The boring business of walk cycles.
Alright, music videos and fabricated country super stars aside, let’s get back to the boring business of walk cycles. In a previous post, I talked about AI vs the human touch, and I kinda came to the conclusion that… yes, AI is impressive, but the human touch is a little better than AI… at least currently.
That said, I still wasn’t happy with my walk cycle… so being a person that’s focused on detail, and wanting to deliver the very best, I decided to refine my walk cycle more. In my previous version, I was relying on sprite swaps, which is cool, and fun, and artsy, but it kinda boxed me in as a developer.
You see… when you use sprite swaps, it makes it practically impossible to have different states of the character… i.e. weapon swaps, and pose changes, etc.… unless of course you feel like drawing 1 million frames. In short, it’s just not practical. So… this new version utilizes the rigging system inside of Godot, which means, I had to build a skeleton, and paint the weights to each little part of our character.
Tedious? Yeah… a little, but honestly it wasn’t too bad. We are still working in a pseudo 2D workspace, after all. (I remember in my early days of freelancing when I was offering 3D animations to my clients, how much of a pain it was to paint weights in a program like 3DS Max… this was nothing like that.)
Anyways, in the process, here’s what I discovered; the animation editor is a little clunky inside of Godot… but I’m not complaining. Yeah… the editor needs some work, but for it being a free platform… it’s pretty amazing. What I really like is the editor doesn’t get in the way. For example, by default, it doesn’t (and can’t) lock joints to certain constraints… which is nice if you have to fudge, a hip back into a socket, but… be careful not to fudge it too far… otherwise you’ll have limbs, exploding unexpectedly, and that’s not fun! We’ve all been there – amiright? Of course I am.
There are some paid third party plugins that help automate some of the processes, like Spine 2D, which looks pretty amazing, and honestly, it’s reasonably priced… but for now… I’ve got to hold off and just work with what I have. (It’s probably best that I first get familiar with Godot’s core stuff anyways.) Maybe in the future I’ll upgrade.
Godot doesn’t have keyframe scaling, like in After Effects, where you can rove across time, you have readjust manually, or I guess you could write a script to do it… (I didn’t try the script writing) but that’s okay… mainly with game animation, it seems like they are short punchy tracks… so if you have an idea what you want… you just have to… readjust manually. No big deal. Lol.
I didn’t mess with IK or FK chains yet… honestly, not sure I need them here.
The one thing that is a little… difficult, is the organization/presentation/ability to adjust. With a walk/run cycle, there are a lot of nuance little movements that can make it or break it… and inside of Godot, it’s a little challenging to keep track of everything, and make sure everything is hitting on the right frame. In the video, you can see all the different tracks that go into a half-second walk cycle. It’s kinda nuts… but #whatever.
Now that I have a walk cycle I am happy with, it’s time to explore the animation tree and state machine… this should be fun.
Follow along, for more on that next time.
Until then, let the bones of your ancestors guide you.
Peace.
PS. The song in the video, is an original piece, made by Stine, and one of the working tracks for the game… “stinehelga’s song” we’ll be releasing more tracks soon.