Welcome to my progress thread.
I started with the UE4 a few weeks ago and want to make a third person sci-fi/fantasy action game in an open world set in the warhammer 40k universe. Some high ambitions I know… but Ive got time and its going well so far. In the end, its just a hobby project without any commercial aim.
For the moment im just learning to create a versatile character controller. Its pretty messy in the blueprints at the moment as im looking for online tutorials, documentations, articles and forum posts to achieve whatever im working on at the moment. So its all stacking up with unused functions and variables and whatnot. But its only a learning stage right now and im also creating a proper plan of things as I get on and learn new things. And then at some point redo the controller from scratch once my prototype satisfies me - still a long way to go tho.
Im creating videos showing the current stages and explaining issues Im having and things im unsure about and people have been giving great feedback so far, its very nice to learn like this…
Heres the current progress youtubes.
these two are nsfw and contain nudity - you have been warned.
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Heres some wips of the other characters Ive been working on previously and am planning to add in as enemies and/or playable characters.
Still need to make proper textures for some.
As I come from a film modeling and rigging background I noticed its quite tricky to model proper game characters - way harder than modeling film characters Id say as there is a complete addition step of baking all highres details back to lowres optimized meshes and textures. For the moment im not paying too much attention to optimized models, tho Im pretty sure Itll be very necessary once the actual world is more populated and has more stuff going on.
If you feel like it, please give some feedback and share thoughts.
I had to remove the links to the nsfw links as they contain nudity, I know its only breasts but I still cant allow it until epic has given more clarity to the issue, I will post back as soon as I hear from them which will hopefully be today as its Monday.
oh and nice work with your character controller, it looks like you’ve made a lot of progress for just a few weeks:).
Aiaiai haha, ok let me know when that has been clarified.
Thanks ive been working on it whenever I was not at my daytime job, still a lot to optimized, Im currently trying to get more stable movement going on when in targetlock mode. Quite tricky to get it to work without flips and jitter when the user goes nuts with the inputs.
yeah well, currently im more focused on the character controller/animation side of things. Its a big topic and im aiming to master it - or at least, become good at it - before getting my hands on a complete level and other areas light lighting and fx.
Thanks mate, so the ones from my latest unreal engine video demos are just some spring controllers on a clever character bone and skinweights set up . Some of the other stuff on my channels is done with maya nCloth, thats an other level tho and Id say probably not worth implementing into the engine unless you want to build a dedicated game haha.
i think i’ll keep an eye on this due to the W40k project, i’d advise setting a limit to what you want to put in right from the start as projects for full scale W40k can take a lot on man hours over many years
Ahh, a fellow WH40k fan, nice meeting you. Yeah thats true, right now I dont have any boundaries or asset lists or plans of that sorts. In the end Im aiming for this to be an open world type game with 3 playable characters and a developing personality and relationship between them similar to gta 5. That alone sounds pretty impossible to achieve as a single person I know that, the actual project is my major goal but although I have already a rough story, character design and gameplay type in mind, I have planned an indefinite amount of time inbetween now and any serious achievement regarding an even remotely complete game. Thats because I have just started using UE4 and the project is currently more of an Idea that drives me forward. At this moment im just using the assets I already made as a test-playground to develop the core character related gameplay ideas, character movement mechanics and those sorts of basics, before going into anything more ambitious.
My current full focus lies on creating and testing a character controller and related features that is natural/believable in its look but also responsive and intuitive to use and very versatile in the actions that it can perform - thats a challenge on its own already but I believe im making good progress. Ill probably update with a new video of the current controller status and planned features this weekend.
@zispradlin thanks, but what does lofty mean in this case?
PS: @ If you see this, pls check your inbox, I sent you a quick message on Tuesday asking how it went with the information on those types of links you removed. Is that ok now or not? What are the limits?
hey guys. Made a little video showing my current maya to ue4 workflow when it comes to rigs and animations.
If you are interested check it out:
On my todo list for this weekend I have:
-add jump roll animations for jumping when crouched or in combat state (almost done)
-fix jump animation flicker (need to turn off direction update per frame)
-play around with APEX clothing
-add gun animations (currently just the ones from the ue4 example files)
-make some laser and shot particles
probably not gonna be able to cover it all in just this weekend, but thats my list for the next couple of days anyway.
I did see you’re PM but I was dealing with something else and by the time I finished I forgot about it;).
well it wasn’t the clearest answer I got but basically nudity(and links to it) is only allowed if its censored and cant be viewed as sexual or pornographic, so kind of like daytime TV(in general) no genitals and no bare breasts although they agree its an interesting challenge to decide what is/isn’t allowed, the reason I was given:
which is understandable, anyway hope that clears things up, let me know if you have any more questions:).
next ill probably be doing one of the other characters and also look some into the combat states more. Adding different guns animations and a cover system using kubolds sets.
I recommend looking into custom attributes if you haven’t already. If you add a float attribute to one of your joints in Maya and add keyframes to it, it will appear as a curve track in Unreal if you have Import Custom Attributes enabled. (should be by default) You can then use this curve to drive things like material parameters and other properties. It is really powerful. Considering you are already using a lot of tricks for your rigs, I think this can be really useful to you.
Try experimenting with wrinkle maps and perhaps blood flow (diffuse) maps for your expressions. It will make your face rig look more organic.
One last recommendation is to learn the art of “less is more”. Your deformation rigs are amazing, but I fear that the abundance of joints may cause you headaches when you get into gameplay later on. Consider making your current rig the cinematic / high quality version. Then create a Level of Detail which does not go crazy with deformation joints. You will be amazed how much you can cheat without players noticing that some deformation is missing when the character is not filling up the screen. Don’t be afraid to sacrifice some perfection for performance.
Hey Denny,
great reply thanks a lot! I didnt quite know that custom attributes would import as curve tracks for UE… thats really really useful stuff! In the video I mention that I want to also look into facial wrinkle and blood flow maps so its definitely going to help there, thanks.
And yeah I get you there with the amount of joints. The skeleton is designed in a way where you can strip down ALL auxiliary joints and be left with the base hierarchy that is only 26 joints without changing the hierarchy structure itself so any higher res skeletal animation can be applied without problem. So I could actually (once I redo my whole project from scratch) set the lowest level skeleton as the main skeletal asset for the character, and import the animations with all baked joints. Then Ill have the mesh lods that are detailed in both polygon count and skincluster influence count. So the lowest lod would be a really lowres model skinned only to the 26 base bones. The next lod would have a selected number of additional joints for generic limb twistsing and volume preservation on important areas, maybe not more than 150 bones in total, and the highest lod would have all bones for volume preservation and facial bones included. Or maybe have an additional lod inbetween with all body joints but no facial joints too. And since the animations would be made with all bones baked out, they would play correctly on all mesh lods and loading only the joints that the current lod mesh is skinned to. Is that kind of correct? Could I go with a workflow like that?
Yep, that sounds about correct. Just make sure you start with the highest detail for LOD0, medium res for LOD1 and so on and you should be good. If you like, I can add you on Skype. I’m always up for discussing character rigs and other tech art.
Taking a little break from ue4 itself and spending some time working on my other 2 main characters…
I had a bit of a designing phase with them… here is current progress:
Now I have to add this at some point so Ill do it now: im not really a character modeler I have to admit and have especially not a lot of experience in game character modeling. So this current stuff will probably not look good - or at least very basic - to the experienced character artists among you. Im actually a character td for film vfx and in my own opinion a bit more on the technical side of things, so my models look probably rather crude. But please do give me feedback on these as im always looking find my weaknesses. Ok so heres the latest stuff…
He is a re-use from one of my earlier models… Im changing his proportions a bit and will make him some new clothes that fit the sci-fi setting some more.
This one is a combination of some other models I had, adjusting some proportions, making some more matching costume and applying some quick textures to him. He is now in the process of rigging.
