Kristen Powers

This project was a struggle for me, as I could not get my character to animate correctly. It did animate, but it is not exactly how in envisioned it. I will continue to work with it, but I am turning it in knowing it needs improvement because I took many stabs at trying to fix it, but could not seem to get it right. I did learn new tools and started to understand Playmaker a little more, but I am still having a hard time wrapping my head around this animation step in the process.

I wanted to get more creative with this scene, and I did have a lot of fun building it--but in the end I think I was way over my head. I should have stayed simple until I really mastered the technique. Even though the animation does not work 100% properly, I did manage to get my zombie character to move. I originally got him to walk in place, and then with the help of Professor Pacheco, the character turned around and walked. However, I couldn't crack how to make it so that the zombie would not trigger automatically and that he would walk the correct way.

I double checked all the work I did, and made sure that the "animate automatically" button was not pressed. I also made sure that my first person controller was not too close to the box collider, but for some reason as soon as you enter the scene he starts walking away...when I wanted him to walk towards the soldiers. Eventually I want to work with the scene to get everything animated. I really did have fun with the concept of my scene, so I am still going to work with it to see it in action.

I did give myself enough time to really play with Playmaker/my scene and try to get my scene up and running correctly, but I am stumped as to where to move from here. I watched lynda.com video and Youtube videos to try to trouble shoot the issue, but I could not fix it on my own. I will come into office hours next week to see if we can work through then.

Things I learned:

-Keep files organized in project! My hard drive is very organized, but I found myself getting lost within the project. For the next one the key is going to be organizing as I go along. This will especially be important as we start adding new elements to our scenes.

"The important thing with innovation and testing things out is that you learned as much from what works as you do from what fails or what is not perfect."

Great quote from our very own Professor Pacheco, when talking about VR with me earlier today for a news package.