2. Starter trouble? Have no fear!

So we are going to make a Superman prototype and I'm planning it to be a third person game. No probs, I'll boot up Unreal and make a new third person project. Bam! we have a new project. Well now what? Hmm.. I'm gonna run around with the default Unreal character, make a few sick running jumps jumps and then.. maybe take a nap or, hear me out, I can watch that episode from the last season of Black Mirror that everyone's telling me to watch.

Don't tell me you haven't done it ever. Some studies say that almost 92.5% of the populace have procrastinated in their lives atleast once. Now I made that number up, but you pretty much believed me didn't you. Almost every person I have ever spoken to, relates with this. But everyone has their own mechanisms to cope with it.

For me, I need to 'see' results for keeping my motivation and enthusiasm up. So we'll start with the part which I always find cool and interesting: Art and Animation. Now before I delve in deeper, for the folks who feel they procrastinate to the level where it's affecting their lives...

So first, we need a Superman model. I wanted something more cartoony than realistic. Sketchfab is my go-to for small projects. I search for free models because I'm Indian and I'm cheap :p . So I found this model :

This is perfect for my project as the number of vertices and triangles are pretty low so it shouldn't put pressure on the engine. My ideal character model would be something which has less than 10k verts and 15k tris. You can get models with higher polygon counts depending on the context but this is my sweet spot considering this is going to be drawn almost every frame of the game. Also shout-out to 'CAPTAAINR' for this amazing model and making it available for free for hobbyists like me. Please check his page out as he has some amazing 3D models. Artists are the one who breathe life into a game or any media and they have my utmost respect and support.

Now we have our model. The next 'cool' thing to do: Animations. For a cheap hobbyist the perfect place is Mixamo. It has a very extensive library and even has parameters to play around with for each individual animation. Although speaking about the quality of the animations, I feel Mixamo's animations are a bit lack-luster and generic, they are good enough for any hobby project. The best part about Mixamo is it's auto-rigger tool meaning even if your model doesn't have a rig you can just use that tool to get a rig for it and honestly I feel it does a pretty good job with the weight painting. Also don't worry if your model is not textured in Mixamo as all we need here is to get our animations.

Now lets prepare a brief list of the general animations we want:

• Ground Idle

• Forward Jog

• Backwards Jog

• Left strafe

• Right strafe

• Diagonal strafes(for more smoother transitions)

• Forward Sprint

• Jump start

• Jump loop

• Jump end

• The booty hip hop dance(don't see a use for it but I'll still take it because its cool)

There are still a few animation which I haven't listed here, like flying and punching. But for now let's just focus on getting superman running. Small steps I say.

At this point I was talking with a co-worker, who is a Technical Artist, about my approach for animations and he mentioned something about 're-targeting' and talked about using it very passionately, which I didn't understand at first. What is a 're-targeting'? Once I have my animations, it is intuitive to just directly use them right? I can just start crafting my character using an animation blueprint. So why was this bald guy insisting me to look into this 're-targeting'. This kept me up at night sometimes. Why was he so adamant on it? Was he jealous of my progress? Is he spying on me? Are there microchips in needles? Is the world flat?

So I decided to google it like a normal person and behold.. he was right. Unreal 4 and 5 both have an amazing system of 'copying' animations from one model to another and this is the most layman explanation I can give for the concept of 're-targeting'.

But Vikram I just need one character, Superman. Why do I need to copy animations to another character when I don't even have another character? Good question. The answer is yes we don't need it now but what if I decided to make an enemy AI? Do I have to repeat the whole process stated in this post for every new character I make? That sounds pretty tedious and I already want to procrastinate so bad.

This is where 're-targeting' is your friend. All you need is animations for one model and you can just use them for most of your characters by re-targeting them to the new model unless you need unique animations for that specific character. Technically if you re-target Unreal's default character to your model, you don't even need to use Mixamo, atleast for the ground locomotion part.

Armed with this new knowledge, I got my animations , but used Mixamo's default character and imported them into my project Since I can retarget them anytime I want. Yay! now we have our animations in engine.

In the next post, I'm gonna cover re-targeting in Unreal 5, re-targeting animations to the Superman model and then getting started with the most awaited animation blueprints so stay tuned and keep gaming folks!

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Part 1: The Road not Taken