July 17th - Cooking Skit 2019 | Dillon Gu Chaotic Cooking Animation Contest

I've been working on a short cooking animation skit to enter into Dillon Gu Chaotic Cooking Animation Contest. The requirement is that it needs to be cooking themed. Don't expect to win but I felt that the contest would help through giving me both creative parameters as well as a deadline to finish.

I modeled new characters for the animation and do feel that they are better than my first set already. Unfortunately it was only when I was pretty much done modeling the new characters that I thought about trying to modeling and rigging eyeballs. Attempted it for a bit but realized that the face shape I had made would make it really time consuming and decided to try and create flat cartoon eyes instead. 

Initially I followed a YouTube tutorial that used UV warping in Blender to animate the pupils. It worked in Blender but didn't quite translate over into Unity so I had to make due with just attaching bones to the black pupils of the character. 

While rigging the characters I realized why its a smart idea to delete the mesh that are underneath the models and can't be seen. It makes the whole process of rigging better since you don't have strange deformations during the animations.

I realized during the process that learning more about proper topology and modeling is something I'll have to look into and can help improve everything overall. Should make both UV mapping and Rigging easier. Better rigging should also lead to better animations as well.

In Unity I've started using the trail renderer for the first time. Hoping to give a cool cutting effect for the character cutting animation. Hopefully it turns out as well as I hope it will. 

I'm planning on keeping this animation skit short so I should be done over the next week if I don't run into any unexpected problems.