We’ve Got Movement!!!!

All the levels are complete! (as complete as they can be without the details anyway) I was going to post a video of the Midtown area and some screenshots of the remaining 2 maps but I’ve decided against it. I’d like some places to take you all by surprise when you see it for the first time.

In all truthfulness, I actually can’t believe I’m here at this point about to head into animating all the weapons and monsters. I’ve often wondered how and when the hell I would get here. There was just so much work left to do that I couldn’t really predict when I would be finished all the levels. Now I’ve finally progressed to the place that I fantasized about being at years ago!

And in an amazing example of synchronicity, I got this text from a friend just this morning:

The very same morning that I started my animations! I take it as the Universe approving of where I’m at right now! I’ve never had a request like this from anyone I know before either.

I thought that animation would be a little on the difficult side since I haven’t done it in years. All I have are memories of how much of a pain it was to rig, weight and keyframe a model. Animation was never my strength (actually, I don’t even know what is!) and I barely got by with what I did animate. But…

I started to look into the various options out there and I am just blown away! The tools and software at our disposal right now (many of which are FREE!!!) is absolutely insane compared to when I graduated Computer Animation School in the late 90’s!

Here’s just two that I’ve looked at that allow you to grab motion capture data from a video you record on your phone. F***IN NUTS I TELL YOU!!!!

RADICAL https://getrad.co/

DEEPMOTION https://deepmotion.com/

I also looked at Mixamo and uploaded a model to see what it was like. Expecting it to be somewhat clunky and difficult, it actually took less than 30 seconds to do! Something that really blew me away was how the software was able to automatically rig the model (I already have a rig in place but this is much better) by just specifying a few reference points.

I started farting around and made a hilarious animation but as a friend just told me, it would unintentionally be quite terrifying being chased around by this thing! AHAHAHAA!

I plan on utilizing Mixamo animations to save time and alter them further where I need. The animations look fantastic, smooth and are lightyears ahead of anything I could make! I thought that animating all my stuff was going to take a few months but now it seems like it might all get done in a week! I said in a previous post months ago that when I got to a certain point, things are going to start moving very fast.

Well, that time is NOW my friends!