Category Archives: Animation

Trails: Narrowing Down the Research

All graduate students in our program are required to research some topic in game development (or related field). It is suggested that this topic be something relatively new or a synthesis on existing topics, but the goal is to provide … Continue reading

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Data-driven Animation Machines

For this week, I explored making the animation machine design more user-friendly by making them data-driven! We already have a majority of our content being loaded via XML so I decided to extend the animation machines to do the same … Continue reading

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Presentation and Purpose

We’d like to make combat much more exciting, interesting, and enjoyable, which requires a re-examining of existing mechanics as well as prototyping new mechanics. A look back at our proof of concept showed some good things and some things that … Continue reading

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Learning from Devil May Cry

This past week was mostly about reworking the player’s combat animations to be more tight and visceral. I did this based on the Dragon Nest research mentioned in my previous post as well as some new information which I am … Continue reading

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Animation State Machine

Character animations are approaching their final stages in terms of production. We now know exactly how our characters are going to be controlled, what animations they will have for various states, and how these animations should transition. As soon as … Continue reading

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The secret of attack timing

I have made a discovery. For the past two weeks, I have been working on some attack animations for our Diamond character for testing and prototyping purposes. The motion is mostly based on my experience with boxing and on whatever … Continue reading

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Animation. Will it blend?

Getting the Havok girl to render, texture, and animate in place was extremely satisfying; it was a major milestone hit and it paved the way for some serious business in animation. But, the battle with Havok Animation was far from … Continue reading

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Havok Animation Integration

Our engine made one giant leap in the rendering world. We can now successfully render a character model, fully rigged, textured, and animated, using the Havok tools. The accompanying video shows the Havok Girl running in place. Let’s get started … Continue reading

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Rigging a Dude

This week I’m going to talk about the process of rigging a character for games in Maya and all the junk that goes into that. 1. Create a base mesh In general you want a polygon mesh that is as … Continue reading

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