FMP: Week 15 Thursday

On Thursday, I attended our scheduled Teams drop-in session with Kat and Craig, where I asked for crit, tips and recommendations on what I'd done so far. They mentioned that to achieve a nice blend between my wood plank ends and the rest of it, I could detach them and extrude the ends, adding my damage trims/alphas in the new topology which would overlap over the wood to break the seams. They agreed that I should consider reducing the push modifier I applied to the treehouse as it made it look a bit too pudgy in my opinion, and reassured me that replacing the character animations wouldn't be too dificult- as I wouldn't be able to use the default ones since my characters have additional bones (horselinks in the legs). We also discussed the fishing rod that I wanted in the scene as a prop, as I had previously wanted to apply a cat bone with physics to the string of the rod and have the bobber float on the water surface dynamically. I was aware of my time constraints and ended up asking if it would be ok to simply remove the string (like seen in games like animal crossing) and have the bobber and rod seperate. From there, I asked if it would be ok to simply have the bobber be animated to move up and down in the scene, since there weren't going to be any animations that actually needed it to be reactive at all.

I asked about my ripple rings, and if the material would look less jagged if I added topology (which they answered positively) and Craig also mentioned that I should add some extra topology between the grass and the sand area in the plinth so that I could make the transition a little bit less gradual.

After the session, I went on to working on the animations for each of my characters, starting with the guard character.

I attached his spear to a prop bone with the intention of removing it later, simply so that I could see where his fingers would grip around it.

Animation sped up to show more

I added 3 different periods of movement with breaks inbetween

I realise that I could have split up the animations into chunks and added them to a state machine in an animation blueprint, which could play each chunk based on the situation (ie. the spear slam on player approach) but I was unsure how much time I would have to implement it, so I left it as it is.