Getting stuck

During the morning I didn’t go to the office where we usually start to work at around 09:00, since I had a seminar to attend at 10:00. Since going by bike to the office set up my computer, start the programs I’m using and then having to close everything to go to the university wouldn’t be a very effective use of my time. I instead did some errands during that hour and then I stayed two hours longer in the evening.

The seminar was helpful since it was about how we are going to write our project report, what to think about when we start writing it. But also what to actively document about our work, since we have to use that information to do a proper analysis of the process of creating a game and what we learn during that process. Then it needs to be abstracted in such a way that it reflects over the design of the game, both the intended and the resulting one.

I figured blogging actively would help me remember all the things I’ve learned but I also realized I have to actively make notes in my post on how, what I will learn, might affect the games design.

During the rest of the day I spent a long time trying to get the polished animations into the Unreal project. First I tried to animate a take where the character is supposed to pull a lever, sadly the lever/mesh wasn’t rotated correctly in the max file, so I had to remove the skin modifier. Rotate it, re-apply the skin modifier and then skin it so that it can be animated in motionbuilder with the  character. Then I just had to send it to the motionbuilder file I am working on.

After that I noticed that the mesh was to small and I discussed with the colleagues If we should change its size right away. I mentioned that i first had to test the other animations anyway, since they are more important then this one animation. As we will be able to control the levers in the game without any animation. All I had to do was to import the animations to the project, but here is where I got stuck.

The problem is the same as I had during my blogpost, BGP – Day 19, of having the animations be animated in place. I went back to watch the same tutorial and did it again, but I couldn’t get it to work. It turns out that motionbuilder just didn’t want to key my changes. Also having the animations move in place, they where offset by the in place function, so I had to re-center them. And according to the tutorial you just had to inverse the value it had been offset to, which would mean if the value was 70 you should change it to -70. It happen to be my value split in half and then inverse it. After all that I managed to get the animations into the project before I had to go home.

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