Neutral Character Animations

And here are the final animations for the neutral state character.
Well, unless they need to be changed at a later date of course.
There is an idle, a walk, a run, a backwards run and a jump. The jump has no pre-empt or reaction on the land because of the way Unreal does its jump function.

















And here is a video of some of the animations working in UT3 engine, though sadly not as a playable character just yet.

Emerald Cavern Whiteboxing

We are now working on the Emerald Cavern as well, the basic layout has been sorted in Unreal and now various tests are being carried out, making sure everything flows nicely.



Some of the stacks of platforms will be changing slightly from the pre-production, but will make more sense when playing.

The level is currently quite jerky in movement (climbing stacks etc) as we are currently creating various mutators for Unreal to change the Unreal defaults, so we can portray the movement we want.

Anemone Sea tests

While learning about materials in Unreal I conducted some tests by creating a small Anemone Sea inspired room.



If you notice the further away that the pads are, they slightly change colour. In this video it is a greenish yellow colour, but it will be changing to suit the lighting and shadow colours we want.

The textures are currently not completely finished as they are preliminery textures.

The character is in as a pick up, thanks to Andy finding out how to do so, this is why he doesn't cast a shadow or look like he's actually jumping much.

There will be a version of the final Anemone Sea room coming up on the blog soon, showing how it is actually looking.

Neutral Character Rig

The neutral character rig has gone through many iterations, as it started off very simple, but has since then developed into a more complex one, allowing our animator Caryn to have an easier job animating it.

Although we did have a few problems getting it into the engine as you can see from the video below.



This then meant that the rig had to be started again, and tests were run every step that the rig was changed, but it is now finished.

Caryn is busy animating it as we speak, so we can soon have the character in engine with the finalised animations on it as the player character.

Below is a video showing the controls of the rig with its texture applied to it.



There is ikFK control on the arms, just my recording software seemed to not include the channel box, while also managing to chop a bit off the top.

Neutral Character Model

Here is a spin around of the Neutral character along with its current texture.



In total he comes to 8240 tris.

It was modeled and textured by Rob, using Maya, Zbrush and Photoshop.