I finished converting my animation keyframe tweening over from cosine interpolation to cubic tonight. The cosine interpolation actually looked fairly decent for the simpler animations, but any keyframe that didn’t have the animation curve change direction would get weird hiccups in it. The cubic interpolation takes care of that, and I now get silky smooth transitions regardless of what the derivative of the animation curve is doing sign-wise.

Not much of a dump, I know, but I want to get the wizard pic up before my brother turns in for the night.

*edit: wizard redacted until I fix his eye*

Has it really been over a year since I last posted art? I’ve got enough stuff to replace the current sketch gallery twice over. Now if only I could motivate myself to do it.

So this is a little outdated, I actually started writing this post in early September but my wordpress installation was so ancient the image uploader wasn’t working anymore. It’s a nice lazy Sunday after a week of vacation, though, so it seemed like a good time to upgrade.

This is a test I wrote up quickly for the collision system in my project. Nothing fancy to look at, you just move the ball around and make it jump and it doesn’t fall out. I toyed with the idea of using a proper physics system like ODE or Bullet to do this, but I don’t actually want a true physics simulation, I’m shooting for something a little tighter since it’s going to be a run n’ gun bullet hell crossover.

I’ve actually got the protagonist’s model in game and replacing the circle, I’ll be uploading a shot of that as soon as I get the running animations done.

There are fifty billion excuses I could put up here to explain over half a year of silence. I’ve been busy at work. Aliens ate my work, and then my dog too. I’ve been catatonic since that awesome knife fight with an entire platoon of highly skilled ninjas, which I won, but then walked into a wall immediately afterwards and laid myself out flat. Etc.

…I’m really just lazy

I have been squeezing time in to work on my projects, though, even if I haven’t been writing about them much. The animation tool for my engine is now complete, and looks a little something like this:

As much as I would have liked to have just written a plugin for Blender, it’s API is kinda cumbersome on the animation side of things. So I whipped this together over a few weeks. It works quite well.

I’ve also been experimenting with photorealistic renders in Yafray. I don’t know that I will necessarily ever finish any of them, but it’s been been a nice relaxing break from work.

Wow, the past two months have been absolutely insane. Between moving and acclimating to my new job, my poor website has been pretty sadly neglected. But no longer! I seem to have picked the absolute worst time to move, being out of work already due to forces completely beyond mine or my company’s control (I wish I could go into more detail, but NDAs prevent me from doing so). So if anybody reading this is looking for some seriously talented game developing mojo with a good smattering of artist included for free, let me know, I’d love to talk to you.

The upside to all of this is that I now have a LOT more time to work on my personal stuff. A fact I’ve been taking thorough advantage of.

Now that the engine is more or less intact, I’ve been going whole hog on asset creation. Below are some screen shots of the latest model, rigged, posed, and rendered in Blender. I made a few changes from the original concept, such as visible feet and the removal of the teardrop scarf around her neck (might put that back in eventually), but overall I wanted to keep the same feel as much as possible. The face and star/moon on the dress will be added as soon as my Wacom pen gets back to me, I left it in Virginia over Christmas break.

435 verts, 834 triangles after loading into the game engine.

For comparison, these are two of the original concept sprites.