UV Mapping
The last thing that I wanted to do to my model was to UV map it. I left this till the end as it didn't really matter when I did it. The overall UV Mapping went fairly smoothly without too many issues. I did have one when mapping the head though with the top of it due to the flat top part, I got around this by adding some more edges to the top of the head and then when UV Mapping I went around the top and completely cut it off and then UV Mapped the rest of the head before attaching it back on in the Texture Editor so that it was easier to texture.
Texturing
I then started texturing the alien. I wanted to keep it quite simple and mostly one colour with a slight highlighting of bluey white around the key parts and then I also mixed in some orange and darker pink just to give it a more interesting look. I managed to get this done pretty quickly and then moved onto making the last few adjustments to the model before finalising it and then getting ready to animate it.
Animating
I then moved onto animating my alien in Maya which was a very quick and simple process. I kept my animation to a minimum, as it is not something that I am particularly gifted at, and something that I do not want to look at in the future. But I do feel that the animation is good enough to show my ability. Although it went smoothly I did have one issue that I couldn't figure out for a while which was that whenever I moved the right arm down at any of the control points the alien would have some kind of spasm in his hand, meaning that I couldn't animate him properly. So after thinking back this only started to occur after I had added in the forearm roll so I asked for advice from my tutors and he said to simply delete it. This solved the problem and I realise that this kind of movement in an arm can be tricky to pull off as the arm joints have to be completely aligned in order for it to work, as this was not the case in mine, this problem occurred, but it was easily solved.
I complete the animation and began to take it into Unity. Here is where I had a few problems. The rig that I brought in the first time had a few problems with the texturing I had to reapply the eye textures after spending a while finding where to apply them too. But then I realised that I didn't actually have any animation on the alien. This confused me a lot as I was not very familiar with exporting into Unity as we had only done it once previously so I had a lot of settings to look through.
I tried exporting it a few times from Maya and still I had the same problem so I went back and went into the outliner to ensure that I was truly taking everything from the scene into Unity and sure enough I then found the the final animation worked. I was happy with the final outcome, but when looking at it I noticed how low poly the model was, this was due to an issue when I was smoothing the model and this did not transfer into Unity. So instead I used a smoother in Unity and managed to get it to look a little better although the mouth has now become a bit of a weird shape, but overall I am happy with the final look.
Overall I am happy with the final look but a bit annoyed that I couldn't get the smoothed alien into Unity in the end so I took a QuickTime screen capture of my Maya alien doing the cycles just so i could show off how he was meant to in the end as I do like the smoothed version and think that it looks a lot better.
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