Rena :: Week 4 :: Progress post 1

Hmm, so fast it's week 4 already. Well, we went to meet our client, on Monday. It was a nice experience, because they were really friendly. The session was great as they had different views to our ideas, views that we forgot about or views that we couldn't picture. With their suggestions/views, changes to our idea will be required. So far, we still have some "conflicts" that we have not settled.

For this week, other than meeting with the client, I did a test for the SL Importer. I know Jason and Huiping tested it already, but I wanted to familarise myself with how the importer works, so I tried it out too. Although with this importer, we're allowed to model our stuff in 3DS Max, but it seems that the tools that we can use is pretty much the same as in SL, because we can only import the supported SL primitives from Max into SL.

However, the additional benefits of modelling in 3DS Max is the ability to add some specific modifiers, undo or clone something. Now, it does seem like the importer has some kind of problems according to Jason. I also have another problem with the primitives in 3DS Max itself. Some of the primitives for example, cones and pyramids, do not appear as it is supposed to be upon rezzing. Instead, they appear as cylinders and cubes. I believe this is a problem with the script called SLPrims. I think the script is still in beta. Hopefully, a solution to this problem can be found soon because modelling the hospital, medical equipments and other stuff in SL isn't easy.

I'm also doing some more sketches of the pets because the style is supposed to be cute but my previous designs weren't cute. Basically, I searched for different pictures and searched through the entire Pokemon database for inspiration. I sketched out whatever Pokemon I find cute so as to help me "analyse" what contributes to a cute pet. Haha... so here's what I call my research sketches:

So, according to my "analysis" I believe cute pets equals to big eyes, big ears, small/no mouth, plump/puffy body and eyes that are "wide apart".

Thus I came up with these:

Only the one on the bottom left is "passed", so I coloured it. The top 2 looks very similar to 2 other Pokemon and the fourth one is said to look weird. So, I need to churn out one more "good sketch" but I'm having problems thinking. Hopefully, I can churn out that good sketch tomorrow. Then I can start to model too. And together with Jason and Hui Ping, we shall finish the required models and graphics ASAP. There's also animation to worry about...blah blah...