Week 12 - First Bake - 'B' Stage

 Week 12 - First Bake - 'B' Stage

This week I worked on reskinning the model to the rig I had as well as fixing some things that were not working on the left hand. after I had done that I reimported the model into unreal and used Mixamo animations as a place holder to make a simple state machine. I wanted to make sure that what I had was correct so I worked closely with Gabe to make sure that everything I made worked with his blue print of Dracula. I received a new version of the model to reskin so I copied the skin weights over from the old model to the new one and tweaked some errors that occurred. When I originally made the blendspace for the locomotion, I had an idle, walk, run animation. However we switched to a floating idle instead of a standing idle so I want to tweak the transition between walk and idle a bit to make it look better. 

Week 11 - High Res Meshing - 'C' Stage

 Week 11 - High Res Meshing - 'C' Stage

This week I wanted to focus on implementing a simple walk cycle VFX for Johnathan's footsteps.  I had to redirect my focus back on the rig however, because of continuous issues with exporting and importing animation in unreal. I also received a higher mesh model so I also worked on readjusting the joints for both the arm and legs because they were no longer aligned with the mesh. I added finger joints now that the fingers were placed in a final position as well as joints to manipulate the jacket. I really liked how johnny rigged the dress for medusa so I utilized a similar method for Dracula. I did a first pass of the skinning for the new mesh and plan on further refining it later on next week. 

Once that was done I reimported the new skeletal mesh into unreal and updated the ABP that we already had as well as the Dracula blueprint that Gabe was working on. I also started working on making a retargeter just to put some place holder animations for the state machine but the ik chains are still not responsive ;-; so I pivoted my focus for the time being to working on the footstep vfx instead. The one shown in the video is specifically when Johnathan jumps up and touches down on the ground. It is still a work in progress but the only thing left to implement is the dust cloud ring which will be easy.