Pretty crude but I’m not going for quality atm, the detonations are very underwhelming, I can clean that up a bit later with a decent burn decal, a sphere effect to show radius and a bigger flash.
I also really want to re-work that icon to be less…..bad? The changes to the blueprint graph were pretty minimal with this one. I only had to add a couple new functions and a new ammo type. The hud is starting to annoy me so I might redo it, but I want to start building out a meta-level game so that I can get more motivation to build the mechanics. I was thinking about doing a cross country trip kinda thing then having each “arena” have a specific mechanic to it, that way the levels can be kinda inconsistent and easier to make.
Added in a small fast stabbing bot that will charge at your feet. I think there’s some collision issues that I gotta get through (you can see me getting pushed back during the gameplay above). But I think I got the hook ups nice enough that it’s not really a huge issue.
Animation is now REALLLY easy for the bots, I can pump out a quick couple keyframes in 20 minutes rather than the 2-3 hours it took before with blender.
I also updated the class structure to be an actual class structure and I can re-use code.
In addition I added some camera shaking when stuff explodes
I think there’s still a question of the directionality of the shake but right now it helps portray an explosion when off next to you. To a lesser extent I have it when you get shot but nothing crazy yet.
…I’m gonna quit on the physical hit reactions thing and just make a blendspace. There’s a hackyness to the ue5 physical animations which I seem to be stuck on and I do not want to spend much more time on it.
I’m still happy I ported all of the animations to UE5, that pipeline is much faster and cleaner than adding animations from blender. Now I can start iterating on newer enemy behaviors a bit faster.
New enemy types
After going through the physical animation gambit I added in a new enemy type. A Grenadier, right now they throw frags and flashbangs but I’ve added them into the basic survival gamemode as random spawns. The game feels a bit more like a game but the levels are so not fleshed out that it feels very vacant.
Also the bots are clipping with each other hardcore, not sure whats up there..
Here’s a few minutes of un-edited game-play (Crap quality because I haven’t messed with the wordpress upload limits yet.)
Its all still very rough, and there still no sounds for the frags hitting or detonating so you’ll just randomly die without a reason. Also I’ve hit one or two bugs that make you fly really fast across the map sooo I’ll try fixing that.
In other news I found out the way I was doing bullet hit effects was wrong so I fixed that (world context thing) now you get better hit interactions. My next goal is to clutter up the map above and fix the clipping to try to get everything feeling a bit more alive.
Uhhhgggg, I know this is a better approach because its more WYSIWYG in unreal and I’ll be doing less messing around but it’s definitely re-doing work. I have to keep believing that physical hit reactions and IK will be worth it.
Walking is still the hardest IMO, everything after that should be easy as pie (day?).
Turns out the big tower of blueprint blocks I was talking about is 100% what you’re supposed to do (meaning I see it replicated in every tutorial I see).
BEHOLD
Right after making the last picture I deleted 100% of my work for the last 3 hours…
So I recreated everything and realized I can do WAAAY less to get the same result. So the result of the redo:
Yeah… the I still have to figure out why it splits like that. My guess is that I shouldn’t have separated the bones in blender and I should re-import and see how it goes. But the IK works fine
A bit smaller blueprint graph also:
Also the IK block I used is now smart enough to handle ground better than I was doing in the first picture.
Essentially what it does is:
1.) Draw a line from the end of the leg bone to the control
2.) If there is a hit perform IK to the hit point otherwise perform IK to the control.
Now why use Control rigs? Honestly not too sure yet… My hope is that IK is easier (so I dont have to add IK bones) but adding these controls seems tedious, in addition your forward solve block I guess has to be a big tower of blueprint power?
I’m probably missing the plot here, but also my “forward solve” seems to be undoing my “backwards solve” where I assumed “backwards solve” was used for IK situations. I’m still playing around but the hope is that by using unreal internals I should be able to handle the physicality of the bots a bit better than I expect.
Which would be amazing if: 1.) Firefox supported usbhid and 2.) If I could remap the slider. But right now its really good for me using OBS to record rather than the snipping tool which records at like 20fps.
So for example here’s the control rig I described in action, BUT there’s no OBS window visible!
Otherwise I think I’m still dead-set on remaking the patrol bot animations in unreal. Walking and reload might be the most annoying but mostly I want to be able to make quick animations without the huge headache of .fbx exporting and importing (even with the blender unreal addons https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/download-our-new-blender-addons , which work amazing for static meshes, kinda sketchy for skeletal). I kinda wish unreal had the option of slicing the animation list of an FBX and attempting bone resolution before importing. I really want to get this working because then my workflow stays in unreal for animating. Blender is still blows unreal out of the water for making meshes IMO but animations in Blender still seem hacky with the action editor.
There are a few things I’m actively annoyed with when it comes to control rigs (which I wont show you here because I’m still WIP with this one.) I’m also a straight up control rig novice so I bet as I learn these problems might be solved with better practices.
1.) You cant manipulate the control shapes in the editor preview window. Seems like that would be an easy addition and should match the same kind of workflow as the “hold control to bump physics asset” thing.
2.) Control rigs are effected by bones. This one I get WHY but it seems counter-intuitive that you would ever want to make a rig that is controlled by a parent bone. I get the idea of attaching to a bone in order to have like a small sub object (for example a turret on a large ship).
3.) When you add a control to a bone it adds it to the children of that Bone. This would be fine if #2 wasn’t a thing.
4.) Adding Default forward solve assignments are not automated. I bet I could find a python script to do this but still, that blueprint tower of power really can and should be made upon generating a new control for a bone.
I have the patrol bots hooked up to throw them based upon an enumeration (Which I dont like, I’d rather a subclass but I shot myself in the foot earlier on).
I just hijacked the reload animation and basically said “if you’re a grenade bot, reload, and instead of throwing a mag up throw a flash-bang”. Pretty stupid for now but its a good proof of concept, the shakyness is because I half implemented physical animations to handle bot hits. I’m still not happy about that, I want to move to a fully unreal animation setup because my animations are so simplistic but that’s another avenue I gotta go learn.
Attempted to add some color to the zapper I showed earlier. I’m not 100% enthusiastic about the job I did but I still like some of the ideas I have here.
For the record this is how you setup a shader in blender for texture Paint:
Essentially you make a shader that you like as your “base”, then make an image that is zero alpha. Then you tie the alpha of the texture into a color mix node, that way when you paint on the texture it will swap in the information on the image to the shader. If I wanted to get REALLY creative here I would add in something like a chipping algorithm based upon the tangent of the base model so you would get a “worn” look to everything.
The potato cannon button I think came out fine, the wires could have used a bit more slack (or maybe some stables holding it down).
The front of the cannon I tried adding some scorching but honestly I botched that portion so it looks more like someone dipped the front in soot and smeared it back.
The bat handle is a bit too cartoony. The wrap needed to be tighter but I already applied the screw modifier onto the object so I was stuck with this. I’ll probably remake this if I keep the same idea.
The shoulder brace bike tire I’m weirdly happy with (minus the un-beveled edges), making a tire is surprisingly difficult in blender (for me atleast).
The pylons in the back I think look kinda cool, but they seem crazy out of place to the rest of the weapon. They don’t have that “junkyard” kinda look I was going for (also without lighting its hard to see the green emissions)
The can and the junction box are fine, I’d want to add a label to the can and some screws to the junction box.
I only wanted a bluetooth adapter because my xbox controller would have crazy delay to the raspberry pi 5 integrated bluetooth adapter, I only bought a bt500 because it was at microcenter and it was kinda cheap. Turns out the realtek chip inside of the bt500 isn’t natively supported by raspian (or linux really). After debugging for like 3-4 hours, I had a thought that maybe the cana kit fan was blocking the bluetooth signal, so I removed the fan tried the native bluetooth on the raspberry pi and everything worked perfectly.
tl;dr : I spent extra money to give myself more problems
Not sure what this is but I think I might keep rolling and texture it to see where it can fit in to future projects.
Other angles:
The pole out the side is supposed to be the end of a baseball bat, the curve underneath I wanted to be some kind of road tire.The sights are a soup can with a nail poking underneath.
The column+coil is built around taking the animation frame counter, doing some math to make a sine-wave and using that as a blend factor between a few colors. Here’s a better zoom.
Not much more to show of this, the base is too shiny IMO but I was surprised how easy it was to make dynamic textures in blender. The volume aspect I hooked up just to see what it would look like and I dug it. In the future I should learn a bit more about how that plays into things but for now I’m happy with my cheap smoke.
