Ho Hum.... Happy Family day if you live in Canada.

The winter finally got to me.  Production has been slowed down a fair bit as my stamina gets depleted faster (I still have a full time job to do).

Thankfully the winter is almost over (I hope).  Since I have 3 days off I got a fair amount of work done along with relaxing.

I've been working on this enemy on the long weekend.  The quality is a lot better than the above gif, I just wanted to make it lean for this blog, it would have been 64 megs if I didn't optimize it!  Gimp kind of botched it a bit, but its still good enough to give you an idea on whats happening.

I'm making separate layers to use in Unity that will "go over" this character, such as sword and shield possibly armor in the future too.  This will take less memory and cut render times down during the creating phase.   Its sort of like the paper doll concept.

After I have enough animations for this skeleton, I think I'm going to work on game mechanics next.  Since I'm still learning it's a good idea to just try it out.  I haven't really touched the animation category in Blender until I made this skeleton, I screwed up quite a few times until I got an idea what I was suppose to do.  So I want to go ahead and screw up with the game mechanics and make mistakes now on a simple character then on hard to manage, like the heroin.

As for the witch and heroin I showed last time I kind of put them on the back burner ^_^; Characters with "meat" on them are kind of harder to make look good during animation.  Still running into a few issues that I'll have to research on how to solve when I have time (and patience).

That's pretty much it for now, anything else I've done was more or less tutorial stuff and not really worth mentioning.


EDIT: Ignore the 64 megs part, Gimp was messing with my head.

Season Greetings (So happy I have 7 days off!)

Happy holidays.

I'm still working on the character I posted last time.  I wasn't happy with my skill level  in rigging, a simple FK rig can get by, but ends up becoming a lot of work later on.  So I decided to learn a "little" more about rigging and weighting and it has paid off. 

So progress has been a bit slow due to learning new skills and time constraints (I still have a day job).

Rigging and weighting is a very tedious process so I got a bit tired and decided to change focus for a while.  So I made a new body mesh for another character I had slated to make.

Still far from done, but I have made quite a bit of progress. 

The heroin I made earlier used a body mesh that I created some time ago and I have learned a lot more about making better mesh design for animating purposes. The mesh that the witch uses has a few extra features "under the hood" that make certain morphs easier to do, Ill probably edit the heroin mesh (again) to include these improved design concepts.

Until next time~  

Progress Report (Current Project)

I've spent most of my free time yesterday and today retouching and replacing the head on the PC model.  The other head was ok but didn't have the manga'ish look I was trying for.  I like this head a lot better.

I still have a lot of work to do rigging her.  She has basic armature and weight painting done, but I want to make a bunch of corrective shape-keys and emote shape-keys.

I'll tell more about the game and may post more artwork later when I feel I have more to show.