Continued Learning and Poor Choices...

Following the trend of the past few weeks, my time for indie development has been limited. However, I did manage to complete the "Intro to Sculpting" section of the 3D course I’ve been taking, which is why today’s feature image is a Gengar render. With only two sections left—advanced sculpting and rigging with Rigify—I’m almost done with the course. After that, I’ll need to dive into a few other 3D topics when the time comes, such as Animation, Texturing, and Retopology, as they’re all key elements in a game development workflow.

For texturing and retopology, I’m currently exploring free Blender plugins, though I’m also considering some paid options. I’ve been wanting to try Substance, but I’m not willing to support Adobe’s subscription-based model. I find it a frustrating way to run a software company, and I’d rather not endorse that business approach.

Mistakes were made..

Unfortunately, this week, I ran into a few setbacks. I came across a great Humble Bundle sale, "The Best of Synty" For those unfamiliar, Synty is an asset development company that mainly targets Unity developers, specializing in low-poly art, though they’ve recently expanded into animation. One of the items in the bundle was a locomotion animation pack that caught my eye. Despite it being listed as Unity-only, the pack also included source files, so I thought I could open them in Blender and export them for Godot. That didn’t go as planned.

The animations were in a rest pose—not a T-pose or A-pose, but a random pose they had chosen. The bone structure also didn’t match most standard assets, or even the assets I’d typically create. Using these animations turned out to be more complicated than I anticipated, and unfortunately, I ended up spending around $50 CAD on a pack I can't use. The only thing I was interested in were the animations, and those ended up being a bust.

The good news? A few days later, I found another pack on Itch.io with locomotion assets for Godot, Unity, and UE5, along with source files, for just $15 USD. So, I guess you win some and you lose some, right?

I haven’t had the chance to dive into the new animation pack yet, but it definitely seems more promising. Even if it doesn’t turn out to be perfect, it’s much more of a manageable investment. Ideally, I want to do all my own animations in the future, but as a solo dev, that’s a huge undertaking. For now, having these animations to work with and tweak is a much better starting point, allowing me to focus more on the coding side of things.

Lets get to the Root of it

Another topic I’ve recently been diving into is Root Motion animations. Currently, player movement is fully controlled by the physics engine, with animations interpolated based on player speed. However, a common approach in many third-person games, especially adventure titles, is to use Root Motion. In this setup, the animation itself drives the character's movement, which leads to more natural and realistic motion and helps eliminate the "sliding" effect that I can’t stand in many games.

The challenge, though, is that I’ve never worked with Root Motion before, so I’m not sure what kind of hurdles I’ll face. How will I handle collisions? How will I deal with early stops or animation interrupts? These are all questions I’ll need to explore and weigh the pros and cons of as I go.

Well, until next time, I’ll keep shouting into the void in hopes of attracting some subscribers who want to follow along. Cheers for now!