At the beginning of the semester, I started by researching simulator games, such as cooking and thief simulator, and interactive 3D animation to familiarize myself with a type of animation I wasn’t used to. I also thought of the specific animations we may want for customers, criminals, and police if needed.
Notes from word document at beginning of semester:
Customers
Simple walk cycles/interaction with sales assistant (player)
Criminal
Superhot for running criminal/being held at gunpoint
Ocean’s 8 scene, confidence, nothing to hide:
Shoplifters, subtle, strategic shop lifting:
Tiptoe references, a way for player to spot shoplifter/criminal on CCTV?
Sneaky walk reference:
Sneaky – 3D sneak walk animation:
Police Animations needed?
Police simulator:
Road 96, (also good reference for game):
Heavy rain shop scene:
I received feedback from Alec after a presentation early on in the semester, where he told me to follow his video on transferring animations from Maya to Unreal. He also told me to plan animation blueprints for unreal so I knew exactly which animations would be needed.
I used Alec’s files and transferred the character mesh and skeleton into unreal, as well as an FBX of each animation. I made an event graph, controlling he speed, direction and velocity of the character, then a state machine, controlling the order of which the animations would be played. When I tired to move the animations into the state machine, they appeared to not be there. I discovered later on that I had to go back to the maya files and change the units from metres to centimetres so the skeletons would import into unreal at the correct scale. I followed this YouTube video which taught me ow to make the blueprints and how to transition between each pose, by creating a blend space.
After I had imported the correct FBXs and added them to the state machine, I noticed the jump started mid-air. I now know that is what the jump loop was for in the state machine, therefore I needed to export the jump as two separate animations: a jump and a fall.