3DS Max biped twist links inside of Unity 3D

For a while now I’ve had a problem using the 3DS Max biped inside of Unity. Specifically twist links and how they would always react badly when imported into the engine. While the rest of the rig would animate like normal, the twist links themselves would fly all over the place. The only solution I could ever find was to just not use twist links at all for my Unity projects.

Recently I found out how to fix this issue. If you rig your character with twist links and then go into Max’s Schematic View (up by the curve editor) you will find that the twist links, as they appear in the tree diagram, are not linked correctly. Somehow they are able to animate perfectly fine inside of Max, but once they are imported into Unity, the FBX reader looks at the links from the schematic view and animates the bones accordingly (which makes the twist bones fly all over). All you have to do is reorder the links in the schematic view. The hand links to the forearm twist which links to the forearm which links to the upper arm which links to the upper arm twist which links to the shoulder. After this is reordered, the animation continues to play fine in Max but now also works perfectly fine inside of Unity.

I found this info really exciting! I’m happy that I can start using twist links again because it was a real pain to work without them. Hopefully this can help someone that may be running into the same issue.

Snowballs and Pumpkins

I'm working on a game with a programmer from the office. I don't want to say too much about it except that it involves kids and snowball fighting. This is the first character I'm making for it. A few more character classes will follow as well as a bunch of props and environment pieces. There's a ton of work to do! I'll be posting more about it later.

This is the pumpkin I carved for Halloween this year! Last year I won the carving competition at work but this year my boss and I were the only two to enter so they just gave both of us gift cards. I was happy to get a gift card but I kind of wanted to reign victorious :( Oh well...

I finished the last of the 3 Bug Monsters for Easley-Dunn Games. I need to go back and tweak the first one however so that it matches the other two better in terms of texture quality.

Since then I have been given 3 Dinosaur Monsters to model! I'm super excited to work on these. They should also go a little smoother than the bugs because they are more organic. The Monster Football game is slated to become a Kickstarter here soon. I'll post more about it when the time comes.

This week was my sixth week of basically nothing to do at work. For about a month I worked on this roller coaster demo inside of Unity to use with the Oculus Rift, but I really got tired of it after a while and put it aside for the moment. I hope to finish it eventually, but I've been spending most of my time recently thinking about my portfolio and what I need to get done before I can start applying for new jobs. I believe it's time.

Speaking of portfolio work, I've been designing my new site! Scott Easley gave me some tips on how to organize my work to make it easier to find stuff. I will be taking advantage of his advice. I sketched a mock-up last night and am really liking the look. The color I've really been digging lately is purple, so I'm pretty sure the final color scheme will be white, black, and purple.

Finally, I ended up winning that Saints Row 4 contest! I don't know how, but it happened. Thanks to anyone that voted for our weapon. I got the [enormous] special edition bundle of the game in the mail a couple weeks ago. Most of this bundle I have to eventually hand over to Brad since the gun was his idea, but I got the game for free at least! Totally worth it.

Supposedly our gun design is going to be added into the game as DLC at some point in the future. I can't wait for that because I think it will be super fun to play with. We are expert game designers after all ::wink wink::

New Stuff

It's been a month. It was snowing 2 days ago and now it's 80 degrees.

I've been working on a comic a lot recently. I've been drawing comic books since I was in elementary school. I drew a lot of books in middle school and they got passed around my school getting generally good reviews. Once I got to high school I stopped. They are a lot of work and I was focusing more on traditional art. College was all 3D modeling and stuff. But I've been thinking about doing another comic for a while now. All of the planning has been building up and I finally found myself in a position where I can start roughing out the book. Here's a sample:
It's basically a super hero story (because that's what comics are suppose to be, right?). It's meant to be a comedy book, but the backstories are kind of dark so I'm not sure how it will turn out. My main inspirations for this are Watchmen and KickAss as well as some Scott Pilgrim. I'm hoping it doesn't turn out too cliche.

ALSO, the videogame project I've been working on with a couple fellow designers has hit a bump in the road. We've been coasting for a while and when we realized we've been planning our game for almost an entire year, we quit. LOL. Not really though. We are just taking a step back on that idea and focusing on something new in order to get our blood flowing. This new title is kind of a throw back to a game we made when we were in school, only this time we are going to overhaul it and make it badass as hell (and it will actually work!!) Here's the character I'm working on for it:

It's a work in progress of course. We got through the basic design phase of this quick, so we want to power through and try to get it done this year.

God help us all