Woo! Got some animations in game, I made the mistake of thinking that Unreal engine control rigs were actually something useful for what I’m doing. Once I found that out I just gritted my teeth and did the whole animation process in blender and transferred it over into unreal.

These animations will definitely need to be remade at some point but I’ll punt on that until I think I have a level of robot shooting going on.

I tried being clever and pretty much wasted 6 hours….

I spent a bunch of time rigging up this model, a large portion of the time was spent undoing the dumb modifiers I put on the legs. Specifically I used array modifiers and mirror modifiers to generate the legs after making the first one.

Using this technique ensures that when you finally go to export you need to manually re-assign origins somewhere on the model which is something you really need to keep track of when rigging properly.

This all went good but I decided to put the bones 90 degrees offset because I thought it would make it nicer to manipulate. Which I would say is true if I was going to manually manipulate the bones. However, I tried getting smart and moving into unreal engine control rigs: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/control-rig-in-unreal-engine

Which in theory should let me animate in unreal, which would save me an export/debug step which I normally have to do from blender. However I kept hitting weird issues with setting up controls and having unreal auto-recognize things… Then I noticed the issue once I tried testing the physics asset:

So that isn’t good. Essentially unreal makes a set of simple geometric shapes that it glues onto your model when you import to try to get a good collision box setup. In this case me twisting the bones make the system give up and just surrounded the body with a capsule and legs with one big box:

So I attempted to fix this (which looked good)

…But then I hit the next problem…

What’s going on here is that there’s a parenting loop going on. Looking back at the original model I put the bones 90 degrees offset from the mesh (again because I think I’m smarter than how everyone does stuff).

With the bones offset from the mesh I had to apply the physics geometries to the mesh itself rather than the bone. So then unreal was trying to modify the position of the mesh, but the bone had no constraints to the physics so it tried putting the mesh back, then the physics manipulated the mesh, then the bone manipulated the mesh, then the physics manipulated the mesh, then the bone manipulated the mesh….So that comes out with the result you see above which is everything kind of giving up. The fix here is to re-orient the bones so I can attach the physics geometries to the bone….I basically wasted my morning setting myself up for failure. However this is the first complex mechanical mesh I’ve ever done so it’s still a learning experience in my head.

Spent some time today setting up and rigging an assault rifle for the game.

It’s still kind blocky but any more effort on this would end up being on details that are un-needed. My main goal with my current modeling streak is to rush a bunch of stuff in game to make a simple fps.

It seems to be looking fine in unreal also.

Now that I have two bonified animated weapons in game (I’m aggressive not doing any reloads, just goldeneye style hide weapon reloads) I can start working the enemy side.

I have some ideas but mostly I’m thinking some kind of drones rushing you and moving in inhuman ways. I have a start here but I think I need to redo the legs/locomotion of this guy.

Which I honestly love the idea of a robot that had a gun stupidly stuck to its head by a redneck super-villian. But the more I look at this guy the more simplistic it seems. I was going for capturing the vibe of modern robotic arms (such as: https://www.devonics.com/product-page/ufactory-xarm-5?utm_source=reachlocal&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=googleshoppingdevonicsincroboticarms&gad_source=1 ) but I don’t think they actually look as cool as I wanted.

I am, however, proud of this top portion:

Maybe not so in execution but definitely in concept. I could take down some of the work I need to do if I just re-use models on the enemies. If I get a good single enemy variant down I can just throw other weapons on top to provide differing variety of enemies.

I made a knife in blender and pulled it into unreal.. Haven’t rigged it up yet but the plan is to get a skeleton on it sometime tomorrow and throw it in the game. Maybe at some point I’ll start making the “game” but right now I’m just living off of this new .gltx high.

There’s probably some huge gotcha with the .gltx that I’m not seeing because this has been some of the easiest imports I ever did.

Even the sizing was easier. Man why did anyone ever make tutorials using .fbx?