Time to rig some characters.

Main character named Garrett Del Vari in his second outfit.

I’m getting close to building out my game prototype. There’s this little issue of rigging. Not my most enjoyable step as an animator but it has to be done well. It gives more headaches later if you rush it. As of right now there’s four enemy types not including bosses. Three humanoid and one flying mech. The flying mech (a quadcopter drone) was pretty easy to sort out and ready to animate. This one isn’t so necessary for the prototype, so I’ll sit on that for now, the others are more import. I’m currently at a stage where the humanoid characters have a bone rig, and the skin weights are finalised. I just need to figure out the control rig so I can begin animation.

Jury is still out on the animation style. Full hand keyed animation or edited motion capture. Hand keyed is always cool but with a lot of characters to animate it might not be the most effect use of time. If I go down the path of motion capture, I have to capacity to do cut scenes. This could be cool addition, but we’ll see.

The test animations below are a little old as the model has been updated recently. Animation is from mixamo.com free motion capture library from Adobe.