One Week till I fly halfway through the world and back to my house!

Accomplishments

• Rigged the Support Unit (1.5 hr)
• Fairly simple rig. Spent most of the time testing out different ways for rigging the spine and trying to fix some rig issues that I had. Decided to stick with an IK Spline rig since it would work the best for animation. 

• Did a brainstorm session with Desiree and Henderson with the help of Kenneth Oumn (1.5 hrs)
• Started to weightpaint the tank unit (1 hr)
• Didn't know that Anna was going to update the model until I mentioned to her that I was weightpainting the Tank Unit. So I had to stop weightpainting.

• Looked over the Rush Unit model and made some reviews (1 hr)
• Spent some time figuring out the best way to correct the model. Asked the rest of the art team to help with critiquing if they could. 
• Animated Kamikaze Unit (3 hrs)
• Fleshed out the walk cycle and the recoil cycle.
• Improved the animations of whatever Jon did before
• Video of the walk cycle can be seen here.
• The movements on the spikes and snout are exaggerated. I wanted to see how it would look and see what feedback I will get from the team. This will give me a better idea of how far I should go with the animations. The result is, I will need to cut down the exaggeration by a lot.
• Looked up limping walk cycles, took some notes and made simple sketches (1 hr)
• This is for me to get an idea of how units would move if their health are low
• Started editing animation for Kamikaze Superunit and Augher (1.5 hrs)

Total Hours: 10.5 hrs

Works In Progress?

Currently editing animations for Kamikaze Unit, Superunit and Augher. The animations right now are limited but I will be adding more animations to them. Right now, the mostly only have a walk cycle and recoil cycle. I will be adding limping cycle, death cycle and variations of recoil cycle. Most of my finals will be done early next week so this will give me more time to work before I fly back home on Friday. 

Next Steps

• Animations
• Continue research on shader writing over the break
• Rig stuff when the time comes

Issues

• Maya rendering issues and crashing stuff. Typical Maya stuff so nothing too much to worry about.
• Finals are approaching so I couldn't really focus most of my time on Senior Project. Tried to squeeze in as much as I can for this week.

Last Minute Comments

I'm not surprised if people can't meet the 12 hour requirement for the past 2 weeks. Last week was Thanksgiving and this week we have finals. I know this is no excuse as well (Anna probably wants to shout at me if she is reading this) so I'll make up as much as I can next week and hopefully over the winter break. Communicating with my team member from across the world shouldn't be too much of a problem. Though the internet connection back in my home is slow since my family doesn't really need fast internet speed. Welp, we'll see how things goes over the break.

Kai-Lin Chuang