Starting to get some decent animations!

Hiyo!

After a couple of days of fighting with Blender, I've managed to produce some decent animations for my swordsman character.
At first, the biggest struggle was the rig, but I found this handy dandy tool / package that allowed epics rig to work in Blender: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?34619-ADDON-BLENDER-UE-Tools

Big thanks to the creator of this addon. Working with the mannequin rig is very easy and elegant. A perfect starting platform for budding animators.

My process for animating this character was first to record myself doing the motion in my living room, and then use that video as a background image for Blender. After matching the major poses, I began just eyeballing the animation and cleaning up. I finally got to use a little bit of my lessons in animating from college, so thanks Shawn Sedoff!

The animations (two attacks played back to back):

I first created the animations with the character matching my own footsteps naturally, then removed the root motion so he walked in place. Birdlay reminded me we're using a modern game engine and root motion is actually a supported thing, so I put it back in pretty quickly. Tomorrow, I intend to get these animations working in game and hitting things! (With my handy dandy damage component system none the less! I should do a blog on this system some day...)

Swingin away!

A bunch of fighting with Blender's FBX export still needs to be done, but I have a semi working "swing" I can test with!  (Don't judge me, I'm not an animator!)

Using Rama's melee weapon plugin was pretty easy, Blender working with UE4's Physics asset editor is not. More to come on this front, but for now I can kinda test attacks and collision so WOO!

Shiny new environment test screenshots!

Hiya! I did a little work learning SpeedTree today, and put a few hours into that and implementing the trees I created and a new lighting model in my environment test scene. Here they are!

Attempting to make dynamic physics based hit animations and madness occurred.

First attempt just setting all bones above the effected one to simulate physics, then adding a force based on damage. This happened even without a force being added:

This was a good start, yet obviously not what I needed. Bones were far too heavy, and the force wasn't being applied. I later found out that adding a specific bone name to the apply force call

 would fix the latter issue.

Next attempt I applied physics at 50% blend with animation, and applied to all bones above and including the bone that was hit:

This one, surprisingly, was actually very close. The animation ended up being a little to subtle though. The spinning and flopping around was due to the root bone being set to physics, and any bones that had force applied to them would keep their velocity even when you went back to pure animation with no physics. The result was that angular velocity would add up over time, while linear velocity would be limited by the bones' joints.

Anywho, that's all for now, I will post more updates soon on art and enemy development.

Shiny new level loading material!

I decided the mess around with Material Parameter Collections in Unreal, and ended up coming up with a cool effect to play when the game starts up! It only takes about 2 minutes to implement into any material, and is super configurable!


OOoo purdy

First blender model "rigged"

Hooray! My first blender "character model" is posing somewhat!



This is a proof of concept for a simple rig to get animation systems working for the game. Obviously not intended to be high fidelity by any means.

Once I get the hang of all the tools I'm sure I'll be using the UE4 robot for any test animations and whatnot, but this has been a great learning experience.

Day 1 Rigging in Blender