Aurora Borealis And Prancing About For Rotoscoping

Chalmers: Yes, I should be--good lord, what is happening in there?!

Skinner: Aurora Borealis?

Chalmers: Ah- Aurora Borealis!? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your kitchen!?

Skinner: Yes.

Chalmers: ...May I see it?

Skinner: ...No.

But see it I did and it was spectacular. Alas I was only armed with an unfamiliar camera and had no tripod set up so the pictures were dark and grainy.

Monsters Loot Swag got another update, available on Steam here.

Much of the month revolved around me being ill with some sort of random stomach issue which has resulted in a detox diet, which isn't as bad as it sounds, though caffine has been kicked into touch.

When not feeling like death, I have spent the month testing more of my rotoscoping concepts for animation, still with only one camera. There has been much prancing around the vegetable patch. Cue list of gifs.

Two-Handed Lunge - The Disembowlment Special!

Wide slash with chopping followup ... The Double Whammy!

Two Handed Sweeping Uppercut - They Won't Be Expecting That!

With various attack types done, both single and two handed strikes, I needed more video of myself prancing around like a demented elf for standard movements, such as forward, back, sides, etc. This was however postponed due to WEATHER and lots of it. It had bucketed down days, possibly weeks, it's hard to tell when you lose all sense of the Space-Time-Continuum due to being excessively soggy.

Whilst waiting for the biblical deluge to wash the sinners into the gutter, I added a shield to my hack-and-slash base character model. Whilst I had posed with my arm out, pretending to have a shield - bokken I can muster, Viking rond alas not - I had not been too aware of sword or body penetration. Thankfully my sense of spatial awareness was quite good, and changes and rotations were kept to an absolute minimum.

It did finally brighten up today, and so I spent more time running about on the way too small available area next to the veg patch. After a quick rotoscope I have some basic forward movement.

Tip-Toe, Through The Meanies ...

After some consideration on forearm and hand deformation I thought it was getting a little too mangled at the wrists, and so edited the base character model to include wristTwist bones, which proved to give much better deformation than twisting the forearm and hand along the Y axis.

Slash With Shield

Skewer With Shield

Reverse Cut With Shield

So that was a very wet May, hopefully it will fair up come June, though ... how the hell have we got to June already????