Week 6_The Sprint Begins

As of the end of this week I have started the final projects for Level Design and Props and Weapons.  That kinda marks the point in the term where I try to jump ahead and free up as much time as possible to get good results for those main classes.  Having said that I do still want to do good work for my other classes I just will be spending more time on my 2 core subjects and as usual minimal time sleeping :p

In Character Animation I put together a lifting animation.  This exercise was focusing on anticipation and acting while we start to get more used to using full character rigs.  The rig we got this week was a lot more 'user friendly' or I guess just simpler than the rig I used last week so I was able to cover more ground much faster.  I also recorded myself doing the same animation as reference which was fun but I tried to keep it secret on my secondary monitor as I was working at school :p As always you can find the full animation in my Google Drive folder.

I made a bit more progress with my character sculpt over the last couple days.  I am going for a semi-realistic style but I exaggerated some cuts and overlaps to give the character a more dynamic look.  Depending on how much time I have over the next few weeks I may try to refine this further but I still have a lot of costume and texturing to do for this character so I may have to move on.

I moved onto using some of Substance's generators to add some edge ware and more advanced detail this week.  It was cool to move onto using the core generators rather than relying on Substance's basic smart masks.  There were some limitations I ran into with the texture being so small but I think the overall look is pretty good and will work just fine for my character Modeling final too yay!

I have chosen my final piece for Props and Weapons which I will be modeling over the next week.  I was looking through some more complex organic pieces at first but I think I will be able to ace my fundamentals with this piece and still challenge myself.  Also it does share a slight similarity to the Enigma machine I built waaaaaaaaaaaaay back for my portfolio to get into Gnomon so I definitely hope I will be kicking that pieces butt.  Wow looking back at it... yikes...  Sometimes it is both sobering and gratifying to look back and see where you came from.

Level Design class was super fun this week.  The homework was a little tricky trying to retrofit all my blueprints to the VR Pawn but I am amazed at how easy it is to integrate VR into Unreal 4!!! I had a movable character who could pick up the rune sword and smack boxes around my level within 20 minutes of firing up the level :p Soooo awesome!  The rest of it was a little more tricky but I now have everything from my midterm working yay! I struggled for quite a few hours but I couldn't get any of the other features I wanted to work like: Snapping the sword to the VR controller, spawning swords from a backpack volume behind the head, getting a crossbow to work, magic fireballs, using a shield in one hand and a sword in the other... Still maybe my teacher can give me a hand with these other features!
I have some pretty big plans for my final but we will see how much actually makes it to week 10.  I have been playing around with VR for a while now but this is the first time I have actually gotten a chance to play with my own models in game! and I am pretty hooked! I am now certain that some day I will be developing my own VR game some time in the future.

I also spent some time modeling a bunch of props for the arcane library which is the final zone for my level design project.  I have a few other things I want to add but I will be set dressing soon and seeing if it all comes together!

For Digital Photography we have graduated from the exposure triangle yay! Now we are moving onto HDR images.  It was really cool learning how these are made especially since we tend to use these in 3D as image based lighting.

Not much to report on for Character Design another pointless class