Post-Beta Review

So I had my Beta review on Friday, and we discussed a plethora of things. First we discussed the fact that Pinocchio and I were not getting along. I'm glad that Norm agreed with me that I need to focus on the animations firstly, and then with time I can try to work more on Pinocchio.
After talking about Pinocchio, I showed everyone how my shelf works and how I was using LERP to blend the different animations together. Norm gave me a lot of suggestions on how to improve the animations of my walk-cycles. One was to rotate the legs such that they were not at 90 degrees, but rather 85-87 degrees. That was really helpful, because I hadn't been animating too much from the front, so along with adding in hip rotations and more leg swinging, I will definitely be adding those leg rotations in, as well.

Another thing we talked about was working on getting rid of the Gimbal lock I have been encountering in the joints. I've been trying to fix that this past week, so hearing Norm and Joe's advice was helpful. Joe has also given me a great end goal for my work. At the end, to show how the body types do differ, I will have rendered out versions of the different animated body types walking next to each other, to help show just how different they are. That excites me, because I've been able to see the different walk-cycles in succession, but I would love to see them together to just see the differences that do happen.

From here, my end goals are to finish up the other animations, and code them in, along with finishing up general coding for all of the body parts. I have methods that set the legs, the waist and the shoulders, but I need to add in neck, back, hands and wrists. Lastly, I would prefer blending with SLERP instead of LERP just to see if it looks better. Spherically Linear Interpolation should look better, especially with rotation blending, so that shouldn't be a hard thing to change. I'm still trying to think of other parameters I can create animations for because I think it would be fun to have some more physical attributes to choose from than just age, gender, height and weight, but I can't decide what yet. Hopefully I will have a brainflash in the next week, while I finish up the current animations.