Where I tell you about the game I'm making and why you'll give me your money for it.
Animation February 7th, 2010
I've been very busy with work lately, so progress has been slow... I got to work on a simple walk cycle animation, but a horde of blender bugs and a little bit of PEBKAC caused me to lose my work a few times... I mirrored Bob's bones to make sure he was symmetrical when he moved, but apparently the duplication didn't create 100% separate objects; for some reason, bones would copy the corresponding mirrored bone's rotation, out of nowhere, without warning, with no apparent logic, and after setting keyframes... Imagine setting up your IKs carefully, posing all your bones just the way you want them... You save your keyframe... And out of nowhere, the whole things blows up in your face, the poor thing's got his knees bent backwards and his hand stuck in his ass. Boo. Fix it by selecting all bones, and make them Single User... No, doing it to just the problematic bones or to every bone one by one is not enough, you need to select the entire armature while in pose mode. Why? I have no frickin clue.
Not to be outdone, I quickly slapped together a little walk cycle. Or maybe he's just flailing his legs and arms around. I don't know. You be the judge:
Or a run cycle... Whatever. I made this in about 10 minutes. Oh God, this looks terrible. Can you tell which foot is touching the ground? No? Well maybe it's because I got so pissed at Blender that I completely ignored my 10000 diagrams of stickmen running and that Muybridge-naked-man-running-a-marathon-while-his-wobbling-manly-appendage-makes-you-uncomfortable set of reference pictures. Ok... Better stop typing now.
Update: Bob running, take 2. And he's shiny like an apple.
Progress January 24th, 2010
New Year's resolution: make a friggin 3D game, and stop trying to be a hero. Seriously. I don't need to program a vertex shader for skeletal animation, or a GUI library, or create a custom model exporter so that my data is exactly the way I would expect it to be once I try to import it into my heavily OS/API-dependent excuse for a 3D graphics "engine." Open source geeks have sacrificed precious years of their lives just so I wouldn't have to! Heck, I'm writing this in a crappy text editor that doesn't even have word-wrapping capabilities, because I refuse to use free blog software. Lame.
Anyway... Latest work includes a new model for Bob the Astronaut:
I was inspired by that thread over at polycount where people post their "500 triangles or less" creations. Wanted to post it there until I read the instructions properly... It's 500 triangles, not faces. Since Bob's 494 faces are about 90% quads, his triangle count is 934! I could probably optimize him a lot, but I really have to move forward with texturing and animation so I can get started on a "walking around" demo.
Hello August 9th, 2009
Let's start over. Projects are on the left.