Welcome back! This entire week has been spent on researching animations. This includes procedural, motion capture, IK rigs and ways to improve the already made animations. I went through brainstorming and discussions with the team and came to the conclusion that these types of animations are not meant for the game. We decided to stick to using root motion animations.
Procedural Animations
Procedural animations are animations that automatically generated in real-time which allows for more varied actions. However, to program and blend procedural and predefined animations together requires much knowledge and time. As a small indie company, we do not have much knowledge on procedural animations neither do we have much time to figure it out. It was too risky for us to try to meddle around with the programming aspect of procedural animations but, we may implement the bone head solver which rotates the head to face a certain direction. The research done can help prepare us for future implementations if we aren't bounded by time. Here is a link to a guide on procedural animations, the guide is not made by us and it is used as a reference. This is the official tweet made by this awesome indie developer, please check him out.
Motion Capture Animations
This is pretty straight forward, we do not have the equipment nor do we have the fund to purchase such equipment. The cost range from $800 to roughly $8k, averaging around $3k. More information about such motion capture systems can be found here.
Predefined & Root Motion Animations
Since we can't develop with either of the above solutions, we decided to manually create our animations and blend them with root motion.
Firstly I tried implementing a Foot IK System where the legs of the characters will adjust to the height and angle of the surface that they are on. I quickly realised that the system revolves around the animations and the rig. If the rig is not defined as humanoid, it will not generate the rig IK binds. Here is the tutorial to the Foot IK System that we used as reference.
I added the root motion animations to test the Foot IK System and there are still some minor glitches with the system and I believe the issue is due to the rig and the animations. See what I did there :D
GDC Links
Sean Ngo
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