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?

This morning I put some more effort into the glock. Added a 3 bone skeleton + 2 quick animations. My goal here was to rush into unreal to get a good feel for things. On that front also I’ve realized I have been making a mistake for the better part of 5ish years. I’ve been exporting as .fbx because I assumed that was an industry standard, but I soon realized from looking at a few blender forum posts: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/fbx-binary-file-format-specification/20814

The reason .fbx is so damn buggy is not because a general “asset pipelines are hard” it’s because the damn thing is a reverse engineered shit show. I always assumed there was no way to get blender materials and shaders into unreal but if you dump everything into a .gltf then EVERYTHING GETS IMPORTED.

Only downside is that your scale factors dont transfer over and 1.0 unit is always going to be 1 inch. But honestly that’s soo much easier than memorizing the settings for unreal (scale: 0.01, units cm if you were wondering).

Now with that I setup the ol’ unreal animation pipeline. This always feels like a chore to me, I should really package up a template for this character pawn and the animation blueprint into a package at some point and maybe distribute it on the store. Maybe I can save a younger dev on going through the same crap that took me a few years to understand. To re-iterate the process

1.) Import all of your animations (INCLUDING AN IDLE OR T_POSE ANIMATION), ideally you would make the model + rig in one file and throw animations in the other. Then upon import click your pre-made skeleton from file A and then only import animations from file B (makes life so much easier).

2.) Make a new animation blueprint, open it, go to the “AnimGraph”. Right click on the grid, type “state machine”, click state machine, drag a line from state machine to the “Output Pose” block.

3.) Double click the state machine to start editing.

4.) Right click, hit “add state” name the state “Idle”

5.) Right click, “add state” name the state, “Fire”

6.) Drag lines from “Idle” to “Fire” and from “fire” to “Idle”

7.) Double click your “Idle” state to open it.

8.) Right click and type the name of your idle animation and the one that says “play animationName” click it. In my case my idle animation was called “glock_idle”

9.) Drag a line from your idle animation to the output pose so it looks something like this:

10.) Now repeat steps 7-9 with your fire animation (use the top bar to back out back to the state machine)

11.) Now add a new variable called “isFiring” to your animation blueprint (make it a boolean) and make sure it’s a public variable (make sure the eye to the right of isFiring is open)

12.) Double Click the symbol above the arrow that points from “idle” to “Fire” (I’ll call this the “Transition Symbol”

13.) Get isfiring and drag it to the “can enter Transition”

14.) Back out to the state machine and click the transition symbol for the arrow that goes from “fire” to “idle”

15.) Make this blueprint (“fire_001” is the name of my animation).

16.) Now go back to your “firing” state, click your firing animation and scroll down to “isLooping” , hit the bind drop down and select “isFiring”. (If your making a fire firing gun you wont see any difference in this step, but for a pistol it will clean up the transitions in and out of the “firing”state”)

17.) Now click “Compile” in the upper left, then at the lower right check “isFiring” and your weapon preview in the upper left should start playing the firing animation. (Make sure you have “edit selected instance” checked when you mess with this. “Edit Defaults” sets what value “isFiring” is when the blueprint starts, you want that to be false.)

17.) (Optional Step) By default the blending mode when transitioning states tries to blend from idle to fire instead of just hard stopping. The default settings should be good for most people, but if your seeing your gun half shoots, then keeps shooting try this out.
Go back to your state machine: Single click the top transition symbol, in the “details” tab set duration to 0.0. This should prevent any gross slides from your idle pose to your fire pose.

18.) (From here on out I’m assuming you’re using the first person template) Now setup a shoot button in enhanced input if there isn’t one already. (See https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/enhanced-input-in-unreal-engine)

19.) In your character blueprint class add your weapon as a skeletal mesh to the camera. After adding setup the skeltal mesh to use your imported mesh, and set the animation settings to use your blueprint.

20.) Add this to your event graph.

• Where “IA_Shoot” is the name of the enhanced input event that I made and added to the enhanced input objected use for this character

• “Gun” is the name of the skeletal mesh that I added to my camera in my character

• ” Glock_animBP” is the name of my animation blueprint class.
• The print string block is for safety, if you see “BAD CAST” pop up on your screen you’ve messed something up.

21.) Go back in game and now when you shoot you’re animation will play:

22.) Now to add sounds+particle effects. Navigate to your fire animation in the content browser and double click it.

23.) There will be a playback line scrolling from left to right on the bottom, find the Time that you want to play a sound, right click on the horizontal bar that starts with “1”, right click > Add notify > play sound

24.) Now click the new sound notify and in the details tab in the upper right corner choose your sound:

25.) Back in the timeline section, next to the #1 on the left click the track dropdown and select “insert notify track”

26.) Now you should see a #1 and #2, next to the #2 right click where you want to see a muzzle flash and select “add notify” > Play Niagra particle effect. Now you should be setup to tie a muzzle flash to your animation. (Learn here: https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/8B1P/unreal-engine-intro-to-niagara)

Only caveat there is that you’ll probably want to add a socket to your bone to attach the niagra system (learn that here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/WorkingWithContent/Types/SkeletalMeshes/Sockets/ ,,technically out of date but the same flow applies to unreal 5).

I really thought it would take me 10 minutes to list out what todo but it took me the better part of an hour.

Anyways as you can see the glock animations seem to be fine (I’m probably just going to do goldeneye style reloads) the sound and the muzzle flash kinda suck so that’s probably the next thing to do.

A month or two ago I ran a cyberpunk RED campaign that I wrote myself. Over the past month or so I wanted to see if I could get my idea of the map into unreal engine 5.

Sidenote: I realized it would have made more sense to learn cyberpunk 2077 mapping for this project. However since cyberpunk 2077 part 2 will be using unreal 5 (https://www.pcgamer.com/cyberpunk-2077-director-says-studios-switch-from-redengine-to-unreal-engine-5-isnt-starting-from-scratch/) by the time I get something that looks good maybe it will be ready to pull into a sequel?

The original maps were made by cybermaps: https://www.patreon.com/cybermaps/posts (Subscribe to them, all the maps are great)

From the game I had 3 critical areas: The sewer, the night club and the apartment building. The goal for players was to head into the apartment building to find an npc that stole from the fixer that setup the job.

Greyboxing in unreal is pretty simple but like everything else more effort in == more quality out (when operating below the 80% mark like everything I do).

Here’s the working version:

Not great, but hey it’s a start. I put in lighting before adding any light source models just to make sure I don’t make any huge errors in geometry. Then I took a mixmo model and had them as npc placeholders across the map. That weird road texture is actually made procedural in blender (which I think is more of a admission of guilt rather than a flex).

The first thing I wanted to make look kinda nice are the doors. I had a few mock ups before the doors in there now but I’m honestly not too much of a fan. The front doors to the apartment just straight crap rn, the texturing was a rush job and the doors themselves are kinda silly.

The double doors will be the player’s entry to the map so I think I’ll need special attention with those. However the interior doors seemed more manageable. I’ve gone through three iterations of interior doors:

Iteration 1:

I swore I had a first iteration here but I definitely saved over the first iteration with the 2nd iteration. If blender had a better style of source control (I could use git lfs but comeon) this could fix this issue. Future hopes is that blender gets a good internal usage of git/svn whatever so when I hit “save” it keeps a revision list like fusion 360.

Iteration 2:

This door was very rushed, you can see the scale is all off in the xy, the door is just a magic square the moves left to right. No indication of how the door works. Functionally this was nice for getting door sizes right but the greybox of the door has no shadowing so it’s actually really hard to see the window edge in bright light. The textures here I just spun up in unreal quickly and aren’t worth showing.

Iteration 3:

With iteration 3 I went hard into the “make sure someone could guess how this worked” which backfired imo.

You can see this huge bulge in the back where I thought the majority of mechanics would be held. On the front there’s a smaller budge which I think has the whole engineering method of “Oh shit we need more room” built into it. I took this door and threw it into substance to add some details

Honestly not the worst thing. It looks pretty cool with this lighting, so I dumped it into unreal to take a look.

Wow that took a turn for the worst. I’m not 100% sure how this happened, but at the moment everything looks like a cartoon, rather than the nice shiny metal from substance.

My thought is that the material type I’m using is probably not the correct type. I’m using a simple opaque texture but I gotta feeling because I was messing with the glass pbr shading in substance there’s an unreal equivalent.

But regardless of the door shading/texturing the real problem starts to become more evident when you get in game:

That’s a stright up jarring door to come up to. It looks like the hull of a spaceship with a huge window, both of which make no sense combined together. You figure you would either have a thin door with a pretty window or just a solid hunk of metal. Plus the goal of this building is to make it look like a rundown-ed future apartment which is controlled by a drug dealing gang. Why would they have freaking bulkheads for each apartment?

So back to the door drawing board I guess…