This week I’ve been working hard on animations. I felt a lot more focused and productive this week compared to last week. With no problems slowing the workflow I got a lot done.
I had talked to my team mates previously about how they imagined the animations should look like so that I had some reference to work after. We had established early on that the character would never physically touch anything with her hands so that making the animations would be easier and go faster.
The device that Vale picks up works like a gravity gun. With it on her hand Vale can lift up robots and throw them together, making new robots. She also uses the device to push buttons, pull levers and break robot fusions.
I haven’t really animated much before and it was kind of difficult making the animations with just arms and not a whole body as a model. There was a lot to think about when I animated I went back and forth between Motionbuilder and Unity a lot. With every animation I had to make sure the arms moved inside the frame of the camera, that they wasn’t too close or far away, too high or too low and making sure I didn’t spend a lot of time on moves that didn’t show in front of the camera.
I finished all of the animations this week and now I have to wait and see how they look implemented in the game. I’m sure I’m gonna have too make some changes and tweak somethings.
I also did the UV map for the hands and device this week.
Too save space I put everything that would look the same over each other on the map. For example, the arms are going to have the same texture so I made sure that the seams on both arms where identical and placed the different pieces over each other. When I relaxed every piece they did not look identical with the one that the would lay over so I used the grid snapping tool too snap each vertex to the exact position.
With this I saved a lot of space, especially considering how much space the arms and hands take up.
I made a test texture to see how it looks on the model but also to make it easier to remember which piece is which when I start texturing it next week.