Before I moved on to more game mechanics I wanted to really refine the character animation. There’s so much I still haven’t done, and so much that I am still learning. I want the character to feel dynamic and alive, while the model is simple I want it to be fluid and react to the environment. Looking around the comment sections of YouTube and Unreal forums everyone says that 3D animation for characters is really really involved, that’s what discourages many people. Lucky for me I’m both stubborn and blindly ambitious. Today I began with adding a sprint to the character, and the added motion of him leaning based on the direction you are turning. I also furthered refined the actions, so you can’t do everything at the same such as sprinting while the lantern is out, or pulling the lantern out while you are attacking. It’s simple things like these I need to catch while I’m the early stages so I don’t have to worry about too much fine tuning once I get to the big picture stuff. A helpful video from Unreal showed me how to make the attacking look better, it was too stiff before when the character was stationary, now he does the whole animation unless you are moving.
There are a lot more variables added now to the blueprint, this just means the character is coming together quiet nicely. The next thing I am working on is adjusting the height of the feet based on where the character is standing. It’s such a simple difference in terms of what you see, but it makes a big impact in terms of immersion into the world. So basically I was taught to cast a line towards and based on the difference between that line and the ground you then adjust the feet accordingly. It still is a bit wonky on stairs, and needs to be disabled while jumping. But damn does for such a simple feature it really does look cool.
I’ll be continuing the tutorial on the feet so it works perfectly once I’m done with implementing it.
GoldenGratus Games 