Week 2: Modelling and Rigging

This week I modelled & rigged the main character

I started by finding my old character turn around (right), and creating a quick refresh for the character (left), as I wanted an updated look for Azazel. Some bits about her design: her jacket has a skeleton design as it reflects her ability to come back to life, and also looks really cool; her hat has 7 stars on it - as there will be 7 boss monstrosities to fight during the course of the game, 7 is a generally 'holy' number, appearing a lot in reference to both angels and demons; she has a shaved head, as at the start of the game she will be burnt at the stake (rip) and so her hair is short when she is revived (also it looks cool, and Furiosa is a big inspo here)

Getting back into blender was a bit of a learning curve, but I decided from the outset that the design of this game will be low poly / pixel art / ps1 graphics. This 1) reduces the workload on me, and 2) I think adds to a particular aesthetic I am trying to achieve. This game is aiming to be very atmospheric, and have horror elements, so I think lower quality graphics leaves something for the player's imagination.

After modelling and texturing, I then followed this tutorial when adding my armature. I've always had issues in the past with parenting with automatic weights, so learning you can pick indiviual verticies for weights was so helpful in getting my armature to work!

Here I started trying to intergrate my armature with Mixamo, and while I had a couple of issues I have got some of the way there with starting to animate. For this project I am using Godot, and currently have my .blend file saved into my Godot project directory, so when I save my Blender file, Godot automatically fetches and updates. This has been very useful so far, but means I have had to tackle issues that wouldnt occur if I just went the .glb/.glft route. Next week, I'm aiming to get a few basic animations working in the Godot project. I have a programmer friend assisting with this project (doing all the heavy lifting haha) so they are currently working on player movement, as we want a turn based X-Com tiled movement. Hopefully, we can combine our parts soon to actually get a player character moving!