Theonian

Another enemy test.

I didn’t think lanky skeleton legs would fit very well, so I tried figuring out how to use the UE4 particle editor (we have to use UE4 for the school project - my own game project with the AGDG programmer is in Unity).

UE4 is still a bit confusing to me, but I think we can make some cool particle effects if we just experiment a little.

Thought I’d try importing my character to Overgrowth, because it would be fun to see it in motion, but hot damn it’s nigh impossible to make sense of the animation rigs included with the game, and they don’t adhere to any standard.

The Wolf rig’s arm bones are set to collide with the mesh, so I can’t put them inside the arm. Some bones get scaled when I move them. Some move on a different axis than what I select. Some spin when I try to rotate (in a different direction). Some are mirrored, some aren’t. Some bones can’t be moved. No weight paint can be applied manually. Some rigs can’t be posed. Some rigs just crash Blender upon opening. Some rigs have tons of controllers and IK direction bones, some have none. The cat rig has SIX bones of varying lengths stacked on top of each other in the upper arm segment!? What in the actual fuck.

/this kills the furry

UPDATE: After long struggles I’ve managed to fit my character to a wolf rig. Well, “fit” is an exaggeration. Notice how the arm bones are completely wonky because I had to do major tweaking to make it work at all. Most of the animations still crumple everything, so I guess I’ll start over again with a different rig…

New enemy design almost done!

I call her the Babysitter

UPDATE: Tried vertex painting it (second gif) - not sure if it’s an actual improvement or not

UPDATE 2: I got a question about what this is all for (from Paraphernalia). This is graphics for a two-man effort to make an FPS for the Nintendo 3DS. Kada does the programming part of it. The main inspirations are Metroid Prime: Hunters and Quake.

Shmoopdev asked why we’re targeting the 3DS at all. There’s no very good reason, other than that we find it fun and exciting, and for my own part Metroid Prime: Hunters was the best console FPS I’ve ever played. It proved that fast-paced arena shooters were possible on consoles, as long as you have a touchscreen for aiming. (Incidentally, I think our control scheme will fit the Steam controller very well too). I think we both enjoy the challenge of trying to work around the limitations of the device, as well.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Today, I want to explain some of my reasoning for going with vertex animation, despite the rather intense work-load compared to bones and other types of animation.

1. (Near) absolute freedom

As the first gif illustrates, vertex animation (being direct manipulation of vertices) is extremely versatile. It makes 3D animation almost as unrestricted as 2D animation, allowing you to completely change the shape of an object from one frame to another (although you still have to account for texture-stretching and topology, of course). The gryphon to bird animation could also have been made with Shape Keys (Morph Keys/Blend Keys/etc.), however Shape Keys are not great for animating limbs. With vertex animation, I can make my character an owl, and then directly go on to make all kinds of animations for the owl form.
This freedom also allows me to employ a lot of “2D” animation trickery. I can, for example, “smear” out a frame to imply speed and force, or I could blow up proportions of parts I want to highlight. For example, I will be making a clawing attack for the talons, and at the point of impact I’m going to make the talons much bigger than their “actual” size, to emphasize the force and to visualize an extended hitbox. Something similar could be achieved by animating the leg with bones, and a talon vertex-group with Shape Keys, but the direct manipulation allows me to orchestrate all deformation at all times, and that feels intuitive and nonrestrictive. It’s also worth to not that although bones (in Blender) can store relative scale data, that data IS NOT RECOGNIZED by most game engines, for some reason. That means you can animate rotation and location of parts with bones, but if you want to change the size of a vertex group you will either have to add some Shape Keys or bake the resulting scaling animation to a vertex animation - Or just use direct vertex animation from the get-go.

2. Limb-animation without extra edge-loops

Going for an extreme lowpoly design, I have not speared any polygons for extra edge-loops around animation sensitive joints. Bones WILL deform such joints terribly, if they are moved too much. The third image illustrates how such deformity is easily adjusted with direct vertex control. It’s a bit tedious, and can be quite cumbersome in some areas, but it works very well. The example here is very simple, and you could do a lot to make it “sort of work” with bones, but keep in mind that this is just a simple move forwards along one axis. Vertex animation allows me to fix any joint or general deformity, no matter how you choose to twist and turn the limbs.

3. Because I want to figure out how they did it

I also take a personal interest in figuring out how graphics were produced back in the day, and work around those set limitations. Limitations are always a great way to challenge and inspire your creativity.

Now, as for the concerns some of you have been voicing:

1. “But vertex animation is more taxing on hardware than bones?”

That is true, I think, but with so few vertices the difference should be negligible. After all, both Spyro and Crash were animated this way entirely.

2. “But it’s crazy!”

Sure, it’s a lot more work, and ultimately, it’s probably not necessary at all, because modern hardware is amazing. But again, I just like to figure out how to do things, and I really appreciate the amount of freedom.

Finally, here are some of my own concerns regarding vertex animation:

1. There is no good way to do symmetrical movement

You can name animation bones with either an .R or an .L-appendix to allow symmetrical posing along an axis. There is no such tool for vertex animation. If you try to flip the mesh itself, the vertices will just cross over, moving past each other to reach their new destination. This makes any sort of looping symmetrical animation very difficult to produce - The basic walk cycle is hell.

(I’m currently experimenting with a hybrid solution, using a bone-rig to block out the general movement of symmetrical animations, before baking it to vertex data to fix all the joints and bad deformations.)

2. Rotation causes deformity

Same problem, really. Rotating a large portion of the mesh will distort it badly, because all the vertices just move towards their new destination in a straight line (instead of moving along the rotation itself at a set radial distance).

3. Few formats support vertex animation

.FBX supports vertex animations, and is supported by Unity, but most of the typical file formats do not.

4. I have trouble getting the Action Editor to work properly with vertex animations

For some reason, keyframe markers only show up in the Dope Sheet view. This makes it impossible to save more than ONE animation to a mesh. I’m hoping to find a solution for this one, though.

I hope this answers some of your questions!

Have a wonderful Christmas!

Here are some photos of the wildlife far out on the Japanese countryside.

That spider kept its legs in pairs, and appeared to be a (BIG) ‘X’, floating in mid-air.

The murky shot at the bottom is of a giant salamander (species), but the spider was probably larger.

I didn’t get a good shot of it, but the grass was absolutely teeming with the little green frogs - So much so that it looked as though the ground was moving in some places!

The skull is from a wild boar.

We saw a couple of hawks too, but I didn’t have my tele-lens with me so the shots weren’t great.