armatures

quick progress update-

since the first three levels have been modeled and scaled and the courses of action as they relate to each philosophy now I am waiting for the programming to get up to the same place. So in the meantime I have been learning about armatures.

An armature is a skeleton that you can use to move the mesh around for animation purposes. I watched this Blender armature tutorial as well as some others.

Here is a picture of my first go at the armature. It correctly moves the mesh around, but I am not sure if it is supposed to look like this. I am very inexperienced with armatures and animation, so I will have to watch more videos to see if this looks correct. I will let you know about progress that I make in this area!

The process was not super smooth sailing. At first I was having problems with figuring out which way the bones should go. Once I figured that out I was having issues with the bone envelopes. It turned out that my humanoid model was too pudgy to be controlled by a bone in the center of each limb. I was not sure how else to fix it so I slimmed the humanoid monster, he is no longer a pudgy little guy. Now he is a slim purple humanoid. Now the next step is to use the armature to animate the humanoid. And then to repeat that process with all of the other characters! Looking forward to it! In addition to working on the magic of animation I am going to start doing some sketches for the visuals of the game (level backgrounds and platform design). Yay! progress!