Dev Diary 016: Match 3 Invaders with Animated Aliens
Rigging the InvaderWell, here we go again. Today I was working with Blender to try to rig up some basic animations for my alien baddies. After a few false starts, I was able to make some bones and rig the alien. There's probably a better way to do it, but I just made used the forked rigging system to quickly make bones for each of the...tentacles? Teeth? Not really sure what those things are! I did notice a substantial hit to processing power once I implemented the animated versions...Considering the simplicity of the animation, I am concerned about doing anything more sophisticated--it appears that making Unity browser games requires substantial skill in optimizing such things. I clicked the options to reduce keyframes and compress the animations. I got some errors (not show-stopping) about some vertices with unassigned bones (huh?). My ignorance concerning Blender is pretty galling; while I'm able to muddle through and get stuff done, I realize that I'm only scratching the surface. I should probably plan to spend more time with my Blender book and perhaps find a good video tutorial series on using the program more effectively. The problem is that a lot of the Blender material focuses on stuff that isn't really useful for my purposes, such as lighting and shaders and such. All I need really is to create good-looking models, UV maps, rigs, and animation.
