Project Changes & First Draft of Storyboard [Week 3 of 12th Feb]

This week was a bit slow as I needed to sort some family stuff. What I did do was figuring out some more problems that I had encountered. that required changes to my project.

Storyboard

The 1^st draft of the storyboard is done so I now have a clear idea of the cinematic and when timing the frames it came down almost 40 seconds. This a little more than I expected as I was aiming for 30 seconds however I felt that the fight needed that little extra time. After reviewing it though I felt that the fight was a little too one sided. One character is throwing way more punches than the other and I wanted the fight to feel evenly matched, so that I’ll be reworking a few seconds in the fight to fix this.

https://youtu.be/M-oFgJBJj6E this is a link to the rough storyboard. The intro has also been updated so that the fight starts quicker.

Character roster Updates

I began to realise that the Yellow Dude character from Kiel Figgins was no longer going to work as in previously importing him would cause his head and fingers to disappear. He does have another model that I could rig myself however it’s impossible to apply the textures he came with so it would a grey character in a coloured background. Also I felt that I just didn’t have to the time to rig the character so I decided to drop ‘Yellow Dude’ completely, to be honest his rig wasn’t designed to be used in a game engine in the first place.  

So I’ve decided to go with another I had in case the previous character didn’t work which is to reuse the ‘Bat Sniper’ rig from Kiel Figgins and give it a slight recolour to imply this evil version of herself. This does make things a little easier for me as this will allow to really get used to one rig however this may lack diversity in how they fight because they are the same, but again this means it’s a good challenge to try and diversify how they move.

Environment Change

Before starting to plot the animation in maya I wanted to place the model in the UE4 environment to see how they looked. This is something I should have done in the last week, but basically they did not look good to me in first environment the default lighting made the characters look like plastic. I did try to fiddle around with lighting, but I thought it would be easier to find another environment that was smaller with better lighting. Also it loads much quicker in maya which is a nice time convenience.