The Cast List. Now looking pretty.

Another long one here. The last couple of weeks from my end have been on the characters; our spiders and ever patient Dwarven hero, who had been sitting on the sidelines for far too long.

Firstly, our spiders. The problem I discussed here a couple of weeks ago has been fixed. While still not 100% sure what the problem was, I narrowed it down enough so I could fix it. The main issue was with the .fbx export, where the skin were coming away from the spider bones on one side. The bones still animated the legs, but because the legs were off line with them, the legs animated into the spider. I'm pretty sure that this was due to way the spider was modeled. Not everything was fully attached, and the legs and torso objects were separate meshes. Though why this only affected the legs on one side, I still don't know.

But that's been fixed now. The spider had to remodelled in places so it forms one complete mesh, with each vertice connected, extra edge loops added to the leg joints as well as numerous other minutia that's far too boring to go into. Unfortunately this meant that after all that had been done, it had to re-rigged and re-animated which took up more of our ever decreasing time.

So we now have two different types of spiders, with the brown one pictured above a slightly flatter version of the smaller ones. A simple material was added to each to give them some distinction. In future for my own portfolio of work I will probably add a more detailed material, with eyes, fangs and more stylish abdomen, but with the view point of this game being the way it is, none of these features would be visible. So for time reasons, the spiders have been left as they are.



On to our character. With the deadline being the way it was, it was felt that we didn't have time to rig and animate an entirely new model. I attempted rigging Paul M's Dwarf character, but editing the envelopes was taking a lot of my time up, and I would not have been able to get that done in time. So a simple dwarf character was found online here that was already rigged and animated, which saved us at least a couple of days work and allowed me to focus on character equipment and stats.

Of course, things are never that easy, as the .fbx version of the Dwarf was missing his head.

One of those bizarre problems. But it could be worked around. The dwarf character also came with .obj versions of the model (which is simply the unanimated mesh). From this file, I detached his head and brought it into the .fbx version of the file. To this file, I then added some head bones, skinned them to the head and then attached both the bones and head to the headless dwarf. Amazingly, this all worked out perfectly.

This character came already with all the animations we needed and some extras too which was great, and saved me days of work.


Following this post will be another one, going more in-depth into the character and equipment mounting.