Heavy State Animations

Here are the the animations for the heavy state.

Some notes on the animations:

The heavy state doesn't have a jump function, but because it bounces off of the starfish bounce-pads, it needs a land animation. The brief wiggle before the land is used by the unreal engine for the 'air-time' between jumping and landing. that's why it doesn't flow smoothly like it should.

As with the neutral state, there is no option to change the backwards speed compared to the forwards speed in Unreal Engine; both must be the same. Hence why are character is running backwards (a feat that is awkward for any biped).

Emerald Cavern Starfish Rigged

After having all the characters rigged I decided to do the starfish along side all my other work.

Below is a video briefly showing the controls of the rig with a flat texture applied to it, although the actual texture is almost finished.



As you can see his rig is quite simple, I wish I could of had less controls on it, but it seemed the best way to give Caryn the most control over it. I wanted to allow her to translate the bones as well as rotate, but Unreal wasn't having it, but I feel I figured out a good way to control the squash in it's belly for when the Heavy character falls on it, which isn't in this video, but I worked around it by using rotation on bones around the belly, which gives a similar effect.

Character Changes Working With Our Characters

We have now jumped an even larger step in our game, mainly because our programmer Rachel Cordone gave me an updated version of the script which has allowed us to get our characters in. I had to add in a line of code so the game would look for the AnimTrees but other than that it was perfect.

Also the glowing on the characters is due to the lighting which needs sorting.



Now the only thing we have to do to have this perfect is tweak the animations, and the characters speeds to make them work well together. Get the jumps working, make them cast shadows, and perhaps change the camera.

Floating Character Rig

While working on the heavy character rig I started on the floating character's rig, which took no time at all after doing two previous ones.

He is very different in bone structure to the other models, as his movements are less complex and more flowing and elegant.



I would like to point out that the texture is currently not finished, and is a very old version of the previous textures we were having.

Heavy Character Rig

After finding out we will be able to get changeable characters in our game, thanks to our programmer. The heavy character got rigged quickly so that animating could start being carried out.

Below is a video showing the controls of the rig with its texture applied.



As you can see his rig is quite similar to the neutral character, with the slight changes being a fat control on his tummy and no face control. Caryn is now busy animating him so expect some animations on here soon.

Heavy Character Model

Here is a spin around of the Heavy character along with its current texture.



In total he comes to 8240 tris.

It was modelled and textured by Rob, using Maya, Zbrush and Photoshop.

Character Changing Working

We have now jumped a huge step in our game, mainly because our programmer Rachel Cordone sent us some script which allows us to have changeable characters from trigger points. Below is a small video just showing what it allows us to do.

It is currently using the unreal defaults, but we are getting our characters in at this present time with her help. Although as you should be able to see with the run through that each character that the test changes to has their own speed and abilities.



The first character can run very fast and jump, where as the second character cannot jump and is much slower, and then the third character is even slower and cannot jump either.

It is just amazing what she has given us, as without her we may have been in a bit of a sticky situation.