September 2018 Week #3

Yo people! How's the heat? We're super proud to announce the progress for this week... you'll love it!

ADITYA CHANDRA (Lead Developer)

In under 7 days, I managed to MAKE ALL THE GENERAL HIGH-QUALITY HUMANOID ANIMATIONS REQUIRED! Now that's determination.

That aside for now, let me get you familiar with all the animations I created. In under a week, I have managed to create over twenty-two high-quality animations in 60 F.P.S... All animations are handmade in Blender, our favourite 3D software. On Monday, after fixing some bugs inside the Unity project, I completed rigging and skinning the low-poly humanoid character model made by Diwangshu, using a custom-made armature that could be easily recognized by Unity. It's something like this:

Turns out, Unity needs something like this: the root bone should be the pelvis, and all bones should be directly or indirectly the children of the pelvis. The pelvis must be the parent of the middle spine, which goes on to be the parent of the chest which has head as its child. The chest also is the parent of the shoulders > forearms > arms. The pelvis has more children: the hips > thighs > legs > feet. If I just helped you with this info in developing your own game, you're welcome.

The animating stuff started from Tuesday and went on till yesterday (Sunday), which was a lot of hardwork, plus some irritating moments when the joints would break up for no reason, the mesh would deform in a very... 'painful' manner or all hell would break lose and all the math would go wrong. Nevertheless, I did it, did it quite efficiently and it took less time than expected. I'm happy about that. And... as for our cube-y little character, I happen to think it looks (almost) perfect for a low-poly game such as ours.

First up, I have the boring default T-pose. Even though you'll never see it in action, this is really important for Unity to understand everything properly. Just to be very sure, I have also set frame 0 of the animation file as this t-pose. Here it is:

Next, I have, of course, the Idle animation. This turned out to be exceptionally well apart from there is something wrong with the right elbow (I'll fix it easily). The breathing feels quite natural and I'm fairly happy with it. It's something like this:

Then there's the walk animation. The walk animation runs for 60 frames at 60 F.P.S. (that'll be exactly one second) and is quite smooth... so I think it'll do nicely:

After walking comes running. The run cycle runs for 30 frames at 60 F.P.S., so that'll be 0.5 seconds or exactly 4 running steps per second. That's fine. I actually ran to see if it really is. You can also see it in action at the very beginning of this blog (sorry for the low frame-rate of the GIF).

Coming up next is the... quite weird... crouch animations. What I'm unhappy about is that the character looks as if he's pooping, but still I think it'll do. If it doesn't for some reason, I can always modify the animation later.

Also, the player deserves to walk as well while he's crouching. Turned out I had to create a separate animation for that. But it worked out fine, and I'm quite proud of this one. Surprisingly, this looks quite realistic and from no angle as if someone is pooping-on-the-go!

After making the crouch animations, I felt it would be really nice if A.T.A. supported going prone. With that in mind, I made this awesome animation... and believe me, it looks much better from the back. Take a look:

I continued by adding moving functionality while prone:

Then I started working on something that looked like a guy aiming with a gun. It was really hard configuring the joints, especially the arms, in a position which looked realistic. Though I think I'll come back later to make it look nicer, this is what I came up with:

I also added walking to this aim animation, and made separate animations for aiming up, aiming down, aiming while crouching, aiming while prone and their respective walk sequences where needed:

Pretty cool stuff, eh?

Next came an animation both for melee attacks and throwing throwables. I decided to make this a common cycle since when I made 'em differently, it was difficult actually differentiating them:

And then here is the much-needed jump animation. I have two instances of this one, just in case.

Then I made an animation looking something like a guy working with a P.C. on a desk. I don't really know where yet, but it'll definitely come in handy later.

Similarly, I made a sitting animation, very much required for placing grannys and boring kids on benches in various locations around the open world when ready:

Next I made some driving animations: one for driving a car and another for driving a motorbike, but obviously they'll also be used for many, many other vehicles. Here they are:

Now, THIS one may look like a kid going to school with his school-bag, but actually this an animation for riding jetpacks, using parachutes and other such stuff. It's something like this:

A while later, I felt the need for an animation which will trigger when the character recovers after being converted into a ragdoll because of taking damage, falling or taking on forceful blows. With 120 frames on 60 F.P.S., the 'getting up' is clearly the longest cycle:

I also knew a 'talking' animation will be required for the story and stuff, but since the face is completely flat, I just created something with the head going back and forth on the Y. I'm not even suure if I'll actually use it in the game, to be honest.

This probably sums up all the important animations. But this isn't it! I also made an animation of a guy looking at his mobile phone. The world today is incomplete with mobile phones!

Then I made an awesome animation of a guy playing his guitar! This will, without a doubt, look great in the final video game! (Just needs a guitar...)

And just because I was itching to make some more, here I am with the awesome DANCE animation (this deserves a GIF):

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

DIWANGSHU KAKOTY (3D Artist)

My exams are still going on... but still I did manage to conjure up some pretty neat models. For example, a sawed-off shotgun, a cute cat and a cool sniper rifle!

I know, I'm awesome.


Another great news: the Moonwalk Entertainment business manager, Utpal Chandra, completed the funds transfer for the project. That's right! We now have the development budget for A Thug's Ascension, ₹ 50,000 (US$ 715), right here in our bank account. Cool!

So that was pretty much it. Once again, we're super-happy with our progress from this week... and also because most of these animations look fairly nice. Also, with the awesome assets our 3D artist D.K. is creating, hopes seem pretty high! Next, we're planning to do some refining in the animations and some texture painting. That was it, people-- thanks for reading!