Experimenting in Blender.

Dev Diary #15

This week I discussed my role within the project with my team as well as split the art jobs between me and the other artist. Due to my experience with character design, making sprites and animation, it was decided I would take on the role of creating the characters for the game. After having decided upon the roles, I set myself the task of learning 3d modelling, rigging and animating a character in Blender to be completed during the week. Following a series of tutorials, I was able to model a basic low-poly character and give it some basic colour and lighting. Thanks to Blender's armature feature, I was able to easily set up a rig and move the limbs to fit my model, ready to be animated. One issue I encountered during this phase, was that after testing the model's movements in the 'pose' mode, I noticed parts of the mesh were moving with other parts when they shouldn't have been. After doing some research, I discovered a Blender tool known as 'weight painting' and upon opening this tool, I could visually see why parts where getting moved with other parts and I was able to use the 'add' and 'subtract' sub-tools to fix the problem. After fixing the rigging, I moved on to the animation and decided to try creating a simple run cycle. This went relatively successful, however there was one problem I just couldn't solve, and that was a random vertex which would spike out with certain movement, however it never showed up on the weight painting so I am unsure what caused it. After finishing the process, I ended with rendering it as an animation.