Character Best Practices - Katie

For this project I was tasked with providing one of the characters for the scene. I began the process by looking into environments and occupations that would be similar to the type of character that would be needed for the scene. I looked into reference pictures to see elements that were common among archaeologists, as that seemed to be the job our characters would have. After looking through several archaeologists the common threads in their appearance were their cargo pants, hat, boots, and their white button ups. Though these were not present throughout every person in the reference images they seemed to properly embody enough elements of an archaeologist to get the point across. Then to create proxy content I decided to create a board game like piece, simply for the purposes of inserting something into the Unity scene. The proxy character ended up looking like a simple person similar to those in the board game life. As for the final character I choose to pull a model from Turbo squid, and during my search I found an archaeologists model that fit the bill rather nicely, if not a tad cartoonish. It was by no means a perfect model ready to go right after purchase. Rather I received a Max file rather than a Maya file and I was completely lost as to how to operate the program. So after contacting the support from Turbo squid and requesting the file to be converted to a Maya file I finally was able to work with the character. There were still a multitude of issues with the model, namely the jacket attached to him seemed to have a copy of itself that refused to move with the rest of him. There were also no controls attached to the rig and the rig itself seemed rather flawed, our rigger is awesome for fixing everything with the model and making it usable. And after much modification from our rigger the character was finally able to be animated and inserted into the unity scene, this character could not have been usable or possible in general with out our talented rigger!