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I was tired of the bald head so I added some hair. I separated the head from the neck so I could add more loop cuts and shaped the head using a guide. I then extruded roughly where the hairline would be, with two additional extrusions for the fringe and ears. I have tried to go for an androgynous haircut.
I also made the proportions a bit more stylised by increasing the side of the head, hands and feet.
Character animation was possibly the most significant portion of game creation that I did not yet feel comfortable with. I did a couple of lessons on rigging, skinning, and animating in first year’s character and environment design module, but the switch the mixamo meant I didn’t have the opportunity to cement the learning. I attempted to help my partner on the Realtime module rig and skin a bear model earlier this year using a 3dsMax quadruped skeleton but unfortunately they weren’t able to complete it. Learning character animation for this module proved incredibly difficult and confusing right up until the moment it clicked.
As an aside, throughout this process I have constantly had Ocarina of Time open on an emulator to be able to quickly reference animations. Alongside directly analysing Link’s movements in animations, this has been useful for figuring out what the standard of quality and detail was so I can emulate that in my animations. For example, I wanted to figure out how many stages there are in animations, like how many different animations are used for different speeds or moving, and what transitional animations are used in jumping/falling/landing.
I followed a variety of tutorials, but it was difficult to figure out exactly what kind of rig I needed for my purposes. The majority of tutorials have a more advanced rig than I need. Alongside simply not needing many bones, I need (nearly) no weighted skinning as I have avoided the need for deformation by segmenting limbs.
My original rig simply followed this tutorial by Grant Abbit, which had an incredibly simple skeleton with segmented limbs and no weighted skinning… and no IK rig. This is where I ran into my first problems, as the lack of a foot IK made animating incredibly finnicky. I got a basic rigid walk and idle animation done, but as soon as I started adding more keyframes to make the animation smoother there was just too many elements to keep track of and it was very difficult to fix the feet to the ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srpOeu9UUBU
I then followed this tutorial by Joey Carlino, which was helpful to a degree but much more advanced than I actually needed. I believe I did create a rig following this tutorial but I don’t think I got anywhere with it.