We then downloaded the character and Eric added a walk cycle which we grabbed of the web onto it in Motion Builder and I exported the model with animation from Maya and implemented it into the fair.
The conclusion is that evolver delivers good quality characters and the exported rigging works straight out of the box. It’s clearly an affordable option for any production (high res video rendering and efficient games characters) to get a lot of characters fast if the character design is generic.
Here’s the interface of evolver and the end result of our test (screenshots).
I modeled the lakes and the biggest Pool, the “Pool of Industry”, of the fair. We needed to know whet impact such big reflecting surfaces will have on the performance of the game and the lakes needed to be added.
I implemented the following pavilions into the fair, which means cleaning up the model and exporting it to Ogre using the OgreMax exporter.
The Chrysler pavilion was was updated by Alex Zelenin. He added trees and plants and re-baked the AO.
I inherited the General Motors pavilion from Julian Orrego to finalize. I replaced all the repeating objects with the latest versions and since a few things have changed on this pavilion I had to “massage” the geometry a lot especially on the lower LOD’s. I also modeled the walkmesh. Plus I added the animated flags.
I also got to finish his Greyhound pavilion which was built based on an old version of the pavilion ground plates and had to be adjusted quite a bit. I animated the rotating sign and replaced the texture on the sign (wohoo a 359 degree y rotation animation 🙂 ). The trickiest part on this was actually to find the historically correct version of the greyhound hound logo with enough resolution.
I updated Eric’s model of the Sinclayr Dinoland pavilion. He animated the dinosaurs, added trees and re-baked the AO. I added the two Modlorama machines and exported/implemented it to the fair.
Alex Zelenin finished Shaun McNeely’s Hall of Science pavilion and added the Space Park behind it. I massaged it and exported it to the fair.
And I replaced the bushes around Alex Zelenin’s model of the Tricentenial Pool with hardware instanced versions of the bushes.