kyudo

3rd person adventure game

Animation Cycles

Disclaimer - I did not create this character - no one did. I wanted to learn how to build a control rig and animate a 6 legged character so I generated the character and had Trellis give me the 3d model.

Next Steps:

  • Animate a jump attack!

Ice Guy

Main Character

I was going for a very stylized sprint for the main character. After doing a rough animation I created keys to hammer out timing. When I added back some movement I think I went overboard and pushed the fluidity too far. Watching this animation from the third person POV could get really annoying.

Next Steps:

  • make some minimal adjustments to the simplified animation cycle for a run that’s easier to watch from the player POV

control rig

The Biggest challenge was the 3 Bone IK chain for the legs.

With the help of Ask A Dev on youtube, I built a semi procedural rig for my 6 legged character, complete with an FK/IK switch. His was a classic bipedal character. So there was plenty of figuring that had to be done to create a rig for a six legged character with 3 bone IK chains for legs.

The way I solved the 3 bone IK chain was to parent the foot to the control at the top of the chain. The Control at the top drove the null that drove the bone position. That was necessary to override the IK control so I could keep the chain bending along the plane allowing it to have a predictable smooth movement.

As a fun experiment I tried to do all the skeletal mesh setup in unreal. Everything was pretty smooth but I ran into some issues lining up the leg bones on a plane to get smooth IK movement so I had to go back into blender for that. But unreal was great for weight painting. I love that you can do it live and get real-time feedback.

IceGuy

Here are a couple snippets.

Rig components

Here is the setup for the 3 Bone IK, per Ask A Dev, lots of concats on an array so we can easily reuse this code in multiple places.

Simple FK to IK Solver

Gameplay Dev

So far it’s a very simply Blueprint that just has the characters do a simple roam and then follow the player character when he lands in their line of sight.

Next Steps:

  • Add a jump and attach state to the enemies

  • Create setup for enemies to track arrows that have landed in a specific range

Follow Player

Archery

The player character to equip and unequip the bow weapon, where the equipped weapon slows movement speed. He can also aim and fire arrows.

Next Steps:

  • Add aim offset for vertical aiming

  • Add attach, sound and effect spawn component to arrow

Nothing too crazy here, I did most of it following a tutorial by Gorka Games on youtube.

I did have to add a bit about destroying the arrow if the aim state ends because there were occasions where the arrow did not disapear and just stuck out of the characters hand.