Better Living through Inverse Kinematics ToddMitchell, February 5, 2020July 11, 2024 Since we’re keeping it simple with the animated enemies in this project, I briefly thought I could achieve everything I wanted to do with simple bone rotation keyframes–this looked bad, took too much effort, and was just wrong. My first couple of test poses were easy with simple rotation keyframes, but I thought it would be fun to import a video clip of someone doing something simple (I’ll reveal what I used on Friday) and see if I could get our enemy to do it side by side. Hashtag marketingBrain. This turned out to be a worthy test, however, because it revealed that this simplistic animation philosophy was going to cause a lot of pain when I wanted to do animate simple movements like crouching down and bending the knees a bit. The problem, if you’ve never tried this, is that grabbing the parent bone and just moving the character down a bit will simply drag the entire model down through the ground, then rotating the legs and feet back up into a believable position is actually crazy difficult. Far more difficult than it would be to set up Inverse Kinematics constraints. I didn’t really remember the difficulty level of this task years ago, so I certainly didn’t know what I was in for in Blender 2.8. I did a quick search, and the results for any closely related search term were overwhelmingly skewed toward a pair of videos, the first of which promised “Inverse Kinematics in 2 minutes!” And you know what? It worked almost perfectly! There was a little more to it than this because the first video only set up a leg for very natural movement. But the second video ran through setting up the same constraints for the arm and showed the shortcuts for mirroring the setup to the other side of the body. I was concerned there may be more to it before I could make my model crouch down somewhat naturally, but there wasn’t. I was done! My model is now posable with ease. I’m still going to run through that video mimicking exercise because I think it will be a good way to get acclimated with the graph editor and the dope sheet. I’ll show this off a bit, then I’ll set about creating a couple of animations I know enemies in the game will need. After that, we’ll see about using them from the Unity side at a moment’s notice. Share this:FacebookXLike this:Like Loading... Game Development AnimationBlender
Culture GameDev Breakdown: Developer and Streamer Chris Gardner June 16, 2022July 11, 2024 The freestyle coder himself drops in to discuss the ups and downs of live coding, presenting at and organizing conferences, navigating the world of non-game commercial software development, and more. We also discuss what we’re playing now and what games we’re looking forward to getting our hands on. Share this:FacebookXLike this:Like Loading... Read More
Game Development Let’s Make a Nintendo Game November 26, 2020July 11, 2024 In continuing our console development basics series, we look at what it takes to develop an indie game for Nintendo’s latest game console, the Switch. If you like more options, we’ll look at a way you can make a limited Switch game with no permission from Nintendo whatsoever. Finally, we’ll… Share this:FacebookXLike this:Like Loading... Read More
Culture RetroMania Wrestling Writer, Salvatore Pane April 17, 2020July 11, 2024 Salvatore Pane calls in to talk about his work for the upcoming release of RetroMania Wrestling. We discuss his work as a Boss Fight Books author (Mega Man 3), his focus as a university professor, and the trouble with bite-sized physical video games. Share this:FacebookXLike this:Like Loading... Read More