ahh Kal not in 3D

I have been working on a new title for the iPad called Hoopfighter. A Soon to be released game based upon the franchise of a Movie, Web comic and more (yes, more to come!) You can check it out at the address below, or the Facebook page also listed below.

http://hoopfighter.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Hoopfighter

The plan was to have a nice 3D rendered version of Kal, the main character in our story and also the main character in the iPad game (the dude you play as). However we ran into some complications as so often happens when starting working with a new team on something 3D. There is always some hurdle or other slowing progress and more. Below in this first image you can see that Kal as rendered in this viewer has a few problems. Notably he head and right arm are missing, also his left hand appears to have some very strange fingers.

 

 



I looked over the skeleton and also the geometry. It was not easy to spot anything really wrong. One of the problems is that this model has 65 bones, and sorting through 65 bones takes quite some time. It is simply too big and we needed to make a much smaller/simpler example with this kind of error. then we would be able to move forwards once that is fixed. However the original model was modelled in Max using something called Cat. This means that its rig did not use actual bones, but instead used objects. Alas the exporter from Marmalade exports Bones and although it would export these objects, it would not see any bones to export, so it simply won't export them. This means we would have to completely re-rig the Kal and other models... Something my friend Scott did for this test of Kal. Simply put.. it would be too expensive and time consuming.

Still I was playing with the model and determined to figure out what had happened to his head. As you can see in the next image, I found it!

But I have to say this is not quite as it seems. To make the head show up, I attached the head to the left ankle bone, and hey presto there it was.. in its rightful place oddly enough. I feel that maybe the transform stack was not cleared before exporting from Max, though I am no Max expert, it is a problem we have faced in the past with our own exporters.

Now though.. this is on the shelf as a 3D game and instead we will be going to pre-rendered imagery. Which will be a lot bigger and a lot more cumbersome for me as the programmer (blended animations anyone?).

It will look awesome pre-rendered though I am very excited about that.

g'night
Da Voodoochief