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Character Pieces Coming Soon!
🕑 Added 2021-09-22 16:07:13 +0000 UTCFirst and foremost, I want to apologize for the lack of communication over the past 1-2 months. A combination of sickness, overall business, and focusing on making animations has kept me from being as communicative and responsive as I normally like to be (even my attendance in Discord has been a bit more sparse).
So if you sent me a question or concern or anything, and I did not get back to you, please send me a reminder. My not responding was not intentional.
Anyway!
I wanted to give an update on the status of the new Character Pieces! I've been working my butt off making new animations from scratch for the new models. I've been really focusing on trying to make each animation look and feel good in all 8 directional facings.
In addition, I've been culling animation frames, adding others, to try and keep the number of total animation frames in check. It is super easy to let the animation frames get out of hand and bloat well into the thousands, which just won't do at all. I feel like I have been doing a good job in this regard and have managed to create sets of animations for a variety of weapons as well as general animations for basic things like idling, interacting with objects, and by popular demand, roll-dodging and even praying.
The image above shows a few of the unique walking animations for different weapon arch-types. This image is slightly misleading because the bottom left, dual-wield, image is for the idle stance and not the walking stance - when I went to make this image to share, I found out that my dual-wield walking animation actually looks like this for some reason:
I have no idea why. So I have to re-do and fix that one. But the rest are coming along nicely!
In the end, each weapon arch-type will have a unique walking animation, running animation if applicable (the 2-H weapons so far is the only one with a unique running animation), a unique idle animation, and one or two unique attack animations. All of the weapon arch-types share the same animations for getting hit, being critically wounded, falling down, etc. This helps keep the total number of animation frames low.
The weapon arch-types are as follows:
- 1-H (with and without shield)
- 2-H (large swords, axes, etc)
- Dual-Wield
- Unarmed (this can include things like brass knuckles and other fist weapons)
- Bow
- Polearm/Staff
- Pistol/Firearm
- Rifle/MG/XBow
These categories encompass the vast majority of weapons that I have available for the character pieces. There might be a few niche weapon types not represented here, like whips, but the line had to be drawn somewhere.
This has taken up the bulk of my work time over the past two months, and I apologize to everyone who may have been expecting it sooner. It is a lot of work and requires a lot of attention to detail - I often find myself googling videos for various fighting stances and techniques and such for the various weapon arch-types.
But the work is almost completed. This initial investment of time and effort up front will pay dividends once it is finished. I am not entirely sure how much more time is needed, probably another week or two to finish up the main animations and a few days to make tweaks and fixes and set up a full animation template environment.
After that, I will churn out a whoooole bunch of character pieces for you to enjoy and build your characters with. Without having to deal with the old green-screen method, this should be a lot easier for me to do.
Thank you for hanging in there and I hope to have these new resources to you guys soon!
-Jesse
Comments
Edward O.
Amazing work as always. As a game developer, I want to add additional content, but it is quite difficult in this 2.5D setting. In 3D, I could just take a static mesh and apply it to the right socket. I was wondering if you had a recommendation to allow us to use our own assets that is compatible with your art style and character base animations.
