Anas Azmi End-of-Quarter Update

Zedna eating the med student's brain.

Things I did last week:

• Modified the animator controllers to make it easier for programmers to read and use.
• Redid all of Zedna's animation.
• Textured the janitor's cart.
• Finished making the air freshener bottle.
• Textured the walls.
• Textured the floor.
• Textured the ceiling.
• Textured the counter.
• Textured the table.
• Made adjustments to the civilian's animation to make it look like he's struggling against Zedna, who's eating his brains.

In summary, what I did this quarter:

The air freshener bottle.

• Modeled, textured & animated Zedna.
• Modeled, textured & animated the civilian (and made a script for civilian customization).
• Textured & animated the neckbeard (he's modeled by Nathan).
• Modeled the siren that appears on top of the neckbeard when he's in alert mode (and learned to take advantage of backface culling in the process).
• Made a script to test the animators (although only I have real use of it for now).
• Modeled & textured the air freshener (although we did have a placeholder model that looks pretty decent, considering it's not textured).
• Textured the janitor's cart (it's modeled by Nathan and Brian and animated by Nathan).
• Textured the walls (they're modeled by Nathan and Brian).
• Textured the tables (they're modeled by Brian).
• Textured the floor (the model is just a primitive plane object from Unity; it was used for level design before).



Zedna pushing the janitor's cart, which is essentially an
infinite air freshener (until it breaks).

• Textured the ceiling (the same as the floor).

This quarter was a quarter of discovery for me. Even though I started out as a programmer who happens to know how to model, I eventually grew up to become, according to Cary, one of the key members of this team. Although I had experience modeling (mostly in Blender), texturing, rigging & animating, my animations were pretty horrible before. Throughout this quarter, I learned about

• UV sets (each set means different UV maps in Unity)
• transparency texturing (and how horrible that went)
• double quaternion rigs (which means that animating a rig wouldn't make some parts of the rig paper-thin; I took a whole day figuring out how to get around this problem using the default setting before I found out about double quaternion rigging)
• rigging an object only to some joints (before I found out about this, I had problems with parented objects stretching to creepy levels when it isn't supposed to)
• weight painting (which was originally found out as a way to do what double quaternion did before I found out about double quaternion)
• backface culling (and how I could use it to emulate glass-covered lamps)
• multiple materials on one object (allowing customizations of each instance of the object by code (although I couldn't make the customization show outside runtime))
• texture tiling (so I don't have to tile a texture just to make the size right)



The hospital cafeteria.

• art prototyping (it's to show Allen what I've done for this game, but I definitely learned something, because I've never been in a team as anything other than a programmer)

I'm looking forward to doing more work in this studio, even if that's as early as the upcoming Play Jam, which we're going to in order to present Survival Zombie.