Common Art Week 10 - Protomeshing - 'D' Stage

 At this stage, I am focusing on the medusa character rig. I did spend way too many time on this than I expected, and the rig is still not properly skinned. This rig will be done by next week.

I’ve finished everything in this rig except the leg FK and finger FK. What I really like is how the dress reacts to the leg movement. The dress mostly follows the legs and knees, but there are still controls for the dress supports so I can add extra expression. The dress holders also add a bit of drag, which helps convey weight and gravity in the motion.

    Just started on the weight painting process, I can tell these dress holders do their job nicely. I also changed the base of this skeleton to a mocap skeleton for naming convensions.

Perforce Proof:

Common Art_Week 09 HW - Initial Block Out - 'F' Stage

 For the 'F' Stage, I have created a proxy Medusa_Rig which includes all the basic hierarchies. One technique I used is copy weights: I first weight paint without the clothes, then copy the weights onto the clothes, saving me a lot of time. Of course, there is still a lot to improve. For example: adding extra controls for her dress and creating modular animations for her snake hair.

I have also built a reference board for the FXs we might use in our game, including Water, Wind, Interactive sparks and Fire:

 This is the perforce proof:

3DArt W7HW_Simple Crate and Barrel_Part Three

Last week, I sculpted the crate and created both a high-poly and a low-poly version of it. Then I baked the maps in Substance. This week, I painted over it in Substance, layer by layer.

Then I exported the textures to Unreal and captured a high-resolution screenshot of it.

TechArt W7HW _ Animation State Machines

To begin with, I have set up a blend space to control transitions between differen animations: idle; jog and sprint using a variable (BSSpeed).

  In the animation blueprint, find the "State Machines". This is where all the magic happens. I have created a loop, starting from Locomotion to  "Hit the Ground"; "FiringRifleLoop"; "BackOnYourFeet" then finally go back to Locomotion. Each state represents an animation sequence, and each transition icon stands for the conditions that required to move on to the next state.

 

These are the conditions, reading from left to right, from top to bottom.

                         

The float variable (BSSpeed) comes from the vector length of character pawn's velocity. The boolean variable (Firing) comes from the boolean (Is Firing) in the Character blueprint.

  In the Character blueprint, the "EnhancedInputAction IA_Fire", which triggers when the F key is pressed or released, will affect the boolean variable "is firing". When implementing this variable into movement mechanic, I am able to stop the movement input when Is Firing equals True. I added another boolean "Is recovering" to make sure that when "Is recovering" equals True, the movement input is delayed by 1.5 seconds.

  Finally, I create a custom GameMode for my character so that I don't need to set it up everytime.

I have recreated the process on the Mutant character, and instead of old animation states, I made him roar at the end of the fighting action.

 I made some changes in the character BP to make this anim cycle a bit more smooth. This logic divides time into repeating segments of 80/30 (AnimFrame / FramesPerSecond). If the current Triggered-Seconds is less than the threshold, it delays by the remaining time until the threshold. If it’s greater than the threshold, it multiplies the threshold by the segment count, then calculates and delays by the difference between that value and the current Triggered-Seconds.

Perforce Prof & Position:

Common Art W7HW _ Let’s Make It Stick

Stickers! I love making them. It’s my first time using a Cricut machine, and I’m having tons of fun with it! Here’s my project in Cricut Design Space.

When I start to print, I notice that it was hard to control the colors, it's either too bright or too dark. Therefor I need to test multiple times and adjust the brightness; contrast and levels in Photoshop. Also, be careful not to print the stickers on the back side of the sticker papers!

CommonArt Week 06 - Use of Composition

 Final image:

Perforce Prof: