So, several years back I substituted my Character Modeling and Animation course at RIT with an independent study in character modeling and animation. My task was to create and animate the characters Josie True and iCat from a collaborative educational project.

Well, it took a while, but for the last 6 months or so I’ve finally taken the time to finish this project up so I can officially be a graduate of the Game Design and Development program at RIT.

Here is a video of my final work. The characters are being rendered in real time in an interactive environment in Luster.

I am not a character modeler nor animator. I have worked in Maya before and done some shotty rigs and animations in the past, but this was a huge learning experience for me. Not everything came out the way I wanted, but I am thrilled to have created what you see here. I am no Kyle, just a noob, but I am a proud noob.

Oh, and also, a little on the two characters:

iCat was rigged and animated in a fully forward kinematic system, which gave me a lot of control but made a lot of animating very tedious and difficult to get appropriate results (for example, making sure the feet stay on the ground)

Josie was animated in a fully IK system, which gave me a lot of nice tools for keeping feet on the ground, bones in place and extra realistic motion from her movements. It was also, however, very complicated to operate with pinning and pull and all that stuff, so making a wrong move would lead to a lot of frustration and other terrible things. Obviously very powerful, but something that I am sure takes practice and experience to master.