Week 11: Sidekick Character Rigging, First Stage Assets, and World Look and Feel

With the project deliverable approaching, this week we divided up tasks and began assembling our first level in Unity. In order for us to start animating, we worked on rigging and skinning our Frend character model while also looking into ways to texture it. Some of our members finished up modelling plants and animating them to also be placed in the scene, while Jules worked on placing rocks and modifying scale to make our first level’s environment appropriate in VR. We also continued to work on lighting and the overall look and feel of our game.

Later in the week after we had already rigged and skinned our character, we realized that the model caused problems with the skinning as we tried to animate it. Because of this, Quinn and Dom worked to modify the model and make it smoother. Once the model was modified, we had to re-rig and skin it to ensure that animation ran smoothly.

We also needed some narrative elements within our first stage, such as voiceover describing the context of who the player character is, why they’re in the world, and how they got there. This comes in the form of a general’s voice coming from a radio that comes from the player characters’ spaceship. For this, we needed to write a script, record Quinn’s voice, and sound design the clip to make it sound staticky as if it were coming from a broken radio. Throughout the weekend we also worked to compile and add these components to our scene.