Holidays?

Hello everyone! Easter break is here but I don't feel like I am on holidays! My routine is still waking up, go to uni, go home, sleep. I am happy though, since I tend to be quite unproductive during holiday time...(I am improving I swear).

But even though I still have to go to uni I am taking it more lightly, I work less hours and try to get out of my daily chores for a chance. This coming weekend (if the weather is nice) I have planned to go to Bradgate Park to do some sketches and be surrounded by nature. Living in a gray Leicester makes me appreciate every glimpse of sunshine and greenery.

In terms of work, the Off The Map competition is coming along very nicely! We started slowly but we're picking up our pace as the days go by. Jonah is working hard on putting all the assets into engine and everything it's looking really nice. If we keep working hard and keep motivated all the way through I am confident our level will look pretty awesome.

This week I have been focused in various things, one of them being the White rabbit. I used albedo, roughness and normal maps with a 512x512 texture size considering the the rabbit it's pretty small in our scene.

For the normal map I baked it from a high poly version of the rabbit I did in Zbrush ages ago which included fur detail.

In engine it looks very nice, yet in 3Dsmax when I render it, the seams are quite visible...I'll give it another try at fixing the problem but at the end of the day if it looks good on engine, there's no need to stress too much about it.

I have also been working on a flythrough for my container city project which I meant to do when we were working on that project. I also had an appointment with careers to polish my CV and cover letter for possible internships for the summer. I'll be awesome if I can get some work experience!

And to finish this post, a little cute animation I did a while ago:

Until next time,

Carla.

A breeze of fresh air

Hello! This week has been a very positive one! For starters I had my year review on Tuesday which went better than I had expected. I was panicking that I had to re-do some projects but it turns out I am doing pretty well! I am in a 2.1 right now and I still have time to push this mark towards a first.

The advice I got from Mike was to focus on my character project and improve little bits here and there to bump my grade up. I already talked with my 3D teachers and I have written down a list of things that I must, should, and could improve. I will explain the process on future posts.

On the review we also discussed ways to improve my blog and future plans. The way things are going I think I will be specializing on characters. Mike suggested to do lots of small  personal projects. Work in low poly and learn how to do good LODs. I might do a longer Zbrush project as well...

Last week I talked about how the Off the map project was draining our energy and making us anxious, well this week has been the complete opposite! Everyone has been working hard to get the buildings done and texturing is on the way. Jonah has been putting the buildings into our level and it just looks so much better. It gave us a boost of confidence and determination to keep on working on this project.

Also, the fact that my rabbit is fully playable in our level made everyone happy.

This week I have been working with blueprints and it hasn't been as bad as I thought. This graph represents the fundamental motion for the rabbit. The way it works is that each group is a state and the rabbit can be in either of the four states.  I had to do separate animations for the different jumping states.

And here they are. By combining these with the idle, walk, run sequence the character becomes playable.

This is the blueprint for the movement controls. I am so glad that coding in UE4 consists on connecting nodes or I would've gone crazy by now!

To be able to move the rabbit through AI controllers I had to make it fully playable first and here's the result. ( I apologize for the bad quality video..)

And once that was done I was able to set a path for the rabbit to follow via navigation meshes and target points.

And this is my progress so far, next week I will be texturing and working alongside Jonah to lay the path for the rabbit to follow.

See you soon!

Rising from the ashes

Hello all! This week has been pretty good! I put my rabbit into engine, we had a very helpful career session and I passed my taekwondo grading! Just in case I haven't mentioned it before I am part of the DMU taekwondo club since last year and today I got my red stripe belt or as we like to call it: the Spiderman belt.
I passed with an A pass as well which it's incredibly rare, so happy times!

Anyways, flaming dodo productions is going through a rough patch...We are not producing as fast as everyone else and it's affecting our morale. I believe that when we put everything together our level will come to life. We have a lot of buildings and once they're finished, our level will be almost complete.
Also, the fact that none of us is very strong on engine, it means that it takes us a while to figure out interactive elements. I have faith we can pull it off and then we'll have a good chance at winning the contest!

But, in terms of my work I did manage to put my rabbit into engine as promised! It was so frustrating figuring out how to do it. I followed about 3 different tutorials and none of them seemed to work for me.

The first time around I got a coulpe of errors which meant I could not import the files. It said that the mesh had more than one root. After changing and fiddling with a lot of different settings (which broke my animation and mesh a couple of times) I realised that my pelvis had two other pelvis bones attached to it. Apparently that was the reason it didn't let me import it into engine.

After I was able to import the skeletal mesh and animation, I opened persona (animation tool in UE4) and the animation did not work. The rabbit was completely static. It turns out I had to bake the animation and import everything separately but I managed to make it work in the end.

I wish I could show a video but I don't know how to record clips in engine, also the animation needs to be refined a little bit further in terms of details like the ears and tail.

The bad news though is that because it's not a playable character I might have to program its movements via blueprints and I am not looking forward to do that...but hey, a new adventure!

This process of creating a character has proven that I have a fair amount of patience! I can't tell how many times the animation just broke and I had to start all over again...so, so frustrating...

I don't want to turn this post into an essay but I'd like to say that up until now I have been feeling pretty down with all the pressure from internships and the course itself. I kept telling myself that I am not ready, that I am not good enough, and I kept putting myself down but I have decided to change that. I realised that I have the same right to get an internship as everyone else and I have to go for it because I might not have another chance...

So, I have an appointment with careers next week to perfect my CV and Cover letter and hopefully I will be doing and internship over the summer. My first choice is Natural Motion which seems like a really nice place to develop my skills and get valuable work experience!

To wrap all of this up, a pair of pictures from life drawing which I have been loving this whole year and I seem to be progressing at a good rate! Also, we have been set a long piece of writing for critical studies and it looks a bit intimidating...


See you soon!

Carla.

Running into trouble!

Hello! This past week has been very long...I was hoping to get the rabbit into engine by the end of the week but I ran into a few problems that has slowed down my pace.

Skinning is giving me a hard time. The mesh doesn't deform properly on some places and it makes the whole animation weird.

Most of it looks fine except for the front legs...I feel it might be the topology but if I make changes to it it means I have to skin the character all over again and I have wasted enough time on this already!

Considering that the rabbit will be fairly small within the scene there's no need to have a perfect animation...

I also did a new animation since the old one ended up breaking from trying to mess around with it too much. I never though that animation could take this long..haha

This week I will work with what I've got and do my best to make it look as good as I can. I want to put it into engine and test that it works. Once everything looks fine in engine it would mean I can add any animation and I will be able to go faster since the character has been skinned already.

At this moment in time we're more than half way through the project and we really need to give our 100% if we want to win this competition. We've got good ideas but I feel we need to pick up our pace!

well, this is it for today, see you soon!