Week 9-10: Animation Integration Hell

Summary

The ninth and tenth weeks of development were spent working on the aesthetic features of the game as well as continuing to implement the mechanics found in the later levels. In terms of the gameplay, the maps were revised, and a minimum was added to improve the navigation of the game’s map. Aesthetically, based on feedback the lighting of certain scenes was revised to better communicate the tone of the game better, though it is still undergoing revision, and animations for player and enemy characters have been added.

Individual Contribution

My contribution this week was trying to model as many assets as well as figuring out how to import rigged animations from Blender to Unity for the character animations. In the past two weeks I modelled and textured three additional characters, and three new multistory buildings for the second level, added new textures for some of the buildings in the first to add more diversity, and worked on animations for the player and enemies of the first two levels. The animations currently implemented at the time of writing mostly pertain to the player’s gameplay animations, the first-level basic enemies, and the first-level boss.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/cc44b3_06f87030c082434d98d50332886fa4b9/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Reflection

These last couple of weeks have been interesting learning and frustrating experiences when it comes to learning about the Blender to Unity pipeline when it comes to transferring animation data. A main source of frustration is how I used free rigging add-ons to speed up my process in Blender but made importing animations more complicated when transferring to Unity. A part of the rigging process for the game characters was to use Blender’s free rigging add-on Rigify to speed up the workflow of having to manually create rigs with various controls. Combined with a Wiggle 2 addon used for the player’s cape, the animations for the player took an extremely long time to import as it took many different combinations of different solutions in both Blender and Unity to import them in a usable state. The result ended in having to join parts of the rigs together in Blender, importing the models and animations as a generic rig rather than a humanoid, and adding additional animations to compensate for the lack of flexibility a non-human rig affords. If I were to do this process again, I would probably separate the cape from the model, and use a cloth simulation directly in Unity instead.

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