Project complete: Elizabeth

After a hectic spring and multitasking which puts all other multitaskings to shame, Elizabeth has finally reached completion. She is now rigged, textured, normal mapped and up and dancing in Unity. Her progress was slowed down by various minor bumps in the road, ie. me having to take the time to write a graduation thesis from Helsinki University. I am proud to announce that the thesis did get written, and Elizabeth got her textures and normal maps too. I have added Elizabeth to the gallery section of these pages. As my programmer is right now having his final moments before his thesis about Elizabeth has to be handed in, he will be able to provide with a video about the game little bit later. He has a questionnnaire  as part of  his final thesis open  about the Elizabeth, and he will be glad to have feedback. The questinnaire will be closed 12.5 though.

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We have come a long road from this…

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My final thoughts are quite positive. I am bit annoyed we didn’t have time to do facial animation (or even a facial rig) at all, but the feet movement is quite natural and the rig has decent bone weights. At one point we thought Elizabeth would wear sport clothes, and this is really on just my conscience, but we decided rather to go for urban street wear, which is relatively comfortable and would make sense also, as lot of people are using the dancing machines in public, ie. in movie centres etc. In the end Elizabeth also became a red head, even though I thought for a long time she would be blonde.

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…to what is shaped like this…

…and looks like this.

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As the project has been shown to people, most of the feedback has been incredibly positive. The criticism is mostly in where it was to be expected, which is a preferable situation. The project was a good chance for me to sharpen my skills on some of the more advanced UV and texturing tricks Blender has to offer and I did get my hands on some sculpting action in Blender too.

Even though we have come this far, Elizabeth is still a prototype. There is a strong chance she will be developed further in the future, as something like her does not exist in the current dancing games yet.

Elizabeth in the game engine.