Update regarding late posts

Holidays are coming!!!!

*regains composure*

Well it seems like its been a long time since I posted anything. It has, I've had some personal issues regarding stuff and its still not 100% yet. BUT the good news is after getting over the majority its now nothing that will affect my workflow (though some blogs may be early/late)

Now back on track.
As my previous blog detailed, I have done a mini timeline of what needs to be completed by when, Its not completed yet as I need to sort out the scenes and how they're going to be animated.

The original idea was to create a virtual environment for the robot to be animated in. Although I wanted to create a detailed scene for each section I was advised to stick with simple visual aides. I ended up making one large scene with simple scenery as well as positioning various cameras for each scene.

The scene where the robot leaves the room.
The trees and bushes are cloned all the way down to give a sense
of speed for the walking scenes.

21st Dec.
So for this week I set myself the UI screens as a tasklist. After experimenting with some chroma keying in Vegas I realized that i was creating more work than necessary for myself as instead I could just make a text layer in Sony Vegas that I could animate and add effects overtop to get a better feel for what I wanted.

Well this counts for the 2 weeks progress, Christmas updates will be as regular as I can make them!

So stay safe folks and have a Merry Christmas!

Timeline, What im hoping to achieve ideally! Now updated!

So as most of my readers would have noted, Alot of tasks have been completed.... But how many are left is kind of a mystery.

So to counteract that I'm going to put up some deadlines and tasks that need to be completed by then.

30/11/2012

• Asset list created
• Script created
• Storyboard created
• Storyboard Animated
• Robot modeled and textured

7/12/2012

• Rig Robot
• Test robot with simple animations
• Factory placeholder and Path area

14/12/2012

• Make the CD
• Make Log
• Placeholder scene for the robot to run through
• Placeholder scene for robot to dance through
• Suitable placeholder scene for robot to dance off

21/12/2012

• UI – SCAN COMPLETE
• UI – ITEM IS A STORAGE DISC
  CONTENTS – MUSIC
• UI – ALLOW TRACK TO PLAY?
  Y/N
• UI – WARNING
  UNAUTHORIZED LIMB CONTROL

• UI – FIND SIGNS OF LIFE
• UI – SCAN ITEM
  ANAZLYZE CONTENTS
• UI – HOW YOU REMIND ME
• UI – crisis state animation of fluid levels etc.
• UI – EMERGENCY SHUT DOWN IMINENT
• UI – Animation of a startup sequence.
• UI – Animation of track 2 being deleted.

28/12/2012

• Test scale of robot in scenes.
• Go over previous tasks and check progress.
• Organize storyboard into scenes.

Rigging complete!

Well that was a successful weekend, Managed to rig the model and up and until now was tearing my hair out trying to sort the vertices and weights. Now.... We have bones!

So I finally learnt how to rig, Its an amazing feeling seeing as the last 2 years ive been crying about trying to do it and failing.

It turns out that while I have been placing the bones correctly and skinning perfectly.... the vertices need to be rigid and 1.0 added to them all, Its still rough but the great thing about animating in 3D is I can change the vertices if I need to mid animation.

Polish Polish Polish as they say, Small update for you all. Now to work on the levels!