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!