Week 5: Play tests & More Faces

Assets: Basket, Baluster, Firewood, Plate Stacks (x3), Dart, Dartboard, Spear

What I've Done

This week we had another round of play tests for our Aftermath environments. We received some pretty warm feedback. A lot of people liked the shapes of the assets, the movable objects and the chaos. I quickly smashed out a few proxy assets (above) before the play-tests. In regards to the plates we wanted them to be able smash though we couldn't figure it out in time so I ended up just making these placeholders.

Below, I finished the expression chart from the reference I was using last week, the process was a bit longer than I had initially anticipated, spanning over a some hours in a single day. I'm also starting to think about the character I want to use for the animated expression chart for my "final" mini specialisation project. Haven't a solid design yet, though I'm imagining them to be more stylised to make things simpler for animation's sake.

This week we also had a deeper look at texturing, materials and shaders in using Unreal 's node tools.

Resources

http://referensu.tumblr.com/image/138273901701 - Profile Expressions Chart: The only resource I really focused on this week was that of the facial expression chart I was using for reference for the above drawings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvbfcmXpepw - "My 7 steps to great Character Design" by Aaron Blaise: I've been following Aaron Blaise's work for a while and this popped up in my recommended feed on Youtube whilst I was thinking about character design for the mini specialisation. A fantastic tutorial in general and a great reminder about things that I often put on the back burner that I should pay more attention to.

http://blog.animationmentor.com/facial-animation-101/ - "Facial Animation 101" by Dana Boadway-Masson: A great rundown on the basics of animation. The page is just as the title says, the 101 on facial animation. The blog post provides a lot of great sources which I'll look further into as research.

What I've Learned & Planned Next

On Trello I've dropped some of my assigned assets to focus on creating a rigged corpse for one of our trigger objects in the Aftermath Project. I haven't started on it yet so our team has had a bit of brainstorming and we've decided to use one of our old character models from last trimester and tweak it to fit the theme of the environment. If this gets done quickly then I;'ll just keep working on the assets to finalise them. I hope to have finished drafting out a character design for the specialisation as well as attempting to apply expressions to animals for experimentation. Though most work will be going toward the Aftermath project seeing that it is due next week...

Cheers,

Grassland