Day 36 – Good Grip
Yesterday I managed to put a pistol in the Kingpin’s hands and trigger the animation to equip or store it. I only had to fix the small hand alignment that was a bit off… which was a whole lot easier said than done.
Spent most of the day looking for ways to solve this. Not sure I have found the best way yet, but I settled for a solution that works for now, as you can see here:
The Kingpin can now draw his fancy schmancy golden pistol, put it away again and walk or run around with it.
Doesn’t look too bad eh!
After fixing the pistol grip I moved on to putting a rifle in the soldier’s hands.
I think the result is acceptable for now, but it’s not the menacing/alert posture that I was hoping for. The root cause for that is the same as with the pistol grip, it’s an incompatibility between the characters and the animations I want to use.
The animations I have are motion capture (mocap) animations, created for your regular human posture. However, the characters are stylized with different body shapes. For example the arms/legs ratio is different and they only have 3 fingers on each hand. Technically they also have a slightly different bone structure (in Unity terms: the avatar is different).
At first glance the animations work fine, but when you look closer you notice things are off. The pistol grip is a clear error but there’s other, more subtle changes as well, as you can see with the rifle poses.
The following is the result I get after some tweaking:
But if you look at the same rifle used with a dummy character that came with the animations, you see there’s an overall difference in pose:
The rifle aim, the position of the arms, position of the head… they’re all just a bit better, creating an overall stronger look.
Even though I have some clues on what to tweak, I don’t really have an idea how much effort it would take to get it perfect – if at all possible. But the current result is acceptable for the prototype.
Besides, after two days messing about with animations, I want to work on some other parts again tomorrow 🙂
Arne Vandamme 