TheGatewayOfRealities

Weapon Types (Part 3/3)

The last but not the least bunch of planned weapon animation sets, not weapons themselves, but the way characters hold and interact with the weapon.

Combat Staves

While it might seem ordinary, this category is extremely versatile, be it just long sticks, bladed staves, sickles, polearms, spears, all can use similar animations. The beautiful moves and intricate dancing fightstyles are expecte...

Weapon Types (Part 2/3)

Let's take a look at the second bunch of possible weapon animation sets. Versatility of them is key, the more generic they are, the more unique weapons we and modders can add later on. The characters will then be able to hold and operate any custom weapon model in the styles similar to ones shown in the sketches below:

Light Ranged Weapons

Light weapons worn as arm-guards, retractable, foldabl...

Weapon Types (Part 1/3)

Thanks everyone for the support for this exciting new month! 

With the most of the work for the locomotion animations done, it's time to start working on animating the weapons, tools and skills!

In this post I'll demonstrate 4 potential types of weapons, however, those are not the "weapons" you're going to use in game directly (that will come later), instead I'm listing the different styles of how such weapons can be held and operated. 

For example, two actual weapon obje...

Swimming and Climbing

Well, it wasn't that simple to implement as I said in previous posts, and it's not because of animations themselves, but the transitions between them. Adding 3-degrees of freedom to swimming animations, while making it look somewhat natural and organic wasn't easy.

It's difficult to show it in a gif without making it absolutely huge in filesize, but here is a short snippet how diving and rising comple...

Sliding

First of all, sorry for a delayed update - I got quite ill, had fever and splitting headaches, that stopped me from approaching the computer for a few days... Now I'm getting better and back doing work: making more animations and script that triggers them at correct conditions.

Thank you so much for supporting this month of development!

I will soon have more gifs to share, but for now its just sliding tests, as you can see, the animation is different depending on where character is facin...

Stopping animations and crouching

I re-did stopping animations because the old system wasn't really thought through turns out... Challenge lays in that it is important that there is multiple stopping animations: we don't know when the player releases the movement input and when the character is supposed to stop.

At the moment of stopping the character can have their right leg in front and left in the back, or other way around.. or both legs can be in the middle, while one in the air and another is on the floor. This resulted t...

More locomotion animations

Almost all ground locomotion animations are complete, from walk to run cycles, turns in place, stopping, jumping, falling.  

These build up the core of the most frequently seen animations by the players, that's why I took some time making them look decent. They are not perfect yet, and in fact there is a lot of improvements to be had, but for now they do their job - it is always possible to revis...

Egg launchers

Animation work is going in full strength, and aside from regular locomotion, jumping and swimming, there are also special animations that   happen when creature is using abilities or shooting weapons. 

This is one of such abilities that we're working on. Perfect for players who is tired of their female creatures spawning regular boring eggs inside them. It allows you to weaponize them! ...

Blender Rig (and scripts)

So as promised, I'm uploading the source Blender rig file for everyone to use! The main purpose why this would be eventually released for public usage is to support mod makers creating new animations, however it's not quite ready for that at this point. 

Think of it as early access behind the scenes look! If you're a blender user, you might find this educational - after all, I personally could not find an example of a more advanced Blender-made rig than ours anywhere on the internet :} 2018-03-31 19:04:46 +0000 UTC View Post

Animations

Just a quick update: I'm working on animations now! So far it goes pretty  well thanks to our highly advanced rigging and scripts we made in Blender (without them animating would be a really big pain) so ultimately it was worth spending so much time preparing this rig.

Before you ask why the neck has weird z-fighting it's because the gifs are just recorded in blender, and it is not setup to rende...

Rigging pt2

First of all, thank you for all the support and love you're giving us <3 Quality work needs time to develop, especially when it comes to good animations, and to do good animations, first step is to make a good rig.

Blender is a nice tool.. but it lacks a support for certain features of professional rigs done in programs like Maya. In the previous post about rigging I went though most of the "mechanical" features, but now let's take a look at the UI plugin we custom-made for the animator con...

Research Facility

Our game doesn't have much content yet, and while animations for many bipedal races are coming soon with the finished rig, it's not yet late to think and refine the what gameplay is going to be like. 

TLDR version:

New playable level ideas
> Gives an exploration goal to the player.
> Desert around and canyon are playable areas with common loot and resources, and little danger.
> Strive to go dee...

Rigging is (almost) done!

So the vast majority of figuring out how to do a proper rig in Blender is done! In case you're wondering why it took so long (2 months of every day dedicated work, in fact), well, there are no learning materials available for such advanced level rigs out there in the internet, simply nothing of use. 

To develop such high-level production-ready rig in Blender I spent lots of time on something that is called R&D (Research and Development), solving problems, engineering, and...

2017 Retrospective.

First of all, Happy New Year and thanks to everyone supporting the project for all of its time. You guys are amazing and I need to keep reminding you that :} 

Here is the retrospective of 2017 as promised, it took me a while to write this post, I know its 9th already and new year thing is kinda over by now, I just wanted to finish writing the Blender animation addon first, didn't wan't to break the flow so to say, sowwy!

Here is a list of some of the big things we did past year, in ...

Merry Christmas!

I wish you all the murry and all the amazing, scaly and fluffy things! I'm not good at written holiday wishes, that's why I drew a picture instead! ^^

I want to say thank you everyone for the amazing support you're giving to the project of my dreams... our dreams, even! After all we're all making the game together :}

Planes of Existence has advanced very significantly over the last year, we have all the foundation laid out for most of the features to function, lots of planning and progra...

December 2017 Support

Thank you so much for supporting the project this month! As per usual, I can only issue your rewards if you contact me with the things you want me to put into the game, otherwise you'll just be listed in a hall of fame once its complete :}

Going to the next development stage

I have some exciting news to share - soon, very soon, the game will be ready to rightfully come ...