Programming

I must say that this subject has been the most difficult that I have ever come across since starting tertiary education. Programming I do loathe to the core. I was unsuccessful in bringing together a coherant animatic and have programming for the cycles excercise before the deadline yesterday.

Unity- Texturing

Importing the character and texture was a success! It took me a while to look through various tutorials available on the net, but I've finally got it! I was even able to place the normal map on it by putting on the same material as the texture.

Normal Map

The normal map I have left to the very last moment since I felt I didn't really need as the model is really smooth, as you can tell. I didn't do this through mudbox, instead just doing it in Maya. I only did this to show that I understand what normal maps are and what they can do. I have added to the model with the coloured texture and it all went very smoothly.

Unity Excercise- Animation Cycles

Unfortunetly I'm finding it very difficult to work with Unity. I just can't get my head around the programming which I was never good at to start with. But I have successfully imported the four animation cycles into Unity and are looping as they should. The animation side of things with the engine seem easy enough. But when it comes to programming, I'm at a loss....

Texturing

Texturing is my favourite part of animating as it brings the character to life. I have left Crayon as simplistic as possible since time is now factoring in. No problems were experienced during the texturing process and simply followed the colour scheme that I planned out weeks ago.

Animatic Excercise

This assignment is such a bummer. I can hardly get anything to work in this program. I at least have the position of the cameras in place, yet the Switch Camera script theat we were given didn't work!

Animation Cycles

For the last week or so I have been doing the animation cycles that we are required to do to put into Unity3d. Ideally I would like to polish up on them some more, but unfortunetly time is of the essence and there is still alot of work to do. Now that I have seen what the character can do I would like to go back and refine the skinning some more as well, especially around the shoulders, chest and upper arms as they do not look natural enough. But a very enjoyable excercise non the less.

Skinning

I have just completed skinning my character. Chris Denaro told me about this easy-to-use rig that is very simple to use. I managed to aquire the melscript for it and have found it very sound. DSN Rapid Rig Basic it is called and haven't had any problems with it what-so-ever.

UV Unwrapping 3

The final stage of UV Unwrapping was for the hands. The hands were the most simple of the Unwrapping process because they are correctly postioned along the X,Y,Z axis. I only planar mapped the top and the bottom sides of the hands and used the Relax/Unfold tool a couple of the times to straighten out a little warping. Then I duplicated the right hand, which was the one unwrapped, then repositioned the new hand onto the left arm. This way the UV meshes of both hands are perfectly positioned on top of eachother.

So Crayon is now completely unwrapped and ready to be textured in Photoshop. What I will have to learn now is what sized textures Ican use in Unity.

UV Unwrapping 2

The body is finished and took a much shorter time than the head. Because the suit is one colour (Grey-Black) I did my best to hide away the seams. The arms I have detached to the body could fit better on the UV template. the seam runs under the arm and down the side of the suit. The feet I have separated so it could fit better on its own. It doesn't matter much if a seam shows on the feet as there will be no close ups of it. The front of the body is slightly larger than the back to allow more detail on the texture. The Relax/Unfold tools were very useful on the body.