We will be releasing official images and info of all The Path characters, starting now and every 2 weeks til you’ve seen them all (well… almost all, have to save some surprises to be discovered, naturally.) And as we show the finished images out front, I’ll be back here giving away all my secrets. Work. In. Progess.
Introducing Robin! The youngest girl in the family. She was a fairly easy birth.
(click the above to see them larger) She started as inspiration in the form of an outfit Michael’s daughter wore one day. Then she was next seen as a (bad) sketch, by me. From there, there was no stopping her emergence!
A quick VERY WORK IN PROGRESS shot of her in the game with the realtime 3d screenshot equivalent of red-eye making her look up to no good! But really, she’s a good kid.
Some final beauty shots to see in the Path gallery and on flickr aaand a desktop wallpaper for you to download.
& just WAIT til you see her MOVE! 😉
The Quest3D visual “code” sometimes reminds me of mysterious writings you might find on the walls of an ancient cave. This is the interface group that starts and stops animations and the like.
My job these days consists largely of exporting character animations. It’s a tedious and slow process. So I will let you share in my boredom.
First I open the animation file in 3D Studio Max, and judge whether it’s good artistically, and technically acceptable. That’s the fun part because I get to see the wonderful work that Laura Raines Smith did in Texas while we were asleep here in Gent. If ok, which is most of the time, the animation data is saved (in a .bip file) and loaded onto the Official Character file, rigged by Hans Zantman. Then I export the animation in X format and import it in the game engine. 3D Studio Max crashes on average every 5 exports. In the game, for each animation, blending priority and loop frames, etc, need to be entered. Every time the skinning of the character changes (which has happened quite a bit), all those animations had to be processed again. Many of these animations have gone through the same process several times.
For the heck of it, I have counted the animations. There’s almost 500 in total! Most of them are simple short things like a walk cycle or an idle pose. But each is a separate file that needs to be treated. Next time somebody calls us insane, I’ll think twice before I contradict them.
