Going Forward

I have revised last week's plan of action a bit to account for what I accomplished this week, and what I plan to accomplish in the weeks following:

- Week 7: 

•  Character's rig completed
• Reviewed re-targeting MoCap animations in Motion Builder
• Learned how to use Unity Mecanim for editing and re-targeting animations.
• Learned how to change root motion of animations in the inspector upon import, as well as in the Animation editor window.

-Week 8: 

• Re-targeted all animations and got them into Unity.
• Used Unity IK to bind left hand to rifle.
• Used blend trees to blend between running in different directions.
• Used animation layers to mask lower body running animations, and upper body running and shooting animations.
• Restructured project, separating animation libraries to separate Unity project, for organizational purposes and to free up space in project.
• Tried to add melee attack animation blend tree, which is still buggy. I may need to simplify it a great deal.

-Week 9: 

• Re-imported all fixed Animations into Unity
• Added jumping and landing animation and functionality. The Character now has a takeoff jumping, midair jumping, and soft landing animations. 
• When the space bar is pressed or held, the character somersaults into the air. Holding down the space bar causes the character to somersault in the air for a longer period of time, and ascend to a greater height before being pulled back down to the ground.
• Used Unity IK to begin adding aiming functionality. Character now aims forward, but additional animation correcting is required.

-Week 10:

• Continue building aiming system, rotate spine bones (spine, chest, neck, head) to follow target.
•  Continue working on jump functionality.
• Add hard landing and rolling animations, for a total of 3 different landing animations.
• Add animation for jumping while shooting, a falling idle where avatar masks are used to transition the upper body from falling/airborne to shooting while falling/airborne.
• Fix jumping animation problem/glitch:
• Build functionality to detect how high character is in the air in order to smoothly transition between falling and landing animations. 
• Calculate the amount of force applied before jumping, based on a set of parameters.
• Calculate the rate of change in falling velocity based on how high the character is in the air, or use raycast, to determine when to start blending from falling to landing animation.
• Use IK to move fist to contact during melee attack animation.
• Begin adding functionality for detecting when character should touch a nearby wall.
• Look at smoothly blending IK weights to achieve smooth transition between IK handle control and animation.
• Use IK to achieve foot planting (lowest priority)

-Week 11:

• If all of the above goals are completed, work on the Week 11 tasks in the spreadsheet:
• Wall jumping
• Ledge grab
• Bullet stopping
• Add as much functionality as possible in time remaining using all Unity Mecanim tools possible.
• Continue working on character controller, adding more functionality. Add Unity IK functionality, troubleshoot problems if need be.
• Master's thesis research, read articles, find new ones, post to blog. What am I doing for my master's thesis? Why? How will this advance the given field?