It's been 2 weeks since my last post. I was stuck on some annoying bugs and was finally able to overcome a few of the nastier ones. I was not feeling very motivated to post a blog last weekend because I had not made much progress beyond smashing my head on the keyboard over something that should have just worked the first time!
The core issues had to do with animation retargeting and using different skeletons for animating the enemies versus the player. In order to reuse those animations I had to setup a few IK rigs and IK retargeters to go to and from the different skeletons and animation sequences. I was having trouble with the pose and animations getting wonky when used in a blend space. I found the solution was to setup unique IK rigs for each type of different skeleton in the game. Then, I created retargets to go from those rigs to any other rig's skeleton. After a week of trial and error (on this and a handful of other issues) I was finally able to figure out the proper pipeline. Over 150 different animations now work across the various enemies and players across the game.
Alas, that is the crux of game development. Perseverance through adversity and staying the course. Sometimes it is best to step away from a problem and move on to making other progress before returning to try again with a different perspective.
Without further delay, here is the list of things I got done since my last post:
Added rage and max rage attributes and replicated them for multiplayer
Added sprinting mechanics and hotkey for sprinting (shift)
Adjusted walk and run speeds to better match animations
Created animation blueprint for bows
Setup logic in animation blueprint to get the socket connected to the mesh to allow bow string pullback
Setup animation notifies for grabbing the bow string and releasing via events
Fixed a bug where opening menus while moving in a direction and holding that input down would cause the character to move slower on the first open of the menu
Fixed a bug where some animations were not playing properly even after proper retargeting
Adjusted blend spaces on orcs for smoother animations
Created additional IK retargeters to establish an interchangeable animation pipeline between skeletons
Created over 150 orc animation montages using retargeters
Tested orc animations on several different modular character configurations
Created a function to hide the player mesh when camera distance to mesh is less than 50 units to prevent seeing the back of your own eyeballs at minimum zoom levels
With a strong positive outlook after the morale-win of knocking out a few tricky bugs that have been on my 'list' for quite a while my next session will be focused on adding some gameplay behavior for the Shaman class and further expanding on the spell casting game mechanics.
Cheers,
Vinny
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