Monday, February 27, 2012

Another Website Update

I updated my portfolio site yesterday. Now when you click on the 'Thesis' tab there is a video of my current trailer. I'm not going to upload it to youtube this time so if you want to see it go there. This update includes spawn, invader, monster and beauty animation, as well as some effects and lighting tweaks, so check it out.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Monster updates

I really do love monsters. The other day I got this book by John Landis, a man who I'm pretty sure I must somehow be distantly related to , and it is so full of goodness.


 My favorite page is a collage of the classic monster carry.



Anyway, that brings me to my monster...it's alive! 




Animation is going well after a few hiccups in the beginning, mostly due to me not knowing what I'm doing at all. This is just a test to make sure that things are working well together before I try to put it in the actual level. I have all his actions split into four animations (walk, stomp, block and rawr) and I blended them together through matinee. The timing still needs some work and you'll have to imagine him being shot. I have the material change set up too, for after that happens. I still only have damage on his head, not sure what else I'm going to do with it, if anything, yet. This is also obviously not the angle it will be seen from.








Saturday, February 18, 2012

Skeletal Mesh Lighting Issue

I don't know if anyone else has come across this issue yet, but I thought I'd share what I found in case you did.

So if it looks like this...


Change lighting bounds scale to 0 to get this....


Tuesday, February 7, 2012

New things to learn

I've started the mysterious process of rigging and animating for the characters in my thesis. I decided to start with the sultry beauty because I knew she would be the simplest.

She has a really simple rig:


Originally I was only going to make her a ragdoll in UDK but some complications arose with certain scenes in my trailer. I decided that it would be easiest to do a couple of simple animations for when I wanted her movement to be more specific.  Like this one...I know its not much but it's my first Maya animation, other than a ball bounce a few years ago. This was really just a test to see if I could get animation out of maya and into udk because I had never done it before. I might eventually want to add a little swing to her legs after they pick her up out of the car instead of having her joints lock into place right away.


But for scenes where I'm going for more of that mangled corpse look the ragdoll sim works just fine.




The next challenger: