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.