Player Character and their Animations

 

Xodius Studios Blog #1 

Player Character and Animations

Author:Justin Palmer
Published: 02/16/2023 18:30

The Problem:

    This week I have been adding in the player assets and getting them to position correctly on the player character.  The main problem I had was with the player animating correctly.  Most of the player would move/animate correctly except for the sword/backpack/belt, which stayed stationary and at the wrong location.  This made the player move and look strange to the testers, and the hitbox on the sword was at the incorrect location causing hits to not occur.  The second problem I encountered was getting the animations to work together with BlendSpaces.  I hadn't made an animation graph and BlendSpace within Unreal and combining them is much different than I am used to in Unity.  This problem resulted in the player only playing either the 'idle' or 'walking' state, without being able to transition between them.  This made the game look really bad and confusing to the testers when the player should be standing still, but the animation shows the are 'walking' in place.
 


Problem Solution:

    The solution I came up with was to use 'sockets' to attach the backpack and right/left weapons on the player.  This was a new concept that doesn't exist in Unity.  It allowed me to have these items snap quickly to the correct model location, and the items can be quickly swapped in and out when needed from the inventory making an inventory menu possible and more variation in the gameplay.
   The solution I came up with for the animation and blendspace was to research how to make some BlendSpaces and AnimGraphs to transition between Idle/Walk/Jumping.  This resulted in a 2D BlendState in which the player will be idle when unmoved, and can 'show' the walking animation if the player moves in any of the 4 directions of the joystick.  The player looks much better when they transition now, and all the animations for the '1-handed Player' are still being implemented, but should be added by the end of the week.
 

 

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