Milestone 8 (Naomi)

 Overview

This sprint, we went back to mainly focusing on our individual tasks. My individual tasks are listed in the following sections.

Testing Mixamo Animations

Now that the Luna model is finished aside from the final textures, I put it in Mixamo to see how the animations would get applied. This is further discussed in the "Challenges" section. Below is a gif showing what one of our chosen animations looks like on the model

Modelling the Health Restoration Chamber

I helped out Zineb a little bit with the environment assets by taking on modeling the health restoration chamber. This will be an object that players can enter in order to restore their health. I modelled and UV mapped it, which took a lot longer than expected due to maya being slow and glitching. Next I would need to add the textures, and add a script to it in unity to incorporate it into the existing health system that I created during the last sprint. Below is what it currently looks like:

I imported the Luna model into the scene to as a size reference (she is roughly the same height as the player)

Browsing Environment Assets

I also helped Zineb out with the environment by looking on sketchfab for furniture assets she could put into the different rooms of the spaceship. She told me what she had envisioned and I would skim the website for assets that fit that theme. We were in the same room so we worked on this together a bit. I then sent her all the links in gmail so she could further evaluate them.

Trello Board

Here is what our trello board currently looks like. Similar to the previous sprint, most elements are still in "in progress" due to them being time consuming, but we anticipate most things being moved to the "done" category by the end of the next sprint as it is the day of our final presentation.

Challenges

Going back to the mixamo aniamtion tests, as seen in the gif, the model is not bending correctly at all. The arms are distorted and so are the legs when visible. This is mainly because when I set the markers for the auto rigger, I can't see what I'm doing:

I do have extra cuts in the geometry that mark exactly where the elbows and knees are, but I can't see where they are because there is no "wireframe on shaded" mode and because the dress is in the way. I can approximate it, but it's not exact This is what led to the animations being completely distorted.

This should be a fairly easy fix, however. I plan to take a screenshot of the model in maya with the wireframe on and mark where exactly the elbows and knees are. I can then reference this when placing the markers in Mixamo. I also need to make some small changes like smoothing the face mesh and adding a mouth socket so that the head animations look more natural. I also need to extrude the inside of the dress to that the skirt is not see-through.

Another challenge this sprint was simply not getting as much done as I had planned. It's at the point in the semester when everything gets extremely heavy so it was difficult to manage my time. I plan to work on the project a lot more in the next sprint.

Successes

Despite the arms and legs being broken in the animations, the Luna model works quite well in Mixamo aside from that. Below is another animation that we are considering that looks much more flattering: 

It was also a success to be able to help out Zineb with the environment assets (saving her time from browsing assets) as she was able to complete the majority of the implementation over this sprint.

Hours Spent

In total, we spent around 18 hours and 20 minutes on this sprint

I spent about 2 hours modelling and UV mapping the health restoration chamber, 1 hour testing out animations in Mixamo and 1 hour browsing environment assets

Sumaiya spent about 20 minutes designing ui elements and 2 hours on the introduction cut scene

Zineb spent about 12 hours on the environment