week 4

I started working on the grappling hook item for the game. The item was to be modeled in 3ds max following the concept skis of it that was made by one other artist. I started by creating the hook and from that I created the rope. The large bundle of rope that the player was going to hold was created separately and simple. After it was done we needed to figure out how much we needed to scale it. By importing the character model and the wall model we were able to scale the item down to its right size. Then I made a rig for the model and started testing it in motion builder. I then realized that I needed to remake the rig ass my rope needed at least 3 bones. Before there was only bones in the grappling hook and the robe bundle that the player held. The reason I needed to add the bones to the robe was so that the rope could follow the mesh of the wall and not stretch and cut true the wall. I then had to do some research about animating with props in Motion builder. I had done some before with the bow but the question I had to figure out was how you made the character hold on to something and the let go of it. I then imported a wall mesh in to Motion Builder and 2 squares. The squares were supposed to represent the grid in the game so I knew where the animation was supposed to stop. He would go from the middle of the first square to the wall and over it then to the middle of the second square. Animating this took some time but was fun to do. In the en the animation was about 500 frames long.
On the Friday that week we had an alpha test session and our grope had made good progress. When we displayed the alpha we showed it on the pc with the level I designed. Unfortunately the animation I did for the grappling hook item was not implemented in to the alpha.
But the alpha testing went well even thou we had a bug with the path finding. We received some interesting feedback that we will go true next week.