Since my last blogpost I’ve added some things, namely:
This week I focused on finishing the textures for characters and their outfits. I also made a model of Painting Brush which the characters will use as a weapon for fighting in Writing Mode of a game.
I also was working on the Writing, Reading and City Map scene layouts and light setups for all scenes, created prefabs for characters, parts of characters outfits and environment.
Phuong was working on the textures of the environments and also helped with Writing scene layout and creating prefabs for the environment.
Another week past, some more GIFs for you. On the first one you can see a breathing animation as well as a more obvious idle animation for our characters. The ‘i-am-bored-and-need-to-rub-my-foot-on-the-ground’ idle animation should be played every 5 to 15 seconds when the player is in the city view but isn’t tapping on anything.
The other two animations I made are meant to be played back after a battle. I hope you can tell by yourself which one is the animation for winning and which is for losing. If not I will fix that by some effects. 😉
The only thing left now (animation-wise) is a painting animation, but first I need to create the skinning for all other outfit parts, to now for sure if my previous animations work for all kind of clothes that are in the game.
The walk cycles of the characters are done, although so far only their bodies (and the clothes of the cat – not visible in this GIF) are skinned, because their clothes still got some minor adjustments.
In the next step the animations have to be imported into Unity, what might cause some trouble (because there are always trouble importing animations in Unity).
This week I spent on adjusting the models and make them ready for the texturing. Since Klaus changed the models a bit to suit the rigging, I had to change the unwrap of the characters’ bodies and adjust all clothes parts and their unwraps. All of the models are now unwrapped and ready for texturing. I started to make textures of chars and their outfits.
This week, i remade shop house with more detailed, finished unwrapping it and had a really basic color.
The KanjiVG project offers us a large array of svg files with all the kanji stroke information we need. However the data is not quite in the format we need it to be. This week I’ve spend time on a script that converts the svg files to strokes. 
I also added a internet lookup for the meaning of the kanji using the wwwjdic api
I’ve also written more documentation about the system which can be read here
This week, i spent time to paint most basic stuffs in the classroom to have general feeling. I couldn’t manage to go further than that. Next week, i will keep polish the scene and then switch to work on the city map again.
Here you can see our three characters rigged and with a proof-of-concept-dummy-animation. They all use the same rig to ensure they can all use the same animations.
I ran into some problems with the UV layout, because I adjusted the Fox’ and RedPanda’s arms in the initial pose a bit and forgot that I can not just cut them off and attach them in the right position again. Luckily, the correction of my mistake didn’t take too long.
Furthermore an error occurred with the Fox’ mesh. It deformed strangely every time I moved the time slider, although I deleted its history, so there shouldn’t have been any input connections. It took my quite some time to find out that such an incoherent thing caused this error. Duplicating and replacing the mesh solved this error. Thanks to working with references, I didn’t have to take care of preserving the skinning and only needed to give the new mesh the exact same name as the old one. Maybe the error was caused because the mesh was created in 3ds Max while I work in Maya.
Besides tweaking the effects a little bit, I focused on rigging the main character(s) of the game over the last week. So far I finished the rig and the skinning for the cat character. To create the rig I used AdvancedSkeleton and it is able to switch between IK and FK controls.
In the next step I’m going to make sure the rig has proper proportions also for the fox and raccoon character. Each of the three characters is going to use the exactly same rig to make it easy to use the exactly same animations for each. An important thing I’ll still have to figure out is how to export the skinned outfit parts of the characters, because the player will be able to change the character’s clothes.
MASTER TENJIN 