How would you go about mixing two separate character’s features such as skin colour, patterns, accents, etc to create a brood (Is it possible to create a breeding system where two characters form an offspring that resembles both parents?)
If so, can it be done on 3d characters?
example of what I’m looking to make: Flight Rising
(input two dragon ID’s into bar)
It sound like something you would do with Procedural Textures and dynamic materials, or a mix of procedural and images. Patterns and accents could be masked textures on top of procudural ones etc. Im no expert in this, just first thing that came to mind.
I’m also very interested in a step-by-step guide for breeding characters using Blueprints, the goal being to have the offspring turn out as an average of the parents. I have a rudimentary if/then flowchart drawn up but I’m not sure how to implement it correctly using Blueprints.
ANY knowledge or help is greatly appreciated, thank you in advance!
you can create a struct listing all character features, and use it to define the character during creation. different features would be used in different parts - for example, face texture would feed into the head mesh material texture parameter, and skin color would feed into all skin material parameters. you could also create collections listing all possible face textures etc.
then, for the first generation, you could randomize all values on creation, and store the resulting struct. for the second generation, you would take 50% of values from parent A struct, and 50% values from parent B struct, or even mix things up like lerp the two skin colors. the resulting mixed struct would be stored in the new character to be propagated to its own progeny, and so on.
you would be smart to make sure to mix in a way that promotes versatility - in the example above, lerp between two parent skin tones would result in the homogenous looking population at a certain point. this could be avoided by inflow of first generation characters every X generations, or by allowing for random “mutations” every now and then
Awesome kenhenner, thank you for the swift reply, that terminology made sense and will be very useful, thank you!