DA Friends





*Zue did a group comm for the Anime Mayhem characters Ayuko, Ariko and Aleesha. She did a fabulous job with it. Go visit her and give her many hugs. :




It's the start of the year A.D. 2008!
Happy New Year!
akemashite omedetou gozaimasu!
明けましておめでとうございます

You really have to write that one in full kana and kanji since the first word holds 99% of the meaning of the Japanese New Year welcome.

I'm working on the game as usual.

Story, character background and setting are going to be my attention over the next while. Among things I need to establish the vocabulary that will describe everything that exists in the game's world. This vocabulary is used most notably by the story, conversation and automaton (operates any characters not in active control by the player and NPCs) engines.

Once I get sufficiently development data I want to mock up the conversation engine since it will likely take me many tries to get the interface not to be cumbersome and inflexible yet not being too flexible otherwise over-expectation overpowers any suspension of disbelief (undoes the whole point of having deeper self-acting character AI).

BTW: The character pages on the Anime Mayhem website have stats for some of the characters now. I'll complete it in the near future when I finalize the numbers and stick them into the database.



A while ago I bought =seika a devart sub This link goes to the commission she did in exchange. I think she did a really good job with this. Go visit her and spread the holiday cheer.

It's that time of the year where I spend time with the family(--ies since there's four sides to mine which makes it huge) meaning lots of time away from home and the computer slowing to a crawl any game work. It's all good though and it'll be back to normal after the New Year.




I've rigged Ayuko for animation. In blender this involves assigning a skeleton of armatures, constraining its movements (so they match the way the joints can actually move), then weighting the model to move accordingly with each bone.

I started to do some of the texture work as well. It can tricky trying to find the contour lines on the UV mapped templates in order to properly draw textures. You can't just grab a brush and draw becuase LSCM (Least Squares Conformal Mapping which basically maps an arbitrary 3D surface onto a 2D texture and tries to keep shape like if you slice open a shirt by its edges and flatten, or "unwrap," it.) may generate a template where a contour line that should appear straight in 3D land is not straight on flattened template. It's noticeable particularly for hair. If you just use a straight line hair pattern it will have weird angles on the 3D object. The hair has to be drawn to match the contours .

I rendered a small walk cycle animation sequence. She walks a short distance and the camera tracks her. Even at 400x300 it's kinda largish, though, at 1.3M, and trying to GIF it did not drop the size any either. I'll get the file onto Anime Mayhem's webserver in the next few days and I'll update with a link.




I have started rebuilding the Domain AI framework of the game after losing the previous database and I finally added a needed function (renaming symbols) to the editor. I no longer need to use SQL directly on the database to rename a symbol.



A good exercise for practicing perception of lines and spaces. With a little patience you can improve your ability to draw from a reference using just your eyes--and no tracing paper required nor desirable (for this exercise).

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