Synoptic Project Week 3

For this week i'd like to make as much of a start on asset design for characters, however this may not go as quick as i may have wanted due to adapting to a new room, which is way too small for my liking, and downloading all the systems i need to my new PC.

Currently the list of things I need to do is:

• Match stick man animation storyboard

• Asset designs for characters

• Watch tutorials on rigging and animation

I think for now i shall start with watching the tutorials for rigging and animation and then create some simple match stick man animation storyboards for walking, running, jumping and other basic movements for the Male base model idea.

Unfortunately, due to illness today, Monday, i'm struggling to focus at all and will probably not end up doing much if anything at all.

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Having done nothing yesterday i want to start off today doing some work out of the list above. I've decided to take a look at the tutorials and make notes as i watch on anything that i think may be helpful.

The above image shows how the walk animation can be made from the idle pose i designed for a base Male skeleton. I also looked at a second pose i could work on to be able to make a run animation.

I then made the walking animation with the character model in Unity. After watching a tutorial on skeletal rigging i decided that possibly having the legs and arms as one asset would work well for this, after this try however i feel that may still not be the case and it's best to go with my previous idea of separate pieces.

Other than that, the walking animation seems possible with this idle pose and should work well within a game. I'm now going to try animating it with a walk cycle in Unity to see how well it truly works as it is. After that i will try to solve any problems there are before i finally get onto designing character assets.

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So far this is what i have managed to come up with for an animation of a walk cycle in Unity. It's very janky, the distorted limbs snap a lot so need to be removed, and there are gaps between the legs and the pelvis when they move so i need to sort that out.

The things that need to be fixed here:

• Separate the limbs again

• Fix the foot on the right leg

• Cover the gap between the legs and the pelvis

After these parts are sorted i shall try to make this animation again, if it looks better then i will move onto the character assets. My current priority is a pose that works for the animations want to do, as it is the Idle pose should be capable of walking animations so i won't need to design a whole new one, however for the run animation and all other animations i will need to draw new poses.

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