F**king, God Damn, Fantastic Bloody Blog Post

Ok, so I haven't actually managed to get round to writing many blog posts this term (I have however been busier that I think I've ever been >_<). This post will sum up everything that I can remember doing since my last post (hopefully, despite my terrible memory, will be most of what I've done).

I've had a virtual sticky note on my desktop for a while telling me to do this post and Martin kindly edited it for me.

So that's why this post is called what it is. Read the rest of my scribble after the jump.

I'm not even going to attempt to write this in chronological order but hopefully putting topics under related heading will at least be logical. Anywho here you go.

My Favourite 3D Table

Ok, lets start with the most boring part so we can get it out of the way. Since my last post Daryl has kindly set up a Google Docs table, which is a lot less agonising than updating the wiki (considering how much I dislike updating this table I'm so grateful it's not on the wiki any more). It took a while to get into the groove of it, but the table is pretty accurate in relation to the state of the 3D models. There are a few fields which have either not proven to be of any use, such as the Type column, and some others which are quite hard to manage or decide what to put in them. It has been hard to know what the priority of items are (mostly as at the moment we need as many objects as we can get) so the Priority column hasn't really been used (maybe I should just set everything to high priority...). The Assigned To column also gets a bit confusing once more than on person has been assigned to the same object, as I was told not to delete any names. Mostly though, the table has been useful and occasionally people are kind enough to update it themselves when they finish an object. :)

Coordinator Role

Being a coordinator is a lot of work. Although I definitely feel lie I have grown a lot doing this coordinator role I don't think I'm really cut out to coordinate, my brain is far too ~~~~~~

I'm getting quite stressed with trying to balance all the work I'm doing with trying to organise what other people are doing as well (not to mention my dissertation and marketing cw getting neglected ).

As well as generally handing out 3D tasks to people I also did a quick unwrapping tutorial hopefully I can get some more people to do the UVW unwraps for some more of the models.

I have also unwrapped a number of models as well as finalising (making fit with the style) some of the place holder model created by other members of the team.

Character Work

This is the bit that I have actually enjoyed. I have modelled, animated and textured the following characters:

Blueberry Fodder - Tiny Bouncy Little Fella

This was the first character I completed. I decided to chooses the most simple character to get into the swing of modelling and animating. It originally only had attack and walk animations but I went back and added an idle animation after I had done the same for the Pear and Sprout. He is very bouncy.

Zomberry Sprout Fodder - Even Sprouts Can't Stand The Taste Of Sprouts

This cute little undead veg was the second fodder I animated; he has a bone in his tongue.

Pear Elite - "Are You Pre-PEARed?"

 The Pear was the first Elite I made and animated. I'm very happy with the way he turned out, especially his walk animation.

The Elites scream when they spot the player so I have also created a scream animation and texture for the Pear. The Orange has the scream animation but is yet to have a texture (I'll do it later).

 Orange Elite - Known For Huge Noses And Huger Axes

For some reason Ben wanted the Oranges to have big axes that resembled an orange segment, so now they do. I didn't rig the Orange in a very clever way, so I had a few problems with aligning the hands and the axe when animating. Next time I hopefully wont make the same mistake.

 Banana Beast Titan - FUN FACT: Bananas Are The Only Fruit With Feet

The Banana animation has a nice swinging motion (like a hammock, you could call it a banana hammock). I was originally only going to use one bone for the whole body so it would always be stiff, but I decided to use four bones. The Banana now moves his head around and wags his tail.

Captain Fennel Boss - He's Not A Fruit And He Sure Ain't Sweet

I just finished modelling Fennel so next step is to animate. It took a while to line up the stripes on his texture.

Logan Player - Who Said Berries Don't Wield Swords..? Probably No One 

 Logan was by far the hardest character to model, texture and animate. The modelling mostly just took a long time to get all the lumps right and there were just a lot of animations to deal with. The biggest problem (which I'm still not 100% satisfied with) was his eyes. The design was fine for a 2D character but it was very difficult to get the floating eyes to not look weird from most angles. This took a lot of tweaking and it still looks strange from a few angles. This may have to be something I take some more time to look at but for now there are higher priority jobs to do. The design of Logans sword was changed to match Michaels interface design. (http://ms3306-michael-hall.blogspot.com/2011/03/textures.html)

Animation Table

This spreadsheet shows the frames of the animations I've done so far.

Anyway that blog post took almost as long as it took to animate a character so I think I'll stop now @_@ (Maybe I'll upload the animations at some point, If I can work out how :P)