Learned a lot more today, particularly about very useful animation tricks such as setting events for leaving and/or entering a state. I also learned about sync markers that I can attach to animations so for certain animations such as walking or running you can set when the left or right foot are down so it can match when it switches over to other animations. I had to go over every walking animation I had and add sync markers for each foot. I wasn’t getting the results I was looking for, the animations were slow for some reason. But I was glad to hear from the trainer that game development is all about plugging something and seeing if it works, if it doesn’t then try something else. I compared what I had to the free character they released on the engine. Incredibly useful these free assets they’ve put out there.
It’s little things and simple logic that blow my mind and will continue to as I unlock more secrets of Unreal engine. I didn’t spend a lot of time taking screenshots. Mostly taking notes on the training and testing some of what I wanted to use. Problem now is that mixamo doesn’t have all the animations I need. I’ll either need to create my own or get from the market place.
From the training he goes over the fact that animators go through the pain of creating animations that sync together such as turning and stopping. It’s up to good code to make sure they smoothly transition to each other as well. The difficulty with creating the Frankenstein’s monster that I have is that I have several animations that don’t necessarily feed into each other. It’s apparent when you see it. Eventually I’ll need to replace all animations with a singular character in mind.
It’s a tiny thing such as an animation for starting to walk and stopping to walk that makes a huge difference in terms of the look of the character. I certainly don’t need to add it to the game, it can still move fine as it is but adding all these small details adds up to the full experience. There’s a few more animation videos I need to finish before I get back to drilling myself back to work. In the next week or so I want to release a short video of what I have so far so I can compare it to the previous months.
I’ve come a long way, but nowhere near the end.
GoldenGratus Games 