Hey guys! It’s time for a Friday tech update. Once again my week has been a combination of business and game dev (almost like I’m a part owner of a game developer). The business stuff isn’t too exciting, it’s mostly been just filling out forms… that and becoming a SWITCH developer! Woo! So yeah the business side this week has actually been quite exciting :)
Tech for me this week has been trying to learn how to set up online multiplayer in the UE4 engine, which is both simpler and harder than I had presumed. But it’s very hard to test because we need a second set up that doesn’t go through the same router, for fear of a false positive (which has happened already), so someone has to go home with the laptop. So it’s a bit awkward to test, but we’ll get there.
In the down time from that I have started to skin Dirk now, so he can be ready for animation sooner rather than later. I actually quite like skinning and rigging (even though it is quite tedious), but like all development it is not without its issues. The issue that has been attacking me is that MAYA LT doesn’t like to keep the joint rotation and scaling axis aligned, and there’s no way to edit the scaling axis without the re-orientation tool which doesn’t allow you to manipulate the axis directly. So in short you tend to end up with misaligned rotation and scaling axis. For most animation rigs this wouldn’t be an issue, but ours is a stretchy rig, so we can get really nice and smooth stylised/cartoonish squash and stretch animation out of 3D characters; it looks so good when it works but this scaling axis issue is making it a little harder to get there.
Anyways I hope you all enjoy your weekend!
JULES
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