Yao is in charge of making the majority of the 3D assets. As I had already made some start on the modelling for one of the creatures during Semester One, I will now proceed to make the model more suitable to be imported into the Unity game engine through several required adjustments.

Remesh Topology Firstly, I wanted to ****remesh the petal feline’s arms in order for them to be better rigged for the weight painting that will come later. As I wasn’t sure how well the automatic weight paint in Blender performs with the model’s arm, the rotation of it is modified first by having the paws facing downwards rather than pointing straight. This would result in the model to be finished in an A-pose structure, which is typically used to reduce mesh stress in the shoulder area.

- Before

- After

Rigging I then moved onto testing rigging by adding a basic armature, altered by adding additional and removing unnecessary bones like the ears or tail. By parenting the model with the armature, it can be seen that the automatic weights that’s applied default required manual edits. This isn’t a huge issue as these tweaks just needed time, but what troubled me is the deformed arms that also affects the body when lifting it up.

After making slight changes to the armature bones and redo the process again, the issue with the arms still doesn't resolve. I made the decision to go back to fiddle with the topology of the arms again. This time, keeping them uniform in a T-pose. Weight painting is more successfully brushed on the body parts by check selecting each bone.

Face Emotes Expressions using a 2D texture is suggested after I found a tutorial on how this is achieved in Blender and how to import this method of showing facial expressions into Unity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E96m9Z4iTcc&t=52s

Another mesh that highlights the face area is made and assigned with the image texture. These 2D textures are drawn and distributed like a sprite-sheet, the expressions can be controlled when the selected face mesh is placed over the emotes in UV editor viewport along the offset coordinates.