Using Paragon Animation Assets to enrich user experience
Author: Sean Jamelarin
Posted on 8/24/23
The problem:
During this week of development, I realized that our current iteration of how units interact with each other felt incomplete, and that there is no visual cue of units combating each other, concealing important aspects of gameplay. If left unattended, the feeling of dynamic gameplay would suffer, as well as obfuscating the purpose of spawning units.
The Solution:
I decided upon using Paragon's Serath as a base for new unit animations, as her assets were free-to-use, and was the closest analog to our own dwarven models, using a one-handed mace. Unfortunately, since Paragon uses their own models, I needed to retarget the models for a UE4 Mannequin. After that, I looked into how locomotion animations were implemented in Realm Rumble, and it was as simple as finding a blendspace, and replacing the original samples for said blendspace with Serath's idle, walking and running animations.
Here's a brief overview of work done:
1. Find Serath's game assets and download in a separate project.
2. Retarget Animation assets and export to Realm Rumble.
3. Retarget Animation assets AGAIN. (I found that the skeleton for the dwarf models were different to Unreal's UE4 skeleton, if only in name.)
As of right now, attacking animations aren't added in just yet; blame AI and circular includes for that one. Understanding how Behavior tree tasks run is also an added challenge here, as I want to stop using delays in our Behavior tree and just have the attacking task to state that it is running until the attacking animation stops.
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