Harry Potter VR | Week 15 VR Interactive Characters (Final Pass)

For this  pass of the project, a lot of my work was already completed with the last pass for animation. In that vein, my job this time around was mainly playing support for others and assisting with the smaller menial tasks for the project. I playtested the project and was assisting in finding where bugs were and was in charge of populating the level with the static book meshes for all of the upper shelves and the shelves the player couldn't reach, such as in the staircase section of the level. I assisted in advising Bryce on how the VFX should look for the pensieve, ceiling, and wand VFX. I primarily played a support role for the rest of my team so that they could focus on their more important tasks so that the project came out the best it could. 

Week 12 VR Harry Potter Interactive Character Proxy Pass

 

This week was all about getting the bulk of the animation done for the interactive character. I have 5 animations created for the character: Asleep Idle, Awake Idle, Transition from Asleep to Awake, Head Scratch Reaction, Stomach Scratch Reaction. 

Once I created those animations I exported them and a base skeletal mesh for Fawkes and imported them into engine. I then created a new animation blueprint for Fawkes with a state machine and animations for each state within the state machine. Bryce took this and implemented it into engine so that Fawkes now plays the appropriate animation for the right triggers. 

Week 11 VR Harry Potter Progress Check-In

Working on the VR project, I mainly played a role in assisting others in whatever needed being done for this week's work. Animations were, for the most part, done. I had one animation that needed fixing, so I went in and did some editing and sent it back in. The original of the Thumb up animation looked like his thumbs were dislocated, so i went in and made them more relaxed. Once I got my animation obligations done, I worked a lot in playtesting and populating the level with our interactable books. And boy howdy there are many.... around 600 to be exact. I kept checking in with Bryce and they seemed to not break the level once he got his work implemented, so they've stayed in the build. If, as the project progresses, we may need to take a step back with the sheer number of books, we will likely be replacing them with non-interactable ones. For now though, players can enjoy a big interactive experience with lots of books to trash the environment with. 

Harry Potter VR | Week 10

 This week I went in and edited the animations for our project and pushed the movement further. After seeing the animations in the project, they needed to be pushed much further so that the subtle animations done were more obvious. I originally wanted my animations to be very subtle, but in doing so, they were too subtle for the first pass. I went in and did this for all of the animations besides the wand hold one. Besides this it was a lot of research and reference hunting for other people and assisting in playtests  for other people. This week was primarily about polishing assets and then reimporting them into engine.