The past two months have been a bit of a weird stage in our development. We've been working pretty hard to get a lot of things done here, but we took some time off to tune our skills. As any dedicated modder should know. If you expect your mod to see the light of day for others to see; then you're gonna have to learn a lot of things you weren't orginally planning to learn. So that's what I've been doing for quite a while now, learning new things. With some help from Alex who some may remember, provided us with a player model a few months back, I've been learning a lot about UVing and modeling. Then as I signed up to be an animator, I've been learning a lot of things about how the Unreal editor handles animations. What started off as me just trying to get a custom rig into the game, turned out to be a bit of a painful process. One thing led to the next when it came to problems, and there wasn't a whole lot of documentation on some of the more complex features of the Unreal editor, such as the AnimationTree and PhAts. But of course, naturally as I finally get into the swing of things, started doing my UVs a lot better, models were coming along a bit cleaner, and I was even finally at the end of getting our player model actually working when.....*dun, dun, dun* my computer decided to kick the bucket.
Yeah, I was really close to finishing off my "learning" stage more or less, so I would be at the stage where I could just go back to producing content when my computer decided it no longer wanted to boot up. So after I tore apart my computer, and did various tests I narrowed it down to either my CPU/Processor or my motherboard. So I took apart the heatsink to my CPU, and what do you know? The entire thing is nothing but a giant dust square thing. It was so clogged with dust that it looked like it was a foam filter almost it was so packed in there. A bit ashamed that I neglected to ever check my heatsink for dust (it was between the fan and the heatsink, so I never saw it until I took the fan off) I decided it was probably the CPU. It wouldn't of had any air flow, and the heat would just build up to the point that the processor would of overheated to it's death. So I decided it was time for a new computer anyways. Now $430 dollars later, my computer is expected some time next week.
So there you have it, more or less a reason as to the lack of updates from us. Although we have no pretty pictures to show off this month unfortunetly, we do get to admit we've grabbed ourselves a coder. His name is Brian, and he's been working with us for a month and half or so now. He's been working on a few new things for us, such as being able to pick up weapons and the likes using the "use" key rather than just running over it. Hopefully I'll be back up and running in about two weeks time at the latest, and then do a proper news post in the following month or so.
I don't mean to be this unsensitive, but could you throw together some documentation on custom rigs in UT3, and animation, to fill that gap in information for others?
I would love to actually. You know, as soon as my computer is no longer dead.
Now the only problem is I use Autodesk Maya, so those looking for help in 3DS Max will need a little bit of working on their own to get this to work. But from the stage of being imported into Unreal to working with the other things it should apply pretty easily. I'm thinking of doing it in a few stages;
Stage 1: Exporting from Maya with ActorX
Stage 2: Importing into Unreal Editor and Setting up Packages
Stage 3: Importing Animations and working on the AnimationTree
Stage 4: Setting up basic PhAts (Physical Assets)
Stage 5: Changing .ini's and some other minor things
then when I'm done with that, I'll write up another part on information for Maya users on some of the issues I've run into and how to fix them. I would say I'll be able to start this off in December though, that way I can hopefully help some people out before next year kicks off.