I’m neck deep in recreating Victor as a subdiv surface. The auto-retopology feature in 3DCoat provided a quite good base mesh. The geometry still needs a lot of manual work before it can be used as an SDS cage, but any help, well, helps.
I do the rest of the modeling in modo. The background constraint keeps the geometry on the surface of the ultrahighpoly model so all I have to focus on is the proper edge flow. Someone should make a puzzle game based on this: Cover a given surface using only quads. (Another game dev related puzzle game could be about making UVs: Maximize coverage while minimizing stretching.)
On the code side of GViz, there are interesting developments. We decided to ditch the classic walk physics for the player characters where the movement speed and related animations are loosely linked together with a few parameters. This approach is fast and its imprecision isn’t very apparent in intense shooters like UT3, but it looks very videogame-ish and doesn’t work well with more complex movement systems.
So we started using root motion for not just specialized moves (like a swat turn) but for everything, movement included. Since the speed of movement is defined by the animation itself there is no “skating”, the feet doesn’t slide in place, even when blending between different directional and speed related anims.
The result is a much more fluid, natural looking locomotion (even with my preliminary animations) which justifies the extra effort needed to make it work with Unreal’s other systems. I intend to post a video of it as soon as we have a properly skinned Victor in the game but first I have to finish the SDS cage…
So I picked up a 
The newcomer is a 
My last investment this year is a 
The following little story is not about serious stuff like recovering from alcoholism, quitting the life of crime or how I stopped visiting hookers (’cause I didn’t).
