PHI - DEVLOG 8

LOOK WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN - LITERALLY

Last time I posted some screenshots of the almost finished model...

Well, here it is now completely finished! I had to make a lot of small corrections and making the textures was a lot of fun. As always, it is possible to get even more out of it. However I already tested it in the game - or what is there at this point - and I think it is quite enough. Also I have to keep in mind that I am working all alone on something that is way bigger than me and I have to manage my resources - in other words: the time I spend on different tasks on this journey.




All in all I think Daniel looks like the semi-adventurous average guy I was going for. I wanted to give him some extra features like a watch or a necklace maybe, but besides more additional work it wouldn't have changed too much, so I dropped it.

LIVE IT UP!

The major focus of this devlog however is on animation and Unity. The model was done, so I could finally start to play around with this great task in videogame development. Since I haven't done this in a while I needed to read into it - especially about the technical aspects - again, watch countless tutorials and experiment a lot. Rigging and skinning wasn't that much of a problem. My main problem was on the side of Unity; How does Unity handle animations? How do I have to export/arrange them correctly so I can import and use them also correctly in Unity? What is mecanim? Can it be used with my character? How do transitions work? What are blend trees? How can I combine several animations together? - For example letting him run/walk while independently controlling/animating the flashlight in his hand...

Ultimately I had way more questions than answers and there are still some unanswered things left to test and find out, but in general I think I have a good basic understanding of the topic. - If you find yourself in a similar position and you even have the same questions, please don't hesitate on contacting and asking me, I would be glad to be of help. Applause to Unity again! Seriously, I was expecting way more obstacles and difficulties. After these last days of "playing" with it, I think Unity's animation pipeline is great. It is super powerful and as always super easy and intuitive to get started with.


If your character has "extra" bones outside or rather additionally to the skeleton that defines the mecanim rig, like for example the scarf that my model has, here is a little hint for you:
Go into the animations, select the "mask" option and activate those bones under "transitions" as well! - It took me like forever to get the scarf animated and I could find nothing on the internet about this, but then I realized that those bones were completely deactivated/unmasked and that explained why the scarf wasn't moving as I animated it, while everything else worked fine.


In the end I was able to produce this small test scene where Daniel has three animations (walk, run and idle) on him and transitions/blend between them. - Please keep in mind that I did the animations just pretty roughly for testing purposes and they are all to be redone and improved significantly from now on. The test scene looks a bit different from the game, but as I said, it's just to give me an idea and a similar test environment.

COMING UP NEXT

So, yeah... I think you can imagine that from now on it is all about animations, animations and animations. - Man, Daniel is supposed to have a ton of them! This is sure going to take some time. I am calculating with about a month for all of them, but then again, I also need to test them out continuously, see how they work together and thus postpone some animations like "open chest" or "swim" completely to be able to progress a bit faster.

Besides animating - or actually before that - there is another more or less difficult task I really need to in the next time: Change to Unity5! What, why haven't you already? - Just because! But damn is Unity5 awesome, or what? It really is about time to get there. Also the new features for example getting free access to all the lighting/shadow features... wow! I can't wait. But then again, I also don't know how much of my game can really be "transferred" without problems to the new system. Apropos shadows... did you see the shadow Daniel is casting? If you wonder how I did that (in Unity4, where there were basically no shadows in the free version) message me over the various social platform and I will tell you. ;) It's actually just one line of code and with a bit finesse you can actually make a nice shadow effect. Not that Unity4 is an issue anymore... but I am proud of this small trick nevertheless.

One way or the other, the black stickman knows that his days are over. He told me he now wants to retire on a small island, find a stickman girl and write a book... Well, I wish him the best! :)




I wish you all a good day and happy game developing! Ah, and also Happy Easter or whatever you are celebrating this weekend. Did I tell you that I hate getting and eating bags full of cooked eggs?

Play more! Animate more!