Poo-Poo Platter

I managed to set aside some time today to work on the horse animations. Today’s animation is a pretty straightforward walk cycle, which you can view here: Horse Walk Test Render.

As with the jump animation from a couple of weeks ago, I still have some tweaks to do on the walk. I’d like to add a bit more head movement to the cycle without making it too annoying – can’t really have a headbanging horse walking around in-game. I also want to do some more fine-tuning on the shoulder and tail motions. They just aren’t quite there yet for me.

This first set of passes on the animation took way longer than I had anticipated. I was able to block out the majority of the walk cycle in a couple of hours, but it took me at least another 3-4 hours to do additional cleanup passes. Most of that time was fighting with Character Studio. I was trying to get the feet to plant solidly and the overall rig to just behave in general. I did step away from my computer for an hour to prevent myself from chucking it through the window. Luckily, Max didn’t crash once, so at least I can be thankful for that.

I still have a more animation work to do before Robert and I can officially call the Horse Pack complete, but I am slowly getting there. The last bit of cleanup on the walk cycle won’t take long at all, and I only have a couple more animations I need to do to finish off on the to-do list. Once those are done, we can pack everything up and ship the content pack.

It’s tough to muster up the energy to devote the whole weekend animating when I’ve already blown most of my 3D mojo during the week at MGS. I am, however, feeling much more motivated to get this stuff done as soon as possible. Getting the jump and land sequences done a couple of weeks ago was a huge boost for me, as was doing the test animations last weekend. I’ve the animation juices flowing again. I just need to get the will-power to spend the weekend working on 3D stuff instead of zoning out in front of the TV or blabbing away on IRC.

Lately, I’ve been really getting into AppleScript. I’ve found it to be easy to work with and very convenient for automating repetitive tasks in some of my daily communications/tasks. It’s also a nice and relatively productive way to take a break from work, game dev, and anything related to 3D.

For those of you who don’t know about AppleScript, here’s a blurb from Apple’s Getting Started With AppleScript page:

AppleScript is a scripting language that provides convenient control of applications and of many parts of the Mac OS. AppleScript uses an English-like syntax that is accessible to scripters with little programming experience. Scripts can combine operations from applications and from the Mac OS, to automate simple tasks or complex workflows.

I’m presently using custom AppleScripts in Mail, MarsEdit, BBEdit, and Conversation. Most of the scripts are written by other people, but I do hope to write more of my own as I learn more about AppleScript.

The majority of my custom scripts are presently used in Conversation. I tend to change my nickname in IRC channels frequently, so, rather than type out long-winded commands to change the name and authorize the ones I have registered, I like to use scripts to automate them. Conversation allows me to use AppleScripts as /commands, so I can just type the name of the script to execute it.

Here’s a quickie one that changes my name to “danny” and then authorizes the nickname if the name of the current server contains “maxgaming” (maxgaming.net’s IRC servers have registered nicknames).

Every time I type “/danny” in Conversation, the script does its magic, and I’ve saved myself a bunch of typing. The script only took me about 20 minutes to put together, and most of that time was figuring out the correct syntax for Conversation’s script library. I’m still not very fluent in AppleScript, so this probably took far longer than it should have.

Learning how to create AppleScripts is actually kind of fun. While the English-like syntax can be tedious sometimes (nightmares of pre-dotSyntax Lingo in Director come to mind immediately), it is very easy to work with and makes reading other people’s scripts go much faster. Apple’s free Script Editor application (bundled with OS X) makes writing scripts go very fast with syntax coloring, auto-completion, and auto-formatting. Best of all, you can actually use AppleScript to create self-contained applications. I haven’t quite gotten to that point yet, but I hope to be there at some time in the future.