W.U. 5: Near Attack

Here is the short-range melee attack.

I think it snaps back to the idle animation a little too fast, so I’ll work on that.

Its also been incorporated into the game. I’ll upload a video once I get around making screen recording work on my PC.

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W.U. 4.1: Animations

I still need to make at least one short-range, weak melee attack, and I realized I need a proper “battle-ready” idle animation.

As a break for relaxation, I did an experiment on antique-looking rifles. This is actually a Gras Carbine M1874. I only chose it because I happened to like the colors of it in my reference photo.

I have no idea how those moving parts move, and I’m pretty sure I made some of them wrong. I may not end up having realistic reload animations for this and I bet there will be antique gun enthusiasts who will condemn me for that.

W.U. 3.1: Attacks

So I asked how long I have for the presentation and I got this response:

Hi everyone,

As you all know, we’ll be having the meetup this June 30, 2PM at the Exist Techbar (there’s a facebook event in the IGDA Manila group).

The plan is to do a series of 4-minute presentations and impress everyone with your game projects. Here’s what you need to know:

• You’ll be with your peers. The crowd is mostly game developers themselves so they understand what it takes to make video games.
• 4-minutes. Then a gong.
• Show us the game. I’ll preinstall the prototypes you sent me on a laptop, but if you made improvements bring a copy and we’ll use that instead. Absolutely no powerpoints!
• Things you might want to cover are: the idea, the point of difference (what makes your game stand out), your team, future plans, what help you need to get it completed
• Practice your talk at least once. The audience appreciates that you took the effort to be polished. And it helps you keep to the time limit.
• Be funny, opinionated or somehow interesting. 🙂

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Julius Cebreros

PS. If you can’t make it to the event, just send me a message covering point 4 and the organizers will read that on your behalf. If not then we’ll just show your game and stare at it while deeply contemplating our place in the universe.

One thing stood out to me:

Absolutely no powerpoints!

Which I take it he means Powerpoint Presentations, but actually meant presentations in general. Quite interesting to have mentioned that only 2 days away from the presentation! I guess having presentation materials is moot.

So, I’m rushing the melee attacks for the presentation. I got an idle, run, and now an attack animation:

So what is that red thing he’s holding? As mentioned in the blog, the setting is a fantasy world with guns instead of swords.

That thing he’s holding is a placeholder for what will eventually be a 3d model of a Blunderbuss. As you can see, he’s also using it as a blunt instrument.

W.U. 3: Animations

Those boots are too big! Maybe Morivalians really have big boots? Or did I just model my Dragurian soldier’s boots too small?

Slow week today. I was fixing a bug in the JSON serialization: it was trying to serialize a UnityEngine.Material!

Also I got out of sync because I had to stay in the office for the weekend. One of my subordinates really messed up, and with one day until his deadline, I had to intervene and redo parts of his code.

I also got sick, I think I drank too much soda the whole week.

Unfortunately I’m at a point where I find it hard to continue visualizing how to go about the code without some proper 3d models and animations, so I’ll be concentrating on animations first.

I just realized my 3d model is not in proper scale, and its not in the proper framerate I want it to be in. Its scaled too big for the game engine, and the Kamen Rider animation test I did was in 24 frames per second.

And when you resize an armature in Blender and apply the scale, the animation will be distorted, specifically the location of the IK bones. Actually, it turns out you just need to scale animations too, in the same amount that you scaled the armature.

The IK bones’ positions are not scaled to match when you apply the scale of an armature. So I had to go through each IK bone and scale the location F-curves, then move them to the proper location. Perhaps a Python script to automate that can be done.

As for the framerate, its only a matter of scaling the keyframes’ positions in the timeline.

So here’s a bland running animation as placeholder:

I think that really needs work.

W.U. 2.2: Finger Rigging Good!

The rigging tutorial I mentioned last time had a pretty good leg rig, so I used his technique. Only problem was once I added a pole target to the leg’s IK, the whole leg would twist too much.

To solve that, I did the same thing I did with the wrist. Each bone in the leg’s IK chain now has a duplicate, and each of the duplicates have a Track To constraint to the leg below it. The bottommost duplicate’s Track To points to the IK bone itself.

W.U. 2.1: Rig Update

The soldier’s rig is coming along nicely.

As a test of how flexible this rig is, here is a sample animation.

It helps if you listen to this while looking at it.

W.U. 1.1: Dragurian Colony Soldier: Rigging The Arm

It’s been so long since I last touched the rigging features in Blender (the old 2.3x days) and I needed a crash course on what changes were made with the new 2.6x version.

Turns out there’s no such thing, but someone at the Blender IRC channel recommended me this set of video tutorials on rigging (its aimed for beginners so feel free to skip irrelevant parts).