Rigging... (It will not be the last time I have to tackle this)

I spent so much time avoiding tackling weigh painting, but it finally caught up to me.

I waited for feedback, got bored of waiting, and then just re-rigged the model for the 459385th time. What a life. I also took the executive decision of forgoing the cloth simulated physics... For now.

Take a peek at my epic fail.

I simplified the model, taking away vertices that I did not really need if I wanted to jus rig everything, and once again went with Maya's autorig tool. After doing it so many times, I can now use it better than the first time, so that is a win. I made sure to go back and tweak little funky things here and there to get it to a decent place.

There is still a lot of space for improvement, but I do think it is finally good enough for me to stop worrying about it for now. I retargeted once again the animations, and they looked okay!

Animations

From the front, that is. Because I deleted half the geo of the body, now I had some pieces sticking out, so when they ran you could see the disconnected joints and it was a mess. I tried to fix it from the model at first, but then I wondered if I could change the animations I had on Unreal. Turns out I could! With animation layers, I could tweak some things and then! It! Looked! Better! I may just do that if I don't get the time to do my own animations from scratch.

Model updates aside, Dulce is officially not immortal anymore. They can die. They can be killed. They can...

Health system and attacks

The health system has been implemented! So now you see your magic AND your health bar. Dulce still one-shots the sombras for convenience purposes, while Dulce has 5hp and every sombra attack takes -1hp from them. The actual attack and damage are slightly delated since they it's triggered after the animation is done, but that is because the animation I currently use is a placeholder. They use the same attack animation that Dulce has. When I actually give them a different animation, I will be notifying through the animation montage itself to generate the attack collision.

I also made it so you instantly respawn after dying, which is... Once again... Temporary. I will be working on that more once I have the save/load system going on.

I think I am getting more and more used to using Blueprints. It is still weird to see the nodes instead of writing functions and everything, but it's an acquired taste I would say. I start to understand things when I think about how I would write the code and then I do it in the Blueprints.

I also found out how to add cinematics but I can't post videos, and I've started doing some level blockout.