Hello Everyone, KrimsonStorm here. This week was pretty busy, as I worked on a plethora of things to push the game in the right direction.
First, I finished up the character’s basic stride cycles. That, and a jump sequence. That is all now seamlessly blended together to form an animation for the body that works great, regardless of the speed of your walk or direction. It’s a bit hard to show all that off in a quick clip, so I might release a video later in the week or next week to show that off as well.
Not only that, but If you remember the Weapon Dispenser and Vehicle pad, those had to be set up to work in UE4 with proper blueprints. All of this was done using a combination of Animation Montages and state machines (hence the pun)
Another huge thing I worked on was in cooperation with Alex and Melissa, on designing the main base for each team. You can see the finished model on Melissa’s blog, but the layout you can see right here:
As you can see, it has a garage that is slightly more open, an open stairwell section, the weapons area, and another open room which could can just be an interesting dynamic area to fight in. The garage building is actually 5M tall to accommodate the build pad’s height.
The second floor is the most dynamic. The spawn room is the bottom right, which has a ledge for people to jump off. The ledge makes it much easier to escape spawn camping, since you have so much surface area to come from. The room above the weapons room has an area to jump down, allowing for easy access to there for anyone close. There is a single 1M height increase that leads to the roof of the garage.
The third floor is pretty self explanatory. It houses the holy grail, the shield generator.
That was the main things I worked on, but I did do other aspects. I designed a concept for the base defense turrets. Each teams base has a set number of heavily armed turrets that need to be taken down before the generator can fall. These turrets are immune to damage when not firing, so you have to enter combat to take them down. Once down though, they stay down. Here’s the concept:
It’s a tower, really. All of them start off underground and activate a few seconds after the game begins. The turret head itself is tiled down until it reaches it’s normal height, and then opens up itself. The decal on the sides is the shield generator, and glows when the shield is on. There is also an Idea of a turret icon in the middle of the object, but that might not be the final icon.
As well, I got into fixing some issues with the character rig, and starting the vehicle workflow. More to come in the future!
This week, I have:
Worked on the main base design (6 hours)
Met with the development team (180 minutes)
Made turret concepts (150 minutes)
State Machine work (12 hours)
Vehicle work (4 hours)
Weight painting fix (3 hours)
Wrote this blog (45 minutes)
With two weeks until the public demo at ImagineRIT, we have a lot to work on. As well, my main thesis grade is this Thursday, and while I don’t have much more to improve on it does mean that I will have to figure out how to show off my stuff which takes away from actual progressing on said work. Next week, however, I will be doing another weapon animation set or sets. Until next time folks, KrimsonStorm signing off!
KrimsonTheory 