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BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG
Unlocking Character Selection
Hey people,
as you are conscious, we’re a small group devoted to BattleJuice Alchemist. With our mixed efforts, we (that is Patrick and myself) primarily have the workload of 1 single full-time artist overlaying every little thing from 2D and 3D work, together with modeling, texturing, and animation. Moreover, we create each asset ourselves, foregoing using marketplaces or asset shops. This poses a problem for a complete RPG, and right now I would prefer to make clear a magical instrument we use so as to add range to our characters regardless of these constraints: animation retargeting.
Within the picture above, you see three skeletons of various sizes. Upon nearer inspection, you will discover that they are not simply scaled variations of one another however have distinct proportions. Given our restricted assets, creating particular person animations for every character is impractical. That is the place animation retargeting turns into invaluable.
For those who simply slap an animation onto a personality with out retargeting, issues can go fairly flawed, as you possibly can see right here (picture from the Unreal Engine wiki):
Animation retargeting in Unreal Engine is like taking dance strikes from one character and instructing them to a different with a special physique form. It saves us quite a lot of time by reusing animations for numerous characters, even when they do not have the very same proportions. The method includes organising a translation of actions and rotations to suit the brand new character’s construction, making certain that the animations look good on totally different in-game personas. This enables us to effectively use and share animations throughout numerous NPCs, like these two very totally different characters:
Here’s what the teeny-weeny Leprechaun seems to be like in-game compared to our participant character:
As we navigate the challenges of growing BattleJuice Alchemist with our lean but devoted group, animation retargeting turned out as an awesome ally, permitting us to breathe life into numerous characters with out overwhelming our restricted assets. Ultimately, we plan to individualize animations increasingly. For instance, an enormous ought to stroll with extra gravity than a Leprechaun. Nonetheless, it’s shocking what number of animations work properly, particularly from our top-down perspective, when shared. I imagine it is a good method to our work, and it has change into certainly one of our prime directives: We should select our battles correctly by including element solely the place mandatory.
Thanks for studying and have an awesome weekend!
Alain
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