What I’m looking for, and what I believe is required as I haven’t been able to find a complete build tutorial on this topic, only snippets of things, is more of a cleanly animated blueprint character for a quadruped.
Currently I’m working on turning, so far I’ve added forward movement with the rotation so I have an arc turn, much like a car.
What I’m trying to achieve further with this is to bring in an additive that angles my character to the left or right from the spines rotation and scale the additive down based on how far through the rotation I am, or zero out if I no longer have input.
The best example of this recently would be in the game “STRAY” the cat always seems to be facing the direction it’s turning with the rear of the body following even from standstill.
For any of you who have played this game, this quadruped system is exactly what I’m trying to achieve to keep things looking clean and realistic.
I’d really like to see a full build tutorial on quadrupeds done like this, and best practices to help developers know what to look for, what animations they may require etc.
Any assistance is greatly appreciated, thanks for your time.
It will be much less complicated if you are able to author some animations on your own.
Having to rely entirely on various third party animations and trying to stitch that altogether across various skeletons is going to get ugly fast.
You can find some great quadraped rigs for maya - try something like truongcgartist on gumroad - that you could use to get started with for figuring out pipeline.
Don’t have to be a great animator because you can copy 90% from stuff thats out there already, but being able to author those little inbetweens that you need to make the controller exactly how you want is much easier than trying to make a litany of random animations and skeletons compatible.
I think this is good advice, at least I’m taking it. I’m going to start from first principles and get the movement right then bring in/create animations to fit with what I want. Thanks!
I’m also starting making my quadruped animations, I believe making your own animations is the way to go. For the turning part, I don’t really think only spine rotation alone would be enough, so I improved my control rig, so now I can transform forward animations into curved ones, for a given radius, after that, I also rotate spine and neck. So my blend space has turning rate and speed. I’m still a beginner, would it be decent enough?
Prototype is a dog but I intend to actually make various wild animals instead. I don’t know if I’ll actually use root motion.
Now I also want to improve the transitions between walk, trot and galop animations that I made, any suggestions?