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Post by tharindu on Apr 26, 2017 9:48:34 GMT
How do you cope with art pipelines? For me, that's the worst part. I make one little change to my animated character, add a LOD or something, and now I need to completely redo all the TPC stuff from scratch. Full ignorant noob rant in another thread... oh, I see you already posted there. Yeah. That. :( Whats the pipeline your talking about? I use place holder characters. I wouldn't be worried about how the game looks, be more concerned on how it plays. You first prototype the game. Once the game has the features you want, then you go into production mode. This is basicly where you use what you learned in the prototype phase to figure out the fastest way to pump out finish pieces of your game is. At that point you only add completed items to the game, like a finished character, which then you update the prototype. If you keep updating the prototype with every small thing, it will work at first, but as your game gets more complex, it will take hours every time you want to intigrate something new, reguardless of it taking you 2 minutes or 5 hours. I completely agree with Shadex. Which is why I am still stuck with the vbots trying to build a quest system that might just work for all of us. It's one man show here too and I am not even a game developer. I work as an sap consultant. I suck at art. so I am trying to get the core mechanics set before I either buy my art assets or learn to do that too.
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Post by warpzone on Apr 29, 2017 13:40:06 GMT
For example, right now I've got the basic gameplay working and I want to start adding new enemy types. But most of them are going to be shiny liquid metal humanoids like the player character model. If I do what you say and add 20 enemy types and then start to polish my character model, my game breaks for every single step of the polish pass, and I need to re-do the entire TPC implementation from the ground up 21 times. If I want to add... I don't know, shoes, for example, that change to the mesh won't be reflected in Unity because only the model import prefab gets updated. My "Player" prefab and "Enemy 1" prefab are no longer connected to the model import prefab. If Unity supported Nested Prefabs, it would be fine. I could update my model as many times as I wanted to and the player and the enemies would "just work." Or if TPC were designed in such a way that the art assets were completely replaceable and modular, that would also be fine. I'm not comfortable leaving my game broken for weeks at a time as I figure out what would make my model look best or how to get LOD working or waffling over extra body parts. God help me if I ever decide to add extra characters as DLC, or let the player change their character at runtime.
In a perfect world, I should just be able to delete the old graphics and slot in the new graphics and everything just continues to work. We're not living in a perfect world. I did it right one time, but since then I keep forgetting steps or making mistakes. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to add eyeballs that animate with the skeleton but aren't hidden on any LOD, since they're pretty low-poly to begin with.
Maybe after I've done this 50 times I'll have the whole process memorized and be able to predict which of my actions will break the system, but right now it's a struggle. And it's three learning curves at once. Unity, Blender, and TPC. Right now it feels like the TPC learning curve keeps picking fights with the other two learning curves.
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Post by tharindu on Apr 29, 2017 14:55:19 GMT
For example, right now I've got the basic gameplay working and I want to start adding new enemy types. But most of them are going to be shiny liquid metal humanoids like the player character model. If I do what you say and add 20 enemy types and then start to polish my character model, my game breaks for every single step of the polish pass, and I need to re-do the entire TPC implementation from the ground up 21 times. If I want to add... I don't know, shoes, for example, that change to the mesh won't be reflected in Unity because only the model import prefab gets updated. My "Player" prefab and "Enemy 1" prefab are no longer connected to the model import prefab. If Unity supported Nested Prefabs, it would be fine. I could update my model as many times as I wanted to and the player and the enemies would "just work." Or if TPC were designed in such a way that the art assets were completely replaceable and modular, that would also be fine. I'm not comfortable leaving my game broken for weeks at a time as I figure out what would make my model look best or how to get LOD working or waffling over extra body parts. God help me if I ever decide to add extra characters as DLC, or let the player change their character at runtime. In a perfect world, I should just be able to delete the old graphics and slot in the new graphics and everything just continues to work. We're not living in a perfect world. I did it right one time, but since then I keep forgetting steps or making mistakes. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to add eyeballs that animate with the skeleton but aren't hidden on any LOD, since they're pretty low-poly to begin with. Maybe after I've done this 50 times I'll have the whole process memorized and be able to predict which of my actions will break the system, but right now it's a struggle. And it's three learning curves at once. Unity, Blender, and TPC. Right now it feels like the TPC learning curve keeps picking fights with the other two learning curves. Some advice on adding shoes and other props. Look at the invector code on how weapons are equipped. Use something similar to place your shoe transforms in an equip point or something. It's better than modelling the entire character again right ? What wastes your time with modelling, try to minimize with code. I am sure this is what chronicman did with his armor plus also More importantly I think you're rushing this. I don't think as an indie you're bound to deliver to the likes of Ubi soft. So you have complete creative freedom and time on your hand ( assuming you have another job of course ). Take it easy. Learning takes time. Enjoy the process and you may find you'll write lesser and lesser angry chronicles I mean this in a good way of course :D lol
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Post by shadex on May 3, 2017 17:49:32 GMT
For example, right now I've got the basic gameplay working and I want to start adding new enemy types. But most of them are going to be shiny liquid metal humanoids like the player character model. If I do what you say and add 20 enemy types and then start to polish my character model, my game breaks for every single step of the polish pass, and I need to re-do the entire TPC implementation from the ground up 21 times. If I want to add... I don't know, shoes, for example, that change to the mesh won't be reflected in Unity because only the model import prefab gets updated. My "Player" prefab and "Enemy 1" prefab are no longer connected to the model import prefab. If Unity supported Nested Prefabs, it would be fine. I could update my model as many times as I wanted to and the player and the enemies would "just work." Or if TPC were designed in such a way that the art assets were completely replaceable and modular, that would also be fine. I'm not comfortable leaving my game broken for weeks at a time as I figure out what would make my model look best or how to get LOD working or waffling over extra body parts. God help me if I ever decide to add extra characters as DLC, or let the player change their character at runtime. In a perfect world, I should just be able to delete the old graphics and slot in the new graphics and everything just continues to work. We're not living in a perfect world. I did it right one time, but since then I keep forgetting steps or making mistakes. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to add eyeballs that animate with the skeleton but aren't hidden on any LOD, since they're pretty low-poly to begin with. Maybe after I've done this 50 times I'll have the whole process memorized and be able to predict which of my actions will break the system, but right now it's a struggle. And it's three learning curves at once. Unity, Blender, and TPC. Right now it feels like the TPC learning curve keeps picking fights with the other two learning curves. 2 pages of this and i still get the feeling your missing something basic in the workflow. The system is made to quickly add characters and enemys, and avoid redoing the setup. It's not slotting in the new graphics and deleting the old, but it is pretty close. What are you "Touching up" or "Polishing" on the character? like changing the texture/materials? Or changing the bone structure and arm length? I'm doing a few tutorial video's in general. I was going to do Enemy AI setup anyways, I'll can easily include a 5 minute way to swap model but keep the enemy AI and animations. I can also show a few things on what actions typically break the system. It won't be perfect, but it should save you time. the worst and best felling in game design is when you find out a much faster way for something that you wasted countless hours doing before. Also when you import an FBX file it does not make a prefab. You have to drag the FBX file into a scene (sometimes drag the material on it) then drag it back into its own folder in project view. As for Nested prefabs, I'm not sure what you mean by that, but you can easily create an empty game object after you used the character creation wizard, add the melee controller (character), UI, GameController, Event System and camera to the game object and store it in a folder to create a prefab. Then whenever you go to a new scene you can simply drag that prefab into the scene, and pull each thing (Camera, Character, UI, GameController) from the gameobject and drag them to the top level of the hierarchy, and it everything should say connected and working.
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Post by warpzone on May 7, 2017 18:06:58 GMT
2 pages of this and i still get the feeling your missing something basic in the workflow. The system is made to quickly add characters and enemys, and avoid redoing the setup. It's not slotting in the new graphics and deleting the old, but it is pretty close. What are you "Touching up" or "Polishing" on the character? like changing the texture/materials? Or changing the bone structure and arm length? Some of the things I'm trying to do recently that give me trouble: Add new LODs to the hierarchy in a blend file. Add bodyparts like eyeballs that are rigged to the same skeleton as the LOD levels, but which are visible during all LOD levels. Creating new animations that work with Invector's existing animations. Adding new Blendshapes in Blender. (I can do this right now, but if I alter the mesh in any way, for example by merging copies of the eyeballs into my existing LOD meshes, it breaks compatibility with the models I'm baking my blendshapes from.) In the past, I tried using an FBX character downloaded from the asset store that had a skirt and long hair, with Invector's animations. Invector's animations broke the skirt. Editing the FBX in Blender broke everything (I think by changing the vertex order somehow, even though I didn't alter the mesh in Blender.) I know how to do the low-level actions to do most of this stuff. What I don't know is how to do it without making me start all over again setting up the prefabs in Unity.
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Post by uberwiggett on May 8, 2017 0:54:53 GMT
Skirt isn't broken. The animations that come with the tenplate cover only arms legs and spine. You'll notice with some models standing still has the mouth wide open. When there is an extra bone (l8ke a skirt) it's ignored and not animated by the controller unless you replace the animations with ones that include the skirt. Some models on the asset store include these, otherwise you can try experimenting with the cloth physics built into unity.
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Post by shadex on May 8, 2017 4:14:37 GMT
2 pages of this and i still get the feeling your missing something basic in the workflow. The system is made to quickly add characters and enemys, and avoid redoing the setup. It's not slotting in the new graphics and deleting the old, but it is pretty close. What are you "Touching up" or "Polishing" on the character? like changing the texture/materials? Or changing the bone structure and arm length? Some of the things I'm trying to do recently that give me trouble: Add new LODs to the hierarchy in a blend file. Add bodyparts like eyeballs that are rigged to the same skeleton as the LOD levels, but which are visible during all LOD levels. Haven't done the import to blender. I know docs.unity3d.com/Manual/LevelOfDetail.html talks about using a special naming convection to auto make the lod files. I typically just make an empty game object, add the LOD Group component and only put in the mesh render part of the character (basicly the non rigged mesh) and put the lod file where the original mesh file is in the hierarchy of the fully rigged character. keep the eyes out of the LOD simple and texture them separately. Here is a quick tutorial if you dont know how Thing of note: if your not changing the bones, you can simply edit a non rigged version in blender, import it and drag and drop the new mesh's in the LOD system and you wont need to do anything else, that will work right out of the box, and preserve all work your doing on the actual character. Unless you need a very specific animation (like doing a dance from the 1940's) there is absolutely no reason to make your own animations. The awesomeness of how unity handles animation is that they can all be re targeted to any humanoid. You have to simply import it correctly, and the amount of high quality animations on the asset store and basic knowledge on how to control them in the animator (mirror, blending, masking) will get you very very far. That being said, if you really are hell bent on making your own animations, you have to import them correctly. You have to go to the rig tab of the fbx model and under animation type, you have to select humanoid, configure the avatar correctly. then as long as the animations on the fbx file are imported correctly, they should work on every model that has humanoid bones. Which means that you can edit any humanoid animation in blender, even if its not the same model your using, and export it and put it in your game. long clothing will always break during animations if its built as part of the mesh. You need either a morphing system or use unity's cloth system to make it so it move with the character. It's one of the reasons why most games with dress's or skirts either cover there feet, cover at near crotch level or they never actually do any wide ranging moves. It's also a huge problem with armor systems. Here's a tutorial that goes over some import settings that i made, this might help TLDR: Your importing the animations and character wrong. I'm 99% sure.
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