Yesterday i made one more character (definitely less than the 3 i hoped for, but it was definitely harder to come up with more unique designs. So i ended up watching Laputa by Ghibili studio at night instead).
This morning I set up the character with the few animation clips I had for them, whilst I had to adjust parts of the armature because the should bone segments are too long. And after some back and forth with UE4 and blender. I noticed the character animation clips have a weird twitch on the right side of the leg.
I thought it was an import/export issue with the fbx, so i tried a whole lot of different export setting from blender, like: add leaf bone, recalculate the roll of the bones, reset the shoulder bone adjustments. A whole lot more that took me a few hours in the morning.
I was a little bit exacerbated since there are so many variables that can cause the issue. So i tried to delete the right leg bones from the armature and copy and pasted the left leg over. It then work!
I then spent a bit of time to refresh my memories of how to set up anim blue print specifically around blendspace - being able to drive a set of animations and how they blend based on a property/variable.I used this tutorial to set up my blend space. I still need to figure out how to pipe in variables like the NPC is close to a piece of art work and look intriged by pointing or thinking. I will need to do some investigation around that.
Then i moved onto figuring out how i can just import the NPCs whilst reusing the skeleton. I checked out this tutorial, and tried exporting the assets, then realised I probably need to just use the same armature for all the NPCs. instead of having them on separate armatures. So I put the npcs into different collections whilst parenting them to the one armature. it worked well…
I think i can just use the same system for the enemy guard NPCs. Excited to try that out! Next I think i wanna fix the camera clipping issue and also figure out how to direct the NPCs to look at art. Maybe I should also do the paintings, it bothers me how terrible they look in the gallery context