Character Rigging Maya to Unreal

Never do too many steps in Maya Character rigging before importing and testing it in Unreal. Just when you think you know the pipeline for getting clean characters into unreal... it explodes again. WHY GOD WHY!??!? LOL, actually that's laugh cry, figuratively but it feels literal.

Little Pollock First in Game

Little Pollock first in game from destruct007 on Vimeo.

Audio is quiet, sorry. Its set up started as Jazz tutorial but the anim tree isn't the same at all, its more like the anim tutorials on the UDK forums I did set the gun up as a skeletal mesh and snap to the hand socket of the main char, so he can switch weapons eventually.

Anyway just getting a character in level.

3dmotive: Modular Building Workflow

Based on a recommendation I just got this http://www.3dmotive.com/product-modular-building-udk

Its a decent tutorial and at $15 I think it's worth it/priced right. Its short, and a lot of the ideas I already knew, so that made me bored. But there were a few key tricks and ideas in there that made it worth watching and buying.

I give it 3.25 stars out of 5. I like how quick it was but I think they could have pushed themselves to show more interesting and elaborate modular design.

Line Up

They are all now UV'd and textured with 1 shader (each that could be optimized further). I've been playing around with colors. Not "there" yet but ballpark. I'll probably go with this for now, rig and animate them, and get them into engine. I've been going over more anim tree tutorials (the 9 video tuts on the forums) Learning how to get their heads to work with look direction and get their body and tails to bounce walk/run.

Edit: just added this, thinking he should be darker, as he is a secret agent. 

UDK WIP Forum Started

Started mirroring this WIP on the UDK forums so I can get more feedback, tips, pointers, etc.

Little Pollock, Crazy Idea?

Re-reading a post over at http://www.hourences.com/future-games-udk-projects/ got me thinking again. Am I asking too much of my first game? Wasn't my goal finishing a game that looked good? swapping out characters is very doable... So here's my idea. What if I make a simpler iOS game that fun and tests out making a game from scratch start to finish? Just like the students did only I can't work on it full time. I'm calling it Little Pollock. He's not textured just lamberts assigned to faces right now. Little Pollock is UV'ed, but the wolfs are not. He's low rez (obviously) so he should be able to work on older iOS devices also, or I'll keep that in mind and try. 

Little Pollock

His head will turn with look direction tail will bounce as he moved and rotate as he turns, hands will bounce and react to shooting. 

Little Wolf Guard

Little Wolf Soldier

Enemies are not as simple. There's a lot to figure out here. How does AI work? What works on iOS? How does their health system work? Lots of questions, and research topics. 

Mobile Vertice issue

Not sure whats going on here, making a post in a second about it on the forums

if you look at that big you can see whats happening in game vs what I see in engine/UDK

iOS Developer

Just bought the iOS developer program. Next is to get UDK developer.

Working in game now, altho there is only 1 animation cycle and bad controls. When I get it to a decent point I'll make a movie of him running around nowhere.

I should also add that there are some verts on the character that are offset when I play on iOS device, but not when I look at it in the animSet editor. So still some trouble shooting type things on the list

New UDK Hotkey Pref

A lot fo the old hotkeys go away in the june build of UDK unless you set
Prefs>Flight Controls>Use WASD Only when Right Mouce Button

The reason I say this is especially if you are following a tutorial you'll get frustrated when a step involves a hotkey and you can't find the menu for that step either. 

Character Animation Import Steps

It may seem easy to import a character with animation but there's bugs potential with that, odd binding, joints shifted, etc.
The best way I've found to do it is:

Character Anim Import
1) Import Original un-animated Rig, cleaned up as you would clean a rig w/anim after baking
2) Create animSet
3) Double click on that to open AnimSet Editor
4) Set Skeletal Mesh to Cleaned Rig
5) File>Import FBX Animation
6) select the rigged character with animation fbx

If you don't have blendShapes you can delete all the models on the rig in the animation file and just export the baked down bind rig. So you have a character rigged, reference that into your animation scene. Animate it, save it. Run your bake script (select -hi of bind rig, bake all, delete everything that's not a joint in the bind rig or an animCurve) export that as fbx. That's what you import into the animSet, and you can import them all at once if they are in the same folder, like fbx/charName/anim/ select all an import through the animSet editor.

*Video Tutorial on this to come* 

Freelance and Vacation

Just an update, I finished fx for a commercial then went on vacation for a week. So I'm back on the case!