Personal Development
- George Green
- Mar 11, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: May 2, 2020
Throughout the project, we all come against objectives that we found difficult. And in order to overcome some of these problems, we needed to develop our skills.
Here will be some documentation of my own personal development throughout the project.
The first bit of personal development came during the character design phase. And was already slightly detailed in the Big Table Games blog.
"When designing the character, I went through a few ideas based on the research I have done. Firstly, I was looking a creating a small girl. However, due to the fact of the potential of making younger boys feeling left out, I decided against this, and decided to make the character an animal.
At first I was going to make a bear. But after realising the fact that I'm not experienced enough in modelling to create a full humanoid character, I decided to make the character a Magpie. It also works with the theme of the game, where the character is going through the game and picking up opals."
When modelling, we decided to change our modelling and art style to low-poly. This is to allow the game to run smoother. In order to make the characters low poly, I had to forgo using Z-Brush to sculpt feathers onto the model.
Another personal development came with texturing the model. As the software I use for texturing (Quixel Suite) does not have a specific feather texture. I had to work around this by using a base texture and editing it to look like feathers.
Part of texturing the model involved the lighting and how it would interact with it. For this, the lighting has to be baked onto the model. Which is to be done in Substance Painter. However, I am unexperienced in this, so I handed this small job over to Annie, who has the experience with this task.
One of the jobs I had to do as part of my role was to animate the model. I had a small amount of experience with animating objects inside of 3DS Max. However, I wasn't fully sure of where to start.
Tutorials online with rigging a model were a big help, particularly the 3DS Max Rigging series from Arrimus 3D.
The first episode can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im8saU3k52E
Also, due to the nature of my model, once the rigging was complete, the animation was very finickey as there were many bones in the wing. The main problem I encountered when animating was returning it to it's original position. I did some research, and found my answer on the 3DS Max forums: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-9F79F01E-6A81-4103-B415-B5E88BD279A3-htm.html
When it came to exporting the character with the animation and importing it into Unreal, I also needed to search up some tutorials to help with that.
For exporting, I used a tutorial from Pluralsight Creative:
And for importing I used a tutorial from Virtus Gaming Hub, which I'm aware the programmer of Big Table Games, Leon, used to help him with programming the runner:
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