Fiammetta - by Sophia George

This blog documents the process of my final degree work at NUCA – a simple platform game called Fiammetta. Here you will find work ranging from research, early concepts and sketches to my finished prototype game.

This project helped me to further my skills in 3D, animation and design, as well as serve an introduction to using a game engine. Fiammetta was created in Unity3d and only offers simple mechanics like running and jumping.

Although the game is simple, learning to make it helped me prep my own 3D work for a game engine and making it work using javascript.

For more of my work and writing, please visit SophiaGeorge.com

Or follow me on twitter @SophiaPretoria

Screenshots

Here are a few screenshots of my game in the Unity engine. In these images, you can see the various assets I modelled and textured.

Character Animations

Here are my character animations that will go into my Showreel. These animations were split up and put into Unity, although I had a lot of trouble making them work, so Leigh helped me with the coding.

Animations from Sophia George on Vimeo.

Progress

This week I had a meeting with my course leader to discuss my progress. I explained the progress of my level prototype, my new website and the documents I am making for the hand in. These include a document detailing my Unity research, my aesthetic development and my 3D progression. My teacher recommended I include documents about extra research, such as sound, music, after effects, etc, as well as a document on my Dare to be Digital project.

Due to the workload of the Dare to be Digital project (Due in for April 3rd) I feel that my studio practise has become slightly disorganised. Therefore, I edited my Schedule to include more realistic goals:

Texturing & head handle

This is the final texture for my protagonist. I also added a NURBS circle which can control the head.

Enemy Characters

Here are my enemy characters, modelled, rigged and textured.

Painting Weights

Next, after adding ribs to the model to make sure it deforms properly, I tested the rig by posing my model using the handles I created. However, the automatically assigned influences of the joints have not worked properly: when the arm moves, so does the face, when the right foot moves, parts of the left foot move too.

To stop this from happening, I had to use to paint weights tool to correct the influences. This was a very tedious task and took a few hours to complete.

Once I finished painting weights, I could pose the character without any strange deformations. Now the model is ready for animation, although my final texture is still not ready.