Rigs and Mel Scripts. Feel so whaling productive!

Accomplishments

• Rigged the tank unit (2.5 hrs)
• Researched on blendshape in unity and reviewed Mecanim (2 hrs)
• Edited scripts (5 hrs)
• Spent a lot of time on the IK rig script due to constant issues and bugs that I had to fix
• Made a new script for baking animations into the joints of rigs (1.5 hrs)
• Gave Anna a brief lesson of setting up Mecanim in Unity (1 hr)
• Went through it with Dylan and Jon as well and we all discuss a bit of how the animations should be used for our game.
• Fixed Jon's Augher animation file (.5 hrs)
• Reviewed Miguel's Tank unit model and some concept art (1 hr)

• Made videos for people to see my progress (.5 hrs):
• Tank Rig
• Blendshape test (Note: I kind of bashed on my keyboard, so I would suggest to turn the volume down a bit to prevent having ear injuries. Now that I warned you, YOU CAN'T SUE ME!!!)
• MEL script updates (Note: My mic was really soft this time, I have no idea why so if you can't hear too well, you can turn up the volume.)

Works In Progress?

I've played tested the game for an hour or so this Friday after our weekly meeting. It was a lot of fun and at the same time, intense when I was playing against Alex. I am happy that the build is working out fine. We changed some values for the resources and I think it's getting to what we wanted. However, we really need to debuff the support unit since it's way too overpowered. Miguel was able to win against Jon in 3 waves with just support and 5 waves when he played with Alex. 

Models will be out by the end of this week, so I'll hop to rigging soon again. Not that I have updated some of my scripts, I am sure that I will be able to rig faster. 

Jon request some shaders to be made so I'll be researching on that in the near future. 

Next Steps

• More rigs
• Start working on shader writing (Need to get more detail from Jon)
• Any other technical stuff that the team requests me to do
• Review some concept art

Issues

• A lot of issues when I was updating the IK rig script. I played around with a bunch of different methods to try to get what I wanted, but failed a lot of times. Either the text field wouldn't work or there is some problem with the renaming of things. But, after looking up a ton of helpful resources online, I was able to work my way around things and have the script work closely to what I wanted.
• Models was coming out a bit slow this week, but it allowed me to work a good amount of time to update my scripts.
• Mic issues on my Macbook pro. Maya crashed after I ran the Bake Animation script when I was almost done. I didn't save so I had to restart the script from scratch. First world problems...

Last Minute Comments

This week was a extremely productive week for me. I really enjoy updating and creating MEL scripts. Makes me feel like a programmer that can make things work for once. Overall, I am enjoying my role as a technical artist in my team. The team is going well, things are progressing slowly but not as fast as what we had planned for. But I'm sure we will be ready when final week comes around. GO TEAM!

Kai-Lin Chuang