Monday  :

I began putting characters into the project with their textures. I noticed that I may have not exported the right type of texture for Julie as she missing a basemap. So I need to correct that. 

+ I somehow changed the UV of the Julie rig so the substance painter textures didn't match up. I fixed the UV for her face but I can't fix her gloves, so I will correct the problem with the gloves in photoshop.

And Shirley's neck has an obvious seam which is unusual for substance painter textures so I have to check that out.

Tuesday:

Yesterday night I fixed up the texturing/UV issues that Julie had but didn't test the textures yet. I also went into photoshop to fix Shirley's weird seam. 

Today my goal is to get my finished assets and animations into the game. The NPC's animations aren't sorted yet but I can get the NPC's rigs into the game so they can be placed, as well as what textures I have. I had problems with humanoid in Unity since I animated from referenced rigs and it can't easily read the files because of the namespace Maya attaches. Once I'm done fixing this I can continue animating.

Animations goal: the 4 main suspects need their idle animation, at least one face expression to wear for their idle, and to be able to rotate joints to face the player. (Which can be handled by either me or Faye depending). The background characters idles need to be done. 

End of today:

I got the humanoid animation/rigs to work on the 4 main suspects. Which I was struggling with because the naming conventions can't be easily read by Unity. Unity needs the root joint to be names hips so all animations/rigs root was renamed to hips. 

I also brought blendshapes in with one rig for a test, but need to figure out animation layers to get his face animations working with body. Since just having blendshape alone makes the character go into the default 'humanoid' crunched looking pose. Also, the idle animations I created make the characters blink but they didn't transfer over with humanoid animation so I think I need to use avatar mask.

I'm almost there with the main suspects and prioritizing them over NPC's. Their textures came out looking fine in Unity, I have a seperate material for eyes from the rest of the mesh to make them glossy. 

The suspects need a blendshape to give them a worried/agitated look by default. 

Wednesday: 

Today I was working on getting blendshapes in for facial expressions. It mostly worked well although Julie's rig had some issues.

First issue was I had changed the UV map after rigging, because it didn't match the textures I created. This was a mishap. And when I deleted non-deformer history it distorted the UV's. And I need to remove history to make blendshapes. Because of this I went back to a previous save of the rig before I changed it. Made the blendshapes, then changed the UV's. Oddly enough this time deleting history didn't destroy the UV's at all. But I had to repaint some weights because they were different from the version of the rig I used to animate which made her legs clip through her skirt. Now that is fixed, 3 of the main characters have blendshapes for facial expressions on them. 

Thursday

At some point my unity collab became unable to sync with the server. So I finished setting up animators and exported the 4 main characters as prefabs for Faye to put in the project. Then I redownloaded the repository from Unity collab so I can start putting NPC's in through Collab hopefully. 

Friday:

  Today I imported the NPC's into the game and what animations I have. I still need to animate the idle for the bartender and have some for characters sitting down on chairs. The NPC's are not positioned in the scene at the moment. Male NPC's still need their textures imported and applied. Next week I have to sort out sounds.

Week 9:

I've completed all my work on the characters.  For a bit of a backlog of the previous days I missed here is the update:

I did have some troubles with humanoid animations but I know how to get them working now. For the past week I have been working on little, more subtle animations to add life to the characters. Such as blinking and making their heads/eyes follow the player. Which will either activate when you walk close to them or when you talk to them. But at the moment they can look a bit uncanny.

But I did have a couple problems pop up when I was doing these things. I found issues in weight painting on some characters faces for blinking, moving eyes which I had to fix. So I re-imported some rigs. Sometimes Unity replaces them smoothly and other times they would glitch out if I didn't delete the meta files. Also characters irises not lining up to center originally so I rotated the eyeballs which ended up biting me back when I tried to apply the lookat script to them. So I had to fix this on Daniel and Vernon. Daniel would go crosseyed and Vernon had one eye slightly looking up more than the other. 

The script would make the eyeballs go backwards on just one side. I think this is because these joints are mirrored versions of the left eye joints in Maya. So the axis of the joints are different. To fix it I create a game object on the correct axis and parenting the joint to it. The joint will become -180 degrees but face the right way. And the script was applied to the game object. The heads of characters also had to have the right positions too. I was having other trouble with the head rotate when they weren't which would make the character tilt their head at an odd 90 degree angle. And the end result of their head following the player turned out to look a bit creepy so we're unsure if we'll even use it. 

I also tried using the aim constraint component but decided on using a simple script lookat instead since it was too finicky and not working the way I want. 

The main game scene needs to have lights baked before I can view what the eye follow animations look like in game. We had troubles with HDRP and ended up separating the environment from characters and scripts so Em can work on baking the lights. Then after she is done we'll import our work as a package and see if it all works before we make the main build. 

Technical Artist stuff:

Feedback was given that there was too much yellow in the scene. All the lights were warm indoor lights. So me and Faye did some work to get some complementary colours into the scene.

The tablesets went from black and grey to shades of blue. I updated the glass textures to be see-through and refractive. Turned down the shinyness on most of the materials in the scene since the whole scene was said to be too reflective.

Faye added new models to fill the scene. She said the wall behind the stairs was empty and was wondering if we have picture frames to put up. I used picture frames from my previous project Destination: Limbo and retextured them . The images inside the frames come from pixabay and are royalty free.

Still refining movement of the characters eyes. Had to lower the height of the player a bit so they don't loom over smaller characters too much. 

Update week 9:

Lighting was  updated a bit. I reduced most of the texture sizes in the project just not the ones that need to be high. At the moment we're building the project and trying to get this thing to work on lower end computers.