Animation State Machines

 

I got both the model and all the used animations from Mixamo. I used a simple UE5 blend space to combine the three animations so that they would "blend" together. I set the horizontal axis to be"Speed" and gave it a min/max of 0 and 500. Then I set my idle animation to 0, walk to 200, and run to 500. I then added a weight speed of 2 to help blend those anims together.

 

 

 

This is the beginning of my character blueprint. It starts by mapping my IMC so that I have access to basic controls like WASD and casts that go to the player controller. Then it moves to the actual movement input where those controls are executed. It checks to see if the character is jumping. If it isn't, then it gets the rotational control for the X and Z and converts that into a right vector. I then do the exact same thing for the forward vector.

 

  

 

 Then I just have the camera controls that allow the player to look around using "Add controller inputs". 

 

 The end of the blueprint is the jumping logic, which is nothing too special. I created a new IA for jumping and assigned it to the space bar. If the character isn't jumping, then it jumps. If it isn't, then it won't. Finally, it just uses some built-in Unreal events to set the variable for repeatability.

 

 

This is my animation blueprint, in which I start by casting to my character blueprint so that they can talk to each other. The Update block is casting my velocity variable along with my speed variable and the falling variable to be used in my animation states.

 

I did it, I promise.

 

 

Week 06- Use of Composition

 

Game Animation

 

This project was a bit of a hassel but it wasn't anything too bad. I created a very simple little exercise animation for the brute and then went on to get a cool dance animation from Miximo. Then came the process of re targeting.

 

Re-targeting was a bit confusing at first but I got the hang of it pretty quick. My only hitch was that I was a bit confused as to why my bones weren't lining up between the knight and the brute. Then I remembered they need to have the same starting pose so once I fixed that then we were off. 

 

I then grabbed another skeleton from Miximo and gave that a quick little animation and brought it into unreal. Fairly easy to do since I had already done those steps earlier so went off without a hitch. 

Use of Basic Lighting

    

Crates And Barrels Project

 

   

 

Basic Rigging

 

Honestly, rigging wasn't all too bad, it was just an insane amount of work. Skin weight painting was a bit of a pain on this mesh since the mesh for the boots and the legs are two separate pieces of geo. That meant there were a million vertices that were just hiding out waiting for me to think I was done.

 Building the skeleton was a cake walk. Place the joint in the right spot that makes sense for the body and then mirror it over. I used the front and side view to make sure they were all in the right spot.

Finally, I placed all the controllers. I made sure they all snapped to the joint locations with the snap point tool and then went through hell renaming them all. I finished it off by making sure they all received the parenting constraint so that they functioned as actually controllers. With that, bam, a brute rig. 

Use of Value and Contrast