Models, rigging, animation, and more! - Devlog #5

Hello! Here's to another devlog  just over two months from the last one.  Previously, I talked about how much of my development time was spent on making all the character models for this game. That alongside work meant that progress slowed down, but there was another factor too; I was learning how to rig and animate (again). This marks my forth attempt tackling this skill and I failed the previous three times at the weight painting phase because I wasn't able to figure out how to resolve a particularly frustrating type of 'phantom weight' bug. Those attempts were in Maya, now I'm using Blender and while it has it's own quirks, the process was much less frustrating and as a result, I rigged and animated my first models! Doogies' test pose is in the header; just below is Yellow Dog. 

Currently I did animations for Yellow Dog and Doogies since they feature in scenes that are the closest to being complete. Doogies currently has the most animations: idle, walking, and running while Yellow Dog just has an idle and sitting pose. Not every character will have the same set of animations. Only what is they need in their respective scenes.  As far as implementation goes Doogies is fully integrated into the first scene; replacing the dummy model that was there previously. Same with the shooting star scene and Yellow Dog! You will also see Princess Foams' model in the space scene and Prince Orbital in the final but they don't have any rigs or animations yet. 





The build has bugs. Especially in the Follow Splorg scene. A few don't make sense, but most is due to having new models with a lot more going on with them. I'll try to fix them during the next update but my current priority right now is to make all the models for the first scene, then rig and animate Princess Foam for scene 3. 

Thanks for reading! It will probably be a few months before I update again, but I am ramping up to the part of game development where a lot of things happen again and that's going to be pretty exciting!