Hello from beautiful Redwood City, and team mixAR!
With our eyes on halves, and our heads down with little distractions, we managed to get a lot done this week. Our objective was to get Mixy, our character, into a build as soon as possible. To that end, we set out to finish modeling, rigging, and texturing the character, and get some basic animations in, grind out the finer details of how the character will act and behave in the scene, as well as, of course, building the tech to support the inclusion of the character. So let’s talk about how we did.
Art is a major bottleneck for us. Animating a character is hard enough as is, added to the fact that the entire experience relies on our character being able to express a wide range of roles and personalities, the task becomes harder still. Happily, we are not short on talent in that area, and our character already has some animations done! Say hello Mixy…
The guiding force of our project is the various roles and personalities the Mixy can display. This is challenging because our goal is to be able to change these by adjusting numbers in a data set. That goal means that every animation we make, and every line of code we write is aimed correctly, as we can’t afford to do make assets specific to any individual role or personality. Instead, we have to plan assets and code that gives Mixy the ability to make decisions based on any given personality or role. That, in a nutshell, is the focus of all our design efforts, making sure to look all the way to the end of the project, and being certain we don’t miss anything that could damage that goal.
On the tech side of things, we have decided to embrace an AI tool called RainAI, which is a powerful AI engine and behavior tree editor made for Unity. This gives us access to a ton of tools that we would have made ourselves, that are already optimized, as well as features that we will be able to use that would have taken too long for us to make ourselves. Not only does this save us a ton of time in the long run, but it should also give us the ability to get more done throughout the semester, not to mention an increase of quality. With ramp up and learning time taken with the new tool, we still managed to make an initial pass at a behavior tree for Mixy, including integrating all of our old code into the Rain architecture.
Anywho, time to get back to work, talk to you next week friends!
~mixAR