Sign errors

I don’t know what it is with me and math, really. I try to be friendly and nice, I’m always polite. I say, “Good morning math, how are you today? Did you sleep well?”. But math isn’t one of those, math isn’t normal, math doesn’t follow the rules us normal folks do. No, math must always get special treatment. It’s really friendly and helps you, but say one false thing and see it stabbing you in the back! Well, it’s not my fault, now, is it? Everyone makes mistakes. It’s natural, I’m a human being, I’m not a machine!

See, I made a mistake in that realtimefacialanimationcode. “Oh”, you say, “that again, it’s been a while”. No, don’t worry, I won’t bother you about it. The thing is, I noticed a bug in that code that takes care of correctly rotating the face when the head is tilted (since it’s three-dimensional, there are two parts to this, one that aligns it according to the face-normal (in simpler terms: Makes it look in the way the person looks), and one that rotates it around said normal). For some reason, when one of the characters lay down, his face would be rotated exactly the wrong way – his mouth was outside his head, and the eyes were the other way around.

AAAAAAAAAAAH! Animations!

Anyone knows good ressources and tutorials about that? Preferrably those for which you need no skill whatsoever to follow them, and you get an AMAZING result still!

Those don’t exist? Why? Oh, why! Truly, fate wants me to suffer!

Thankfully, T linked me to some quite good material, and it’s interesting what I learnt about the “walk”-cycle. Apparently, materials for aspiring cartoonists are also good information for us game developers. Now, mind you, I’m still far from capable of creating nice animations, but with a bit of tweaking, I managed a semi-nice-walk-cycle. That’s kind of a magic moment, right there. I found it very hard to get the timing right and to see exactly how much the leg moves or how much it twists from frame to frame, and seeing a clear example of this really helps. Of course, the arm movement must be considered as well.

Now, if only my extremely old version of our gamedevelopment toolkit would support several bones per vertex. Sure enough, they do that NOWADAYS, but who wants to switch engine generations in the middle of development? Not me, thats for sure! One of the usual updates I did a while backalready required quite some fixes, and I can only imagine what kind of nightmare an upgrade will be. Or maybe, it won’t be too bad?

So, thats it for the daily* news: I’m trying to animate the models I created before.

* not a promise for another update tomorrow

Productivity boost

A common problem with us hobbyists is that, along the way, the motivation fades. This may or may not happen for professionals as well, but since working for them is essential, it results in burn-out and hate for their profession, rather than laziness. I think (This is, of course, a wild guess. It’s not to be taken seriously). However, I, for example, don’t feel such pressure. I won’t get fired if I don’t work on it. My life doesn’t depend on it. And look at what still has to be done, thats so much! I’m never going to make it, anyway. And I really don’t feel like it. So … how about playing a videogame instead? Or reading? Or …

That’s, as stated, a common problem. Everyone has his or her own ways to deal with it – and usually ignores this way in favor of doing something different. It’s easy to get stuck there when all you’re doing is detail work or bugfixes or anything else that doesn’t show a clear visual result, or if it is very difficult to achieve a good-looking one. For example, I tried animating for the first time, and I literally spent hours trying to get it to “look right”. But when your honest judgement only makes you delete what you’ve done the last half hour, its extremely frustrating. You can’t stop, look what you’ve made and say “YES, I’m really pretty awesome, all things considered”.

Just starting this tasks again after a break can seem like an impossible thing, and its easy to think of ways to not do it. “I’ll do it right after I’ve read this thread“. Youtube can also be an excellent way to not do something productive.

So what is your trick to get motivated? Are you rewarding yourself with candy? Do you change the music you’re listening to to something upbeat that gets you in the mood to work?

Sometimes a test play to see what you’ve achieved already can be nice. It can also backfire in case you only concentrate on whats missing (this can happen if you’ve trained yourself to do that!).

So, dear readers, share your secrets with us!*

Now, on to something completely different. Kiyaku/Kihaku, thankfully, never has these motivationproblems. This is why he now updated his art-section on his website. You’ll find the link on the right, in the “Blogroll”-category. Since you’re probably extremely lazy – which is now a theme in this post – you may also click this link. Huh. He sure is obsessed with death, am I right guys? Death? And Boss Death? (“Ober Tod”)? What the heck, everyone?

* – I am fully aware that this, too, will end up with zero comments, which will make the whole thing look really sad.