I decided to take a step back from developing the whip combat weapon since that is gonna be the heart of the gameplay. I dove into some more Unreal videos and again like many of their videos they don’t do a good job of explaining what they are doing. They make it look very cool, but to people who only have a basic understanding of Unreal it is difficult to follow. Basically jumping back and forth from video to video I found a few helpful tips about how to manipulate the physical structure of the character. This one video showed how to put the character in a drunken stupor. But the guy was throwing out commands, functions, nodes, blueprints, etc. that he barely took the time to explain if at all. It might become helpful later, maybe a fun alcohol addled adventure.
Somehow, I stumbled upon a nice channel that did tutorials on third person characters meant for large open world RPGs. It talked about how to move items from slot to slot. This was perfect because I wanted to figure out how to move the lantern from the hip to the hand. I started by making my own custom animation for the first time in Blender. Smooth, it was not, but good enough, definitely. Easy enough to import, though difficult to get working. The video was more helpful than many of Unreal’s streams, and while it may look complicated it was rather straight forward. My main problem was getting the animation to play when moving the lantern back and forth. At first it was merely teleporting from his hand to hip.
After a lot of fiddling on the roof (it’s a real expression). I found a written tutorial from Unreal that solved my problem. For now it moves the character as intended, eventually I may encounter some issues I was unaware of. All I had to do was play the animation directly to the mesh (the physical body). It happens outside the other actions so that’s why it might get in the way later when I add more layers. Eventually when the lantern is in hand the character will have their arm up, and should only be able to walk/jog. The channel I found with the tutorial on slot switching has tons of videos on movement and combat, this may be the guy that will save me a lot of time.
Pictured above is the graph of the lantern action. Check here to see some test footage. The animation will be refined further, as will all other aspects of the game. Feeling great so far with this progress.
GG out.
GoldenGratus Games 