Rigged and ready for a walk

It has been a very productive weekend for Asylum and AutoWallpaper. For Asylum I’ve been concentrating on the temperamental character animation. As Asylum is now going to be a third person point and click adventure (with a bit of action) I needed to sort out once and for all the problem of character animation.So, armed with a copy of Fragmotion I set about rigging (adding the skeleton) to the model. This process has previously left my head spinning with very odd things happening; however, this time I followed an online tutorial to help me get to grips with it in a much easier way. The tutorial lasted about 15 minutes and at the end of it I had a full rigged character that behaved as it should. I even had a primitive walk cycle going. The downside was to come after I imported the model into the Wintermute engine, for some strange reason the model was stuck between the davinci (arms out straight) pose and the idle/walk pose, so that when the character was walking his arms were half way to his side and his legs looked as if he’d had an accident, but, I thought, at least I was making progress.I posted a quick query on the WME forum and in a few hours I’d gotten a response. Multi-weighted bones apparently cause a few problems from time to time. So, I stripped the model of bones and set them up again, making sure that I didn’t use multiple assignments. Re-imported and hey-presto, the model was walking perfectly (at least as it should be).With a small amount of time left for the weekend I turned my attention to sort out the bizarre lighting that had come across from the 3DS file. This fortunately didn’t take long and the result is a much more integrated character (albeit the texturing is still very earlier and will be improved upon shortly). In the meantime here’s a work in progress screenshot (the green text at the top is debug information). AutoWallpaper also saw a fair amount of work this weekend (between WoW play sessions). There will be a new update shortly and this update will include:No repeats – the option to ensure that wallpapers do not repeat during a single session.

Single-click tray icon can now be changed to either show main window or force a wallpaper change.

Fixed a possible problem with really fast PCs loading AW before windows has loaded the notification tray.