Week 3: Character Animation

It's been a few weeks but here are some animations!

I decided to use Mixamo for this project, at least to make the humanoid animations easier - plus I gained some experience in understanding how to make animations by editing the Mixamo ones.

I uploaded my .fbx file of Azazel to Mixamo, then downloaded the animations, without skinning at 24 fps. I did this to keep the simple rig I made last time, rather than use the Mixamo generated one. As you might see, I had some issues with the pose, especially with the thumbs/hands, which always seemed to be at an awkward angle. After this, I used a Blender plugin called Keenmap Retarget to swap the animation data from those skeletons onto my main rig. This was super simple, though again I had some issues when retargeting - I think this was due to bone roll issues. Still, I sorted it by aligning the Mixamo rigs as closely as possible with my rig before retargeting. I also edited some of the animations to make them look better for Azazel, as well as fix issues like her hat clipping through her head. After this, I deleted every other frame (on two's) and changed interpolation to 'constant' to achieve a more 'poppy' (or jank) feel which works well with the low poly & pixel textures.

As you can see, I used the NLA as this is compatible with Godot, and I saw a brief tutorial which used this method. Whether I'll actually need this set up when it comes to the code etc. I will have to see! But things currently work in Godot :)

I will want to create a large variety of animations in the future, but I figured that these 4 are a good base for now. Next, I will create some monster designs, as well as begin to flesh out biomes & areas the player will encounter - at the moment we only aim to create the first area, but I want to plan them all out so they work well together.