Studio B Game Development
Home Screenshots Blog About Us Contact	July 2006 - A Smooth Walk Cycle and Lip Synching
		After looking at some other games, I realized our main character's vertex count was a little too high so I downsized him a little. That meant to re-rig him and re-paint the weights on each vertex. I also learned about Inverse Kinematics where the bone structure is set up that if you move his foot, his whole leg will follow the foot's movement. The walk cycle! This is definitley something that takes practice in order for the cycle to play smoothly. Luckily there is something called IPO curves to smooth out the kinks and skips. Here's a little five-second video (1.4MB) I took of our main character walking. Yes, it's me holding my camera up to the computer screen. :P Lip Synching and Facial Expressions. This wasn't too bad to grasp but eventually you'll get the hang of it. Previously, our character was animated using bones. Since the lips and facial experessions are more 'delicate' in a sense, we'll be manually positioning each vertex to the place we want, and holding them there using shape keys. This way, we can get a more exact and defined location of our precise movements. We've cut down the lip movements to only a few animations called phonemes. One phonome would be how the lips would look with the "OO" sound, another is how the "L" sound would look, etc. Setting these shape keys can be quite tedious to get them the way you want but just take your time and have fun with it. Here's a two-second clip of his lips moving. There's a bit of stretch in his texture around his mouth. I'll have to learn how to fix that. In order to render the walk cycle and lip synching movements in Ogre, Patrick had to program an export for Blender. Back
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