December 24th Weekly Update (Patreon)

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas/happy holiday!

I had planned on shoring up some animations this week, but I spent part of the week getting the rag doll to work how I wanted it to, and then to my surprise, received something I had been waiting on for quite a while!

I had previously mentioned that the rag doll stuff wasn't working how I wanted it to, and so it wasn't good enough for the game.  I have since been able to tweak it so that it performs in a manner that I feel good with.

I had problems getting the camera to follow properly and I was able to solve that as well.  This means I can use rag doll in some of the animations, which saves me a ton of animation work. (and c'mon, rag doll physics cause a lot of silly fun!)

Also related to the animations was my surprise.  I got an email early in the week that my extra Vive trackers were shipping.  With 3 extra trackers, there is enough information to do full body motion capture with the vive, and it works out really well.

Its not going to be useful for every animated sequence, but there is a lot of time consuming lesser animations that this will be perfect for, and it helps to at least build reference for some of the more complicated animations.  Some animations, such as the more randy ones, and animations involving multiple characters, will still need to be done by hand.

Here's an animation that used the mo cap as reference.

Stuff like attacks, enemy reactions, and such will work perfectly with this new set up, and I'm really excited.

That's pretty much it for this week!

I mentioned this last week, but I'll be taking the next week off for the holidays, and my birthday.  I hope everyone has a happy new year!