Week 4 Personal Blog

Week 4 has been moving along pretty smoothly so far. I have been still mainly focusing on character rigging and overall game directing for other members. However, the week has been pretty stressful for me since there are a lot of problems with the animation that I could not solve.

Starting off the week, as I was still struggling with the character rigging, I had a meeting with our other fellow modeler and we were able to narrow down the potential problem, armpit. However, after adding on the additional skin for the armpit, the rigging still simply too complicated for me. After hours of tutorial, I was able to complete the character rigging through a program called Maximo. I was extremely happy with the result that the program gives, however, the problem didn't end there. After importing the rigged character back into Maya, I was able to create full body character controller for animation. The next step is to do animation. I was able to create one attack animation with over 40 keyframes. I wanted to try to import it into Unity (although it's still pretty rough), however, it does not work. Apparently, the controller and the bone does not attach together when exporting them as FBX. I still haven't figure out the solution to that.

As the group manager and game director, outside of completing our group blog; I helped my fellow members on their individual task, directing them on what exactly I need from them and how it should look like.

For personal reflection, I might have set a standard that is outside of reach with my skill and time. It is quite stressful to complete my individual tasks while also thinking about the rest of the group. I'll try to pace myself and split some of my responsibilities to the rest of the team.

As for the team, I am quite happy with the progress that we made for this week. The only thing I would suggest my team members is that please be more engaged in solving the potential problems.