Finalizing the Vehicle and the Character

Now, it is the time to move my character to the final rendering, we made two turnarounds for them, and front , side, 3/4 and back view of the models, I generated a normal map from my ZBrush sculpture and for the car, I finalized the reflection map and the spec map, I get some good critiques on the reflections of the car, which I need to fix the texture of the car, I am not very happy about that, but the rest of the works are pretty well done. Please watch the videos in its highest resolution. Here they are.I hope you like them:

Making An Attract Trailer For Our Racing Game

I have to say this is a fun project. We are asked to make a trailer video to show our levels and the game play of our racing game (right now, it's official name called "Sophomore Spin-out") We submitted a 1st pass video first then this is the final version of my trailer:

Firing My Weapon In UDK

This is an extra credit projects for the Programming For Artist class, which we are asked to set our character as the default character in UDK and make them shoot their weapon. I followed a tutorial that is made by our professor, the particles and sound effects are from UDK. For some reason, the new gun does not show when I switch to 3rd person, but everything else work fine, here is a video about it:

Making Weapons for My Character

As I mentioned in my original concept design for my character, she is going to hold a M4 assault rifle, I have finished the rifle for her. I rushed this gun, because the weapon is no longer a requirement at the end of this project as we don't have too much time left before the semester ends, but I think I should make a gun for my character to really complete this project.

Making Animation

We are asked to animate a idling and a simple walk-cycle animation for our characters, we don't focus on animating in our major but it is something that every game artists should know, this is my first 3D animation, I get a lot of help from Yunhao Zhang, he is one of my friends here, he is a good animator in our school. Here is how they turn out:

Rigging and Weight Painting

I have to say that my character is not easy to paint weights. While I was painting weights, I have restart for 3 times because of lacking experience. I think that it is very important to know how the weights affect skins. I need to keep testing the weights in Maya, and then import the model into UDK to test again, because sometimes everything work fine in Maya but the weights do not work well in Animset.

Due to the fact that my character has many bags and gears around her body, I grouped those gears separately and bind them on different joints, therefore they can be constraint by different joints. Those joints that control all the pockets also have weights on the vest, so the vest and the pockets could move together without stretching too much. It is pretty challenging to add weights and make it working for this character, she works fine at the end, but I think I need more practices on painting weights.