Re-Animate Polished Character Locomotion and Attacks

Recap time! I went into this dk30 planning to mostly focus on animating, and less on integrating animations into the game but even then I underestimated the effort there. I ended up hitting all the goals I planned out side of the stretch goals though! As always, these DK30’s continue to be a slight nudge of motivation which is enough to get me rolling more so than without it.

I find myself in the same spot in animating as I am in my art now where I can clearly see the gaps and faults but have difficulty really seeing how to get there. That said, I feel like I’ve improved a ton and have even more to learn so onto more practicing!

A slightly longer and nicer version of the gif below https://i.imgur.com/u0iUzbL.mp4

I totally didn’t get sidetracked in the final week and worked on grass. On a completely unrelated note, here’s some new grass/landscape work i’ve been figuring out over the past few days! The end result seems basic but there was a lot of work under the hood to get the landscape painting and grass colors to coordinate and blend like they do.

I started work on repurposing the older attacks as a start, and I forgot how much work was involved in getting things hooked up. So I think to round out the DK30, I’m going to forgo animating new attacks and go clean the animation controller for the character. I haphazardly tossed and copied things around for this project so I could focus on the animating but going forward it’ll be a headache if I don’t solve it now.

Since last update i’ve worked on finishing up the week 3 animations for dashing, running and the transition. I’ve been running back through all the animations and polishing them up. I think i’m going to take a break on the polishing events and work towards the stretch goal of having an attack combo animation to wrap up the dk30.

I managed to sneak in the running turn animations at the start of week 3. The effect is pretty subtle as is but it makes things look a little bit less slide-y and more polished when running in circles.

Nearing the end of week 2 and polished the start-run-stop animation loop to a spot that actually feels a bit alright!

The turn animations for running haven’t been started on which I somewhat expected. I think I’m going to put those in the stretch goal category for the end like I should have in the first place.

We’ve got the animations hooked up and they’re as janky as expected! All of the ground work has been done now though for getting the new skeleton in place with a new animation blueprint, so adding new animations and tweaking existing ones will be a much quicker process.

Now i’m in a good spot to iterate on the existing animations and i’ve added two todos for turning animations while running as it’s looking extra-floaty without those.

Blocked out the main flow of idle -> Running -> idle! I’m winging it hard right now on the stop transition from running as I’m not entirely sure how it’s going to look/feel once its in UE4 and the animations are blending rather than just snapping in blender. I figure quickest path to progress here is to have it blocked out, get these in UE4 asap now, then see how they function and what tweaks need to be made then.

Pretty much right on schedule so now i’ll be starting on the week 2 work with importing these into UE4. I expect some troubles as I’ve made tweaks to the skeleton since i’ve last worked with this character but it’ll be a good experience to learn some retargeting stuff in UE4.

Some replanning! I originally was going to have walking, running, and a singular dash, but I think I want to have a jog as the default movement, and then more of a sprint vs running. Also I’m going to skip the transition animations for walking as those are pretty subtle to just blend into I think, and focus on transitions for running and sprinting.

So with that, I blocked out some jogging and there’s still polish to be done but it’s looking much less wonky than my existing jog!

Next up is blocking out transitions between Idle <-> jogging

First bit of progress - Created a first pass at a new Standing Idle, transition to walking, and walking animations. Things are still stiff and thats the part I really want to focus on in this project over what animations I have today. I want to ensure the movements ripple through the character rather than looking stiff and robotic.

Next up is block out a transition from walking to idle and then polishing for the next few days.

As an initial post, here’s the last update I made on the previous dk30. I’ve made some tweaks since then but the animations are really stiff for my liking so thats going to be my main focus! For some prep, i’ve worked on tweaking some of the weights around the various joints and tweaked the skeleton a bit, so I should be good to hit the ground running with just a lot of animating!