Quick Update, Unity Problems

Walk Cycle and Textures finished, now onto the rendering and final touches! I have tried to export into Unity but am having permission issues with the program and can't even open it. :(

Woo!

After doing a huge amount of tweaking with the bone structure and change length, as well as some visual improvements, I am finally able to apply my texture and get an actual working walk cycle going. I have found adding inverse kinematic bones to the knees creates a much greater method of posing and creating the creatures walk cycle. It is much easier to pose in a more fluid way. I am finally happy with the overall look. I want the pincer to be working as well but that may be setting myself up too many fish to fry.

With the addition of more meshwork around the 'knees', I have created a more organic looking creature. Several tweaks here and there have also improved the overall look of the creature.

More tweaking and weight painting.

I have sort of finished the weight painting, however im having issues with the mesh staying in certain positions when you pull different areas of the inverse kinematic bone. Hopefully I can sort this out. Here are a few pictures of my creature:

Tutorials & Update

After just completing the tutorials, I am very excited about Unity. It has an intuitive easy to use interface which seems to blend coding in without the headaches. I now understand why we are using this engine because of the power it has while not being specifically designed for coders or designers.

Although I will have to brush up on my javascript, I am interested to see how a final game shall look using this engine!

I have also done a considerable amount of work to my model, which has been modelled 90% and rigged up. Weight painting is causing a few issues with me but nothing a good solid work session should be able to plow through. Here are some examples of my un-posed creature on the left:

My creature isn't as refined as I would like it to be at the moment but with a bit of work it should look a bit more fluid. In this state it does'nt show off the true potential of the character in my opnion.

Ideas and Sketches

Ok, my initial ideas were some kind of flying creature with a different twist. After trying to think of some kind of twist on the whole idea of flying I ended up giving up on that idea and decided to look at other 3D games for inspiration. I found myself looking at the interesting creatures known as 'Striders' in the game Half Life 2. They are basically organic war machines created by an alien race.



So I have set to work creating various sketches of a large long legged creature and use the idea for a monstrous 'crab'. My initial ideas were to have the creature just walking around on flat terrain. But after thinking about various phenotypes, I decided why not create a crab like creature that is adapted to living in large narrow canyons? Using the canyon walls on either side as support it walks along the walls.

After doing these initial sketches, I found that the creature seemed quite scary, and would be perfect as some kind of frightening creature in an FPS game of some sort. Im thinking of playing on this idea and making it as creepy as possible.