In these regular updates we will bring fresh content to Hive in the form of our game coding experiences; IBT is a developing PC game - the one to have future Crypto interactions.
Too many animations for one action!
Do you think that its a great idea to have a character shoot a bow at a target and that's that, simple? Well it isn't a good idea and not even remotely simple at all haha... but I guess once you start there is no looking back. There are quite a number of animations required just to give the character an affect that its reaching for a bow and arrow. Therefore you must have an animation for taking the bow out and pulling the arrow out, holding the bow, drawing the bow, drawing the bow string, shooting the arrow, reaching for another arrow blah blah blah!! Then you must make an arrow mesh, add velocity to the arrow, add hit damage to the target and....you know I give up...agghhhhhhh
Animation testing
Its okay to make an animation but then you have to test them after. With some tests in our early days our animations looked like someone had removed the bones from their arms or stuck them in a machine that twists you into a piece of licorice. So it is important that every frame is checked...time for you workout IBT Characters hahaha.
Sheathing-placing weapons after use
Another feature we are after is making it look like the character is actually reaching for a weapon or tool of some type. This gives the game a little more detail and polishes it up a bit too. It does require some blueprints/coding but overall its worth it, what do you think?
Extra Meshes Added
The terrain does look good in IBT but we are looking for a little more variety still. We decided to add a few more Quandong tree shapes with some added branches and fruit but at the same time kept memory usage and textures as low as possible to save performance.
Well, that's it for this week, time to get back to coding, sorry for the delay in posting this week and not responding to comments, I do read them, but sometimes not in a position to upvote or reply easily..Cheers though it's good to know people are following along and sharing experiences and feelings here on the Hive chain.
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And this is the main reason why I decided to focus on animation instead of games XD
Must have been a season for it or something, I didn't post a progblog last week either but mine was partially there's a lot of things on (it's comp season) and mostly because I was really irritated about being stuck on scales again and knowing that's going to take a while XD
Did you get stuck on anything in particular with the coding/animation or was it a similar thing or something else? :)
Patience is a virtue for sure, got a bit stuck with key frames vs scales?..like with scale/size of animals, or items we played a bit (a few tweaks with size changes when they die or drop)....with key frames, like all the bones have to be in a certain position. Needs a key for elbow, key for wrist etc....but well on the way now.
Do you not keyframe everything? (loc/rot/sca) animations will calculate from either the rest pose or from the last keyframe.
Yay for on the way XD
Yeah we do keyframe "almost" every single movement and pose. Some animations are available at the UE4 store but they are limited. Since we do it ourselves it seems to give a more natural movement to the character rather than being a robot with non fluent beeline movement which a lot of software seems to do. Plus we are a gluten for punishment Haha
Gluten or glutton? XD
They would do it that way because it's less memory and less work.
Looking good.
If this is in Unity are you using UMA for your characters?
Cheers, yeah its in UE4 (has a character, tools and editors integrated)so no Unity/UMA
Odd animations due to wrong bone being moved is always funny. I’ve had a few glories fails myself.
Keep up the great work.
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