Putting out fires

With my character done, rigged, and animations being made by my awesome teammates, I've been working on other not-as-cool things. I've been problem solving with our designs for the character - catapult designs as of late. First, with Derek's initial wagon design (the lower half of the catpult), the catapult top hardly had room to grow before clipping into the character. We also noticed the character towed the wagon from one side and fired it from the other. That would be confusing to the player, or add some tricky animations and general awkwardness. We decided it was best to get some redesign action going on. While Derek and Lisa were animating like crazy, I revamped the wagon design by adding some MacGyver-ness to the handle system, so now it's way longer reducing the clipping and allows for firing from the towing position. This should simplify the transition from towing to firing.

I also made the level 2 catapult design. I had some concept art from Lisa to go from, but I thought it still looked a little barren. After some Google searching, I found another design I could blend pieces into Lisa's design. I modeled and textured that, then threw a rig into it with some simple controls and animated a fire animation. With the new wagon firing system, I needed to redo the fire animation Derek originally made. Then fix the transition from towing to firing.

Lastly, I've had to go through all our animation files getting them ready for exporting at least five times now. First I had to turn the rig around and re-freeze the game rig joint orients. Then put copy-paste all our animation work onto the rotated rig. We had to turn it because it turns out both our render guy and I compensated for the fact Maya operates in OpenGL while our game runs DirectX. So I made my rig backwards, and he had a backwards camera. Our something. It turned out to be more work for him to fix his camera (with the risk of breaking other stuff) than for me to rotate the rig and reexport animations. Then I've had troubles with weight painting, too many render nodes, ever-present image planes slowing things down, dozens of empty layers accumulating from importing files for testing... ugh.