I made a new hat and edited the lantern to look a bit sharper and less wonky. It’s still far from perfect but I think it’s coming out great. This is great progress from the 2D sprites I’m used to working with. That third dimension is really trick. Though after I finished putting it on the Unreal mannequin I didn’t feel satisfied. So I thought I would try to figure out some shortcuts so I could get my own custom mesh (character skin) working. Thanks to Mr. Mannequin’s tools it’s so easy to export from Blender to Unreal without much issues. I did my best to line up simple shapes with the bones and assigned them to the proper bones.
You can see what I was doing in the first picture. I basically put the shapes on top of the original mannequin and deleted it afterwards, leaving the shapes assigned to the bones. I didn’t know if it was going to work but I was determined to try. I was really happy with the results. There didn’t seem to be any issue with putting it into Unreal. All the parts followed the same animations.
So I made a better cape for the model and slapped on the Haunter gear: lantern, and hat. The whip will be a much more complicated adventure. I think it looks really good. There might be more graphical issues when I make a more custom mesh, but I’ll worry about that when I get there. The next thing I’ll be working on is animations and gameplay mechanics. I’m planning to have the whip be able to grapple the character to certain objects. It will act sort of like Indiana Jones. It will probably be the hardest thing I’ve done so far with Unreal, but I’m sure I can figure it out.
If you want to see a video I took of the model running I put it up here. The more I learn about Unreal the more optimistic I get about finishing this game. It’s going to be a long journey, but the fog is starting to clear up and I can see further than I had before. It’s starting to look a lot more like this guy.
GG out.
GoldenGratus Games 