Sunday 27 March 2011

Roath will be happy days for me, I think!

Okay, I suppose I deserve a slap on the wrist. Not only have I not been doing anything on the book designs front in the past few weeks, I have also not been doing much in the way of Uni work either, and my 365 page a day project has been neglected for... I'd say around a month. I am a bad, bad girl.

But wait! I have not been doing nothing!

I've been heading out to Cardiff a lot lately, first to find and view and choose a house to live with some friends. There are eight of us, six of which will still be in Uni next year, but we have split up into two groups of four for the purposes of house-finding. I'm going to be living with Claire, Dave and Todd, who I can affectionately refer to as The French Actress, The Dark Dove and The Wizard Rockstar... Really need to come up with some good names for the other four guys. I'm also not sure what nickname I would have, although I've been told by the DarkDove that if I were a Pokemon I might be a Persian, and that the French word for cat is pronounced the same way as the first half of my name. Perhaps I'm The Petit Chat?

Almost us: This image drawn by The Wizard Rockstar includes members who won't be part of the Cardiff crew, and is missing out a couple of people...

We've all managed to find houses and flats in Roath, literally a couple of blocks away from each other, which is fantastic. We won't have a garden in the flat my half will live in, so I was looking up allotments in Cardiff and found some cool things going on.

Then I found out all about the Roath Market, and the Craft Market too, as well as an apparently abundant craft culture in Roath [see here too]. Needless to say, I am now even more excited about the first post-Uni year of my life than I was before!! And unfortunately more distracted from my current Uni coursework....

Come now Petit Chat, don't get too ahead of yourself!

Wednesday 16 March 2011

Yellow Snake

Today I made a little artwork to splat onto the walls of room two. Wasn't sure what to do though, so I'm drawing a little inspiration from my 4 Pillars [if you don't know what that means, don't worry. It's one of those Chinese Horoscope things].

Here's my year pillar, the Yellow Snake:


I literally just painted the body with the touch pad on my laptop, and sneaked a peek at this tutorial for some help with making it look like old graffiti.

Here's a quick look within Unity:

Empty Room; Requires Vandalism

This is a quick check I'm doing to see how the texture I've put on puzzle room two looks, before I start vandalising it with paint and more wear and tear like Tim has done for the first room.

Tuesday 15 March 2011

I'm going to paint some walls

Project

Well, the animating plan didn't work out too well. I found it really hard trying to work with a rig I didn't understand. I might have done better if I had used the same tutorial Tim had worked from to rig a character, so that I'd know from the start what all the lines on the rig meant [perhaps I should rig up Mr Shiny when he is made?].

So this week I've got to texture up the second room of the first level. Here's what I've been given to work with:


Tim has shared a bunch of textures with me using Dropbox [Dropbox is a file sharing/syncing software and website that's pretty cool. If only I had more computers with files I want to keep track of so I could play with syncing stuff with myself...]


UPDATE: Have put the base texture on the walls, floor and ceiling, now it just a little tender, loving care vandalism decoration.

I've also made a little task chart for us to look at and use. I'm not sure how up to date it is at the moment and we haven't thoroughly discussed Milestones at all, but it's up there and is shared in our Dropbox folder for us to edit as we go.



Dissertation

I think I've gone into denial. The sun is out, I can smell freshly cut grass, I've got plans for living arrangements next year in Cardiff with some friends, and I've got texturing to do today. Let's just say I will be happy when I have seen the end of the dissertation period.

Wednesday 9 March 2011

I'll be like Dr Frankenstein

Looks like I've got me some animating to do! Tim's gotten sick of looking at Tagger, so we're having a bit of a switcharoo. He's going to take over the environment for now, and I'm going to animate the rest of Tagger's animations. Except I haven't done any 3D character animation since the tweaking of old Igor back in year 1...

Tutorials to the rescue! Here seems to be a nice little one from OliverBarraza on YouTube about importing character animations from Maya into Unity. Not hugely in depth but I think I get the gist of that side of things.



What I seriously need now though is some tuts for tips on handling a rigged up character for animating. Part 2 following the above video has some tips, not sure I quite understand some of them yet though. I think I will just have to have a play and see what I can do.



He has some more tutorials in his Advanced Unity Tutorial series, so I'm going to check those out now and see what I can learn.