Another week, another installment of What We’re Working On. Last week, we were knee-deep in modeling and rigging our four main characters. We were mostly successful in that we have completely modeled and rigged three of them. That fourth one will come once we discuss the character design a bit more (as I mentioned in my previous post, we mostly just wing it on all of this stuff).

My modeling talents were definitely put to the test this last week. As a person who has a bit of an artistic thought process but no actual artistic skill, it was a bit of a bumpy ride. With these characters being my first humanoid models, I had a lot of learning to do. I input each individual vertex by hand on my first human head. Vowing to never do that again, I began using cylinders and various tools in Cheetah (like the scalpel and weld tools) to do the brunt of the work for me.

The plan was to pass off the models to Shannon so she could rig them. However, as she had never done rigging before, and I hadn’t done rigging on anything that needed vertex weights that weren’t 100% all the way, the two of us weren’t prepared for the complexities of rigging a humanoid character.

Whereas the sheep in Sheepstacker were composed of completely separate moving parts, humanoid characters have skin that has to stretch around the arm and leg joints. This was the most difficult part to get right. Since I had more rigging experience, I took over the initial rigging job for our first character, and played around with it until I got it right… well, mostly right. There’s still a bit of pinching in some areas, but we’ll try to cover it up as best we can.

I also did a full UV unwrap of one of our characters. Again, the complexity level versus our experience level was the holdup here, but I think things worked out decently. I’m passing along my knowledge to Shannon so she can complete the rest of the characters while I start working on our fourth and final main character.

We went through a few more iterations of our logo design. We’re getting closer to having a design I feel we can call final. I haven’t been doing very much programming in the last week, though I did speak with my good friend Nathan Fouts over at Mommy’s Best Games about some technical points that we’ll be facing soon.

Friday was also Snow Leopard Upgrade Day! I’m a bit impulsive when it comes to OS updates, so it probably would’ve been better for me to wait to upgrade until a few more kinks with some of the apps we use were worked out, but I just couldn’t resist.

One app that we had just started using to keep the project synced across our machines (since Unity doesn’t play nice with SVN or Git) was Windows Live Sync, which up until the Snow Leopard upgrade worked just fine. Having gotten used to having the project auto-sync on our machines, we needed the functionality back ASAP. Since the Live Sync team has been quiet on when they’ll actually fix the issue, I went looking for an alternative. Luckily, we found Dropbox, which not only does the sync functionality we needed, but also backs up our project files online, and it works on Snow Leopard. Win-win-win.

So we’ve got a bit more character modeling and rigging to do and lots of texturing. After that, it’s character animations and the creation of our very first complete level. Very exciting stuff.