my plan is to put the animations I have currently into FF1 without changing them. I will see how they look and then based of game play, I will go back and tweak animations to make them more stylish, cool looking and better yet, fit the character.

Hopefully next time I post, I will have good news about FF1!