I am working on building a level in 3DS Max, the idea for the level is that of a crypt. I am setting up for the scene to be an outside, dark and dreary place leading to the inside of the crypt. This leading down to a darker area where the bodies would be laying. The way the level is being set up is in that of a modular setting. To make a level modular is to make everything into set pieces that you can put together as a puzzle after you have it all modeled and textured out. One can make multiple walls, floors, ceilings and even objects such as tombstones to be placed either together to create a closed off building, fencing, or wall. You can even take the smaller objects and place them where you wish throughout the map, which is usually done with small things like boxes that you can find sporadically in Halo or many other games. This is done in different games, sometimes to make multiple different levels within the same building or even in making an entire large city for the main character to travel around in. In my sense of the crypt, I plan to have a few different walls, some columns, trees, tombstones, even doors and gates to populate my level. With that I can set up a graveyard scene, making several markings with tombstones pointing out that there are many buried, even make a few different crypt sets that don't work to take you to another area and leaving one that is different and is where you need to go. Having multiple possibilities that don't work and one that does is a way to keep the player immersed into the game and making it so they won’t finish too quickly.
One particular part of game design is that of the animation of your characters for said game. For this project I am going to be animating this preset character/rig to do some pantomime animations. Essentially to pantomime is to express actions without the use of words or sound. I will be using this rig to do actions like jumping, diving, even different sorts of attacks. Rigs like this are good to get down the basic move functions and actions for characters and to better learn the steps of animation so that you can raise your skill level. The actions I will be laying out will be in an eleven second long animation to see how well i can organize and set up a scene. This particular model and rig is named Stewart and is a great use to get down poses and actions, I will be using him for this set up.
For my Team Production (Gambit), we are making a third person platform game. To make a game you must go through a long process creating different assets of the game, from environment components like trees and rocks, to fully animated characters. However you can not simply start with a fully animated character most times, a lot of times you have to take the time to create said character and rig them for animation. For those that don't know, a rig is essentially the bone structure of your game characters. You must create the rig with joints in the right places where you want the character to bend certain parts of their body to best imitate walking, running, shooting, swinging and so on. However creating the rig for your character is only half the battle, you must also apply skin weights to the rig after you have all the bones and joints set up the way you feel they should be laid out. What applying skin weights does is makes it so that each joint only affects a certain section and amount of the body of the character. This will affect not only which sections of the body each joint effects, but how strong of an effect that joint has on that particular section of the body. That is what I am currently doing, I am editing where on the characters body each joint can alter, and how much they can alter said part of the body.
