Beginning Animation Mech :Lara:

Here is an initial shot of a basic walk cycle in Maya. For the Mechs basic movement it will be a quicker cycle since the Mech has to move across a battle field. There 25 key frames being used for this.

Mech Rig

Start of Adding Controls for rig

wolf_rig_progress_9/1/14(darren)

Here is a quick post to show a little bit of progress on the wolf rig. I've restricted each joint to only allow them to rotate as far as they need to rather than a full 360 degrees. The inclusion of pole vectors allows for the knees to be corrected to a straight leg position but has created an issue where joint rotate function has stopped and this is something which if isn't solved tomorrow needs to be done by  next monday.

Progress

Character Gantt Charts

Latest version of the character gantt charts for character creation and animation, thanks to Dan for sharing the layout from his charts.

Rig progress (darren)

Here is a quick post showing a bit more of the progress of the rig. The main added feature is the ability to control the feet and lower leg areas by control curves and to be able to pose the feat with a foot role. There is also the ability to pose out the knees from side to side if needed. While these things aren't necessarily needed I have decided to include them on the basis that I don't have the experience to generate a rig without including them as I am reliant on tutorials. Below are a the progression images and an image of a dog skeleton that I used to figure out the placement of the leg joints, how many I may need and possible naming conventions.

rig progression (darren)

here is a quick post showing the progress of the wolf rig. There was a degree of rebuilding because the way the mesh was built creates movement problems for the legs because the joints aren't aiming straight ahead. The majority of today has been deciding whether to include a reverse foot roll because for the most part it won't be seen in game but due to lack of confidence in adjusting what is included in the rig I have decided to include foot rolls in the rig. Below is the progress of how they look.

Rig Progress (darren)

Here is a quick post showing the small amount of progress made on the rig this week. The majority of time has been spent making sure the joint orientations are correct that X is aiming down the joints and Y is aiming up from the direction of X. The aim being to have the entire joint system at least generated by Friday with some indication of control curves applied to the joints too

Game Design Doc and more organization stuff

uv's update and weapon simplify (darren)

Here is a quick post outlining the completion of the mech's UV's and the alteration of the mechs weapon so it doesn't look so over engineered and so it looks like it actually fits on the arm like a solid object.
In regards to the mesh of the light weapons the majority of the poly's weren't being used as effectively as they could have been so I dropped the poly count and it was through that that the mesh started to look more like a solid object. To improve the texture quality overall for the entire mesh I pieced as many parts together and overlapped UV's anywhere I could to gain that better quality and detail and make the overall file more efficient when multiple versions of the mech appear in the game

for some reason this picture is dark on blogger but fine on anything else.