Animate platformer character with new rig

I snuck in a final bit of work today but calling it done. Didn’t quite hit the milestones but made solid progress on things that needed to get done!

What went well:

1. Having a lot of busy work planned out in advance! On big motivated days I could tackle the big pieces but on days that I wasn’t feeling it, I had easy tasks to pick up and make progress on.
2. Having a morning routine made my days a bit more rigid, but kept daily progress moving. That’s a clear trade to make in the future if I want to prioritize my freedom vs personal work.

What could have gone better:

1. (The classic dk30 mistake) Dont focus on output vs input -> I should have just focused on hitting hours each week instead of trying to pump out set numbers of animations. It lead to sloppy work just to call things done and added unnecessary stress.
2. Deliberately plan for more break time -> Whether it was Elden Ring, current events, or just wanting to rest on the weekends, I should plan for clear break time rather than struggling to eek out work and not really being productive anyways.

Here’s a recap! I snuck in some feet IK (the whole reason for starting this project), an updated bearguy model, and some inital Eye tracking.

Hopefully this is the last time I restart the whole rigging process and I can just focus on pumping out some new animations and characters instead.

Ok coming back from a bit of a hiatus was tough. I expected the project to get derailed a bit due to Elden Ring but with that combined with the state of current world events, I completely neglected this project for the past two weeks.

Today was mostly cleanup but productive! I upgraded off of UE5 early access to the UE5 preview build which is a necessary step for going forward. However doing so uncovered some issues with my rig including one big issue where anything involving root motion was moving on the wrong axis. This required me to fix up the rig transforms in blender and start the whole export process to UE4 from scratch :(

But now that means I was able to implement ledge hanging and climbing!

Tomorrow I’ll do some finally cleanup and do a little recap write up but even with the mid project hiatus I’m happy with the good progress.

Closing Week 2 right on target still! Since last update, I’ve mostly just been cleaning up and smoothing out the animations.

Here’s the dashing and the smoothed out air jump.

Going into week 3 I’m fully expecting to fall behind due to Destiny 2 and Elden Ring but I’m alright with that as there’s no true deadline here. I might de-prioritize some of the lesser used animations related to swimming and what not. Either way I’m still happy with progress so far!

Week 2 looking good so far! This week is all jump/flip animations which are about equally as tricky but things are definitely going smoother this time around. I’m past that hump now where I instinctively get to work on this when I have down time which is a super good feeling now that the habit is sticking again.

Here’s the progress!

Animations:

• Crouch
• Crouching High Jump
• Air Jump/flip
• Turnaround slide
• Sideflip

Also started on a dash and a long jump. I did realize I had some duplicates tracked as well as some missing! So at some point I need to do a little housekeeping and recheck all of the animations I have planned.

Week 1 wrap up!

4 animations i’m good to call ‘done’. With 4 more I’m sitting on for a bit longer.

Looking ahead in terms of progress, I’ve stayed right on pace even with spending time importing ingame that I didn’t originally plan for but that’s worked well. I also started with some of the more difficult animations so I’m hoping that offsets some effort in the coming weeks with some game releases that I know are going to distract me a bit.

As for a quick update on the past two days: I solved an issue with how I was blending the walk/jog/sprint in Unreal that I’m super happy to have figured out. I don’t think it was noticeable in my past gifs but it would cause the running to look really wonky at times.

Today was all about jumping! Technically theres 3 animations: Jumping, falling, and landing. That brings me to 8 so I’m right on target. And that’s even with me spending time on importing that I wasn’t planning to do. Getting things in game has been extremely helpful though so I’m going to maintain that and factor that in going forward.

For the interesting part, here’s the animation. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

The landing is a bit stiff/artificial for my liking but I feel like I’m getting better and better with maintaining weight and momentum. One thing I’ve learned with the jump animation in particular is that I need to fight my current instinct and exaggerate the poses more for it to be noticeable in game.

Today was spent importing what I have so far into Unreal and spinning up the animation blueprint for the idle/walk/jog/run animations. The intent was to check out how things look ingame.

Turned out not too bad! A few things stood out though:

1. The stretchy-ness looks pretty alright but it does cause things to feel a little bit more floaty.
2. The different stretches in the chest/shoulders seem to cause some issues when blending from one animation to the other.

I think what I’ll plan for now is to make the jog a bit shorter of a jump and stride. Otherwise I think I’ll ignore the blending issue for now and plan to solve that on the Unreal side.

For now though, the plan is to keep chugging along on the other animations to keep up with the milestones. Still just on pace so far.

Keeping up with a little bit of time each morning has been working out so far - it doesn’t help that this dk30 is in the midst of game after game release - but we’re sticking to it!

The past two days have been focusing on sprinting. I’m not sure how I feel about the squashing/stretching so I think i’m going to change up my todo’s over the next day to work on quickly importing these animations so far to see how they look in unreal, since that’s what matters at the end of the day. I have a feeling I might need to push more into a sprint to make it look different enough from the jogging. That said, I’m feeling a little bit less struggle each day with animating so that alone is progress enough.

I’ve been making good progress so far and getting time in each day but it’s been pretty sporadic throughout each day. Going forward I’m going to try to commit to a solid 30min - 1 hour in the mornings at a minimum. I find my attention slips super easily when it comes to animating, especially if I hit a rough spot or things aren’t coming together. So hopefully boxing out time can help curb some distractions!

That said, I’ve been working on what’s one of the toughest animations, jogging. I think sprinting might be the only tougher one, but hopefully there’s some reuse or reference I can reuse. One of my goals is to push for more stylized and exaggerated motions - specifically i’ve been referencing the old Jak and Daxter games. I don’t think I’m quite there yet but it’s a start!

Ok day 1, proper! Normally I don’t make daily updates but I think I’ll shoot for at least every other day given the nature of the work i’m doing. Things are bite size enough that I should have something to show even if I just get a few minutes in a particular day.

Progress so far includes a standing idle, the look offsets (used for rotating the characters head towards interesting things) and the walk cycle! For this first week, I want to start a first pass on some trickier stuff, but keep checking in each day with a fresh set of eyes before I call them done. On my past animations, I found I would recognize that the animations looked stiff/off once they were imported but by then I was too far removed from animating to want to fix things, so they stuck.

Anywho, here’s a gif of the walk cycle.

In advance of the reanimation work, I thought it’d likely be helpful to have a second character that I can work with to ensure animations look good for different proportions.

The file is saved as Zipp so I fully expect that placeholder name to never be changed so I guess that’s their name.

Theres about 32-38 animations(depending on how you count it) right now. Some more difficult ones like walk/run cycles, and some very simple ones like static look poses. Currently tracking inventory of all of them using Coda.

Here’s the current state of the majority of animations in play! So hopefully the end result in 30 days looks at least the same if not better!