AGI Studio 1 - Week 10 - Studio Work Post

Starting this week, I moved my exploration into a different direction. Previously, I was working on a tool to export the blendshapes from Maya and set the blendshapes up in Unity without any hassle. But after trying out different things and researching similar topics, I figured out that I was over-complicating things and everything that I wanted to do was pretty straight forward. So, instead of making a different tool for it, I decided to incorporate the exporting of blendshape into my Folio 1 project. I added a checkbox button in my existing tool. This button, behind the scene, bakes the animations from the blendshape to the model and exports it out with the rig and animation. This way nothing needs to be set up inside Unity or Unreal and everything runs smoothly.

From Week 10 onward, I’ll be exploring and working on 2D rigging and animation in Unity. This week was mostly spent doing research, but I did manage to finish rigging a 2D sprite (sprite downloaded from the Unity Store) inside of Unity. The video above shows how the bones and deformation of the sprite looks so far. In Week 11, I’ll be working on solving problems in the deformation and creating animations for the sprite. I have a list of basic animations that I want to have by the end of Week 11, so I can start setting everything up through state machines starting Week 12.

Research this week has been proving very helpful to me. Through research I was able to figure out a simple way to export the blendshapes from Maya to Unity and research has been helping me in learning about 2D rigging and animation inside of Unity.

Over the next week, I need to start pushing myself a little bit harder because I have a lot of things on my plate that I want to finish before Week 13. I also need to start looking for references that might be similar to what I am developing instead of just focusing my research on the exact thing.  I need to continue focusing on what I am doing and getting through it one step at a time.