This sprint went fairly well with some slip ups. I ended up completing 9 points of work, leaving nothing in assigned. This included a modular NPC character and some animation fixes for our team.
At first this sprint was rough as I'm not sure our producer and designer were on the same page with how our NPCs were going to work, which left me confused on how to tackle our "modular" NPCs. There is of course plenty of ways to do this, either through mesh variations, cosmetic swaps, various textures, and I wasn't sure on what specific combination we would need for this. Eventually however I got the specific details after conversations with both leads on what I thought was possible for our game. We did some experimentation and testing to make sure our idea would work.
We settled on a character that had a base mesh with various cosmetic items that the game would randomize. My character was a Scottish male for our world 1 scene, so he would have a hat, a vest, and a ponytail mesh which could all be swapped out by the programmers with some randomized scripts. We also decided to have three different textures for each complete character. This resulted in a lot of work and cards for me to complete, but my designer and lead understand very intimately now how long it takes to complete things, and conversations helped me make sure I got all of my work.
One thing that was a really strong change for me was frequently uploading screenshots to Jira of progress. While I did this before, I only did it at milestone moments, which come rather slowly. However, if I update every hour or two, me and my producer can more easily see how much work I have put into a card.
I think this helped a lot because a previous issue I had before was knowing when to ask for more points for a card. I like to work in long sittings, and without any means to measure these amounts of time it can be hard for me to remember if I put in 2 hours or 4 hours, and the difference between 4 hours and 8 hours is even harder to estimate with things like meals, classes, and other homework assignments interrupting my process. This effort to frequently update in Jira allowed for Kade and I to count up hours I had put into cards to see if they were measured properly. This resulted in at least one story being knocked up to a three point card. Had that not happened I would only have completed 7 points of work this sprint, which I'm fairly sure would have been inaccurate.
Something that went badly this sprint however was an old habit of mine that made a return, which was this tendency to work in long sittings. These long sittings only come several times a week, and I work like this for every class. So I really only managed to get a significant amount of work done for this sprint twice in the first week of this sprint. This led to a decent crunch at the end of this sprint for myself. While I still completed all of my cards I would love to have imagined a sprint where I finished more work earlier and had more time for other classes, or perhaps sleep.
This is a serious issue and can't continue. It requires me to go against my instinct, which is to work in 4-8 hour intervals. I am working on a system where I can work on both 470 and 495 every other day so that I can ensure this doesn't happen again. However, this will take effort to fit into a schedule that I am already learning and growing comfortable with, as well as one that always is changing, so I am really expecting quite an adjustment period to this new style of working.
Regardless, my work this sprint was mostly standard with some minor slip ups along the way.
Once again, I am using my new methodology for character building where instead of "brute forcing" each individual piece to final detail I tackle pieces generally, from their block-outs to their final detail. This takes a lot of versatility, however doing this maintains a general mindset where I am considering the model's general forms and shapes and then work down to smaller details.
This worked especially well here because this NPC was not necessarily an easy tackle in forms, approach, or detailing. NPCs are meant to be extras in our game, they are not meant to call too much attention or seem unique enough to be a character. This balancing act was a change in pace as I have only built important characters for this story up until this point, which have distinct shapes, forms, colors, personalities, and more. Building a character that fit this world but also didn't stand out too much resulted in a block-out period that took longer than I would have liked. I don't think there was a way to avoid this, however I know that my "general to specific" approach to building the character absolutely minimized the amount of time achieving this character's forms. I am also practicing this approach to character art in CAGD 330 so I am becoming quite fond of it.
This final high poly here is a base mesh which is then build upon with a vest, hat, and ponytail mesh. For brevity I won't detail the methods to get this modular character working, however it took a chunk of time to set up the functionality for this system. Scaling, pivots, exports, UV maps, texturing processes, animations, and more was affected by this unique type of character.
Something else to note on is the shear amount of time re-topologizing hands takes, even with symmetry. I can't overstate how much time has been wasted on this project towards building new low poly versions of hands. I am going to be reusing our hand models in the future for other characters. I would have done this earlier although the first two characters had different hand shapes. At this point I now have a set of hands for young characters, old characters, and middle aged characters. I regret not looking up faster ways of doing this, because I am not sure if industry professionals really re-topologize every hand they have. If they do, then they are much quicker and more practiced than I am.
The texturing process was fun and had some unique painting elements to it that I think turned out well. I added patches and shifted their colors for each variation, as well as changed eye color, hair, and clothing. It was a fun process and I ended up with a set of NPCs that varied a good bit while only using one mesh. This was an excellent use of our limited resources from our designer and producer and I am pleased on the variation we achieve through these means.
Finally, at the beginning of the sprint I also helped Colin with an animation fix. This was a nice feeling because I was actually the one who recommended to help, I noticed in our playtest a very specific animation bug that I have solved before. So I spoke up and managed to get a card out of it. I worked on separating the top half of Zayden from the bottom half so that Zayden can walk while he performs actions and spells. While I didn't finish or flesh this entire system out (I don't have access to our full Unity build), I did test and confirm this was possible for Colin. Then I taught him how to do it so that we can do this for individual arms in the future.
Overall this sprint was bumpy and I wish I could have been more consistently working on cards. Other classes frequently come up, which I know is the case for everyone in this program, so I know I simply need to manage my time a bit differently so that instead of my cards "stumbling" into complete they continuously flow... if that wording does this any justice. However, I do think lots of things went well with this sprint. I still have a goal to complete two characters in one sprint for us. I am worried to ask for this many cards but I really want to achieve this for us as we are at our halfway point for the game. Perhaps next sprint I will be able to reuse clothing and meshes from this NPC into another character so that I can produce more content.
留言