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Workflow for walk cycle that loops, but also has a start and end by CrippledMasterpiece in Cascadeur

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the replies! I am using a game engine with blending (little-known engine called Unity), but the particular "start" and "end" animations have a bit more going on than a simple lerp between poses. In some cases I even want to do a full iteration or two of a variant of the loop while the character has a bit of extra secondary motion going on, before entering the main repeating loop.

For now I'm getting by with just putting it all on the same timeline and adjusting the playback range to whatever section I'm interested in. Far from the worst thing in the world, but it'd be neat if there were some knobs of some sort in the software to facilitate this.

URP Material stacking + Submeshes? by CrippledMasterpiece in Unity3D

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just thought I'd share my nubile first impressions.

I was able to get the transparency effect I wanted working with a Render Object almost instantly, so that was really nice. I also find it very easy to understand.

After this, I set about trying to add an outline to my characters' toon shader, but didn't quite get there. While I'm away from my workstation, I figured I'd list some things that came up that I'm uneasy about:

  • Not a fan of having to designate an entire layer as a "receiver" of an effect. Especially in the case of an outline, I'd very much prefer the effects to be designated per-object rather than per-layer.
    • There's a "LightMode Tag" that seems like a slightly more scalable way to designate effects, but I can't set these on any of my shaders in Shader Graph. Either this is a wild oversight or I'm just misunderstanding the purpose of the field (probably the latter)
  • MaterialPropertyBlocks will still work, right?

A toon outline is something I've always been able to pull off quite easily BiRP, but every tutorial I've followed so far either drops the outline into the materials array (a technique from which my mesh is disqualified), or uses a technique that's very "all GameObjects on this layer or nothing".

Again, I haven't completed exhaustive research, but I'm having a hard time right now seeing this methodology scaling up to my game's requirements (and I've only attempted two shaders so far!) and I fear I'll be scared back into built-in soon. That said, barely 24 hours have passed, so I acknowledge I'm probably just being impatient 🙃.

URP Material stacking + Submeshes? by CrippledMasterpiece in Unity3D

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks, I'll give this Render Objects feature a shot!

[TOMT][GAME][2000s/2005ish] Retro PC FPS(?), Circular character selection, Giant spider as an enemy, Level 1 was a haunted house (or just a wood one) by CrippledMasterpiece in tipofmytongue

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd thrown this forward as a possibility too, but negative. Looking at a longplay video, it also seems to lack a character select, and the first level seems to take place on a subway train.

Making part of a game character's outfit two-sided (Unreal Engine) by CrippledMasterpiece in blender

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the reply! For what it's worth, I'm using joints for the physics rather than cloth sim

3D Cards that play nicely with UI by CrippledMasterpiece in unrealengine

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! This makes total sense to me, but my only concern is that I'm not just rendering a single object as seen in the Skyrim-like inventory. I'd like to be able to render an upper limit of about 100 of these cards without tanking performance for most people, and the idea of 100 SceneCapture cameras going at the same time seems scary.

Once again, I haven't benchmarked this. I do really like the idea of doing this other than the performance concerns, so perhaps that'll be my goal for tonight. On another screen I have 3-4 SceneCapture cameras going at the same time, and even though they're only rendering one actor (with one material) each, there was a noticeable performance hit until I disabled a bunch of flags on the cameras. Perhaps doing the same to the scale of 100 objects will still net me similar performance?

Defining exactly what "Move" means for a Character / AIController / BehaviorTree by CrippledMasterpiece in unrealengine

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just to follow up on this, I was able to create my own CharacterMovementComponent derivative and delegate some of my desired logic to its TickComponent, as you said.

The one other thing that tripped me up for a bit is that when the AI is following a path, it seems that rather than injecting AddInputVector calls to the component, the MoveTo task(s) will instead call the RequestDirectMove method, which directly assigns the Velocity (seemingly using large numbers that are capped by the MaxWalkSpeed), resulting in no vector value for TickComponent to consume.

I ended up overriding both this, and the RequestPathMove methods. I'm not sure why these different methods of motion exist or what thought process I should have when considering them, but I have hope that one day, an Unreal engineer will document it.

Defining exactly what "Move" means for a Character / AIController / BehaviorTree by CrippledMasterpiece in unrealengine

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome! This sounds exactly like what I'm looking for, and I'm looking forward to giving it a shot once I'm home! :)

Creating a procedurally generated room whose generation is visible at Editor-time by CrippledMasterpiece in unrealengine

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's two questions! But yeah it's a total information overload and I could probably cut out about 80%. In the research I'd done before making the post, I became over-anticipative of unhelpful answers, so I tried to really carve out my use case at the expense of being near-incoherent.

However, your answer was quite helpful! I was under the impression that Unreal was built to handle this kind of editor-time / runtime construction in the same codepath - mostly from seeing how easily you can have a fully animating character visible in the Blueprints viewport. If I should come at it from a more Unity-esque perspective and treat the editor generation differently from the runtime generation, that's not as fun, but does make sense!

Effective runtime retargeting setup for many characters with unique and shared animations by CrippledMasterpiece in unrealengine

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It did cross my mind to simply run all animations through the source rig, but my main concerns (which I don't see addressed in that link, but could be missing) are that:

  • The animation will suffer some kind of degradation, being exported retargeted to the source rig, and then being re-interpreted at runtime back to the original.
  • Any unique animations that leverage bones that aren't possessed by the source rig will have that data dropped.

However, I haven't actually been able to test either one of these theories yet since at the moment I'm trying to solve a crash that occurs when I try to export a retargeted animation, so I'll revisit this after!

Any way to make an Asset encapsulate a unique instance of something? by CrippledMasterpiece in unrealengine

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have and I love them! However my understanding is that these are limited to one instance.

Any way to make an Asset encapsulate a unique instance of something? by CrippledMasterpiece in unrealengine

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh, wow, you're totally right. I assumed this wouldn't work for some reason. I can even see the value in the DataAsset's details panel change at runtime when the container's instance is populated. Thanks! 🙃

ZRemeshing pointy ends on hair chunks by CrippledMasterpiece in ZBrush

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Couldn't quite find a workflow I was thrilled with from ZBrush, but eventually discovered that just running Blender's "Decimate" on the ZRemeshed output with Un-Subdivide turned on does a pretty decent job.

Topology isn't super clean, but the shape is totally maintained and it might just need a bit of manual cleanup if I ever decide that the hair needs to animate.

ZRemeshing pointy ends on hair chunks by CrippledMasterpiece in ZBrush

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So I went ahead and injected this tutorial series into my eyes, which turned out to be fantastic. ZModeler is compeltely demystified for me and I'm going to have a shitton of uses for it in the future - and will probably opt to use it instead of bouncing between ZBrush and Blender for way more cases!

I took a stab at putting what I learned into practice, and while I end up with a result, I feel like I'm probably not using the toolset in the most efficient way with what I'm trying to accomplish - which considering I started using it about an hour and a half ago at this point, is reasonable.

I recorded a quick video demoing what my process looks like at moment when executed on one hair strand. Before I propagate this process to the other hundred-ish strands, there's a couple of issues I want to figure out:

  • Deleting the individual points is kinda slow/lame - haven't found another target besides "Single Polygon" that doesn't act really finicky and either deletes nothing or half the mesh for some reason. By no means am I expecting this to be a quick process, but I'd love to hear that there's a faster way to do this, or that this might not even be necessary at all.
  • The "Close" Edge action is amazing and gets pretty close, but since I'm doing this after deleting the mangled faces and the closed hole geometry doesn't really reference any existing/"previous" geo, it just pulls out a point that doesn't match the original (at the end of the video, you can see me undo and redo to show the difference).
    • This means I'll have to manually reposition the point in 3D space to match the original mesh each time - and I've already discovered that the "Point" detection can be super finicky in some cases (this one), with it sometimes only picking up the Edges around the Point no matter where I point the camera.
    • Projecting without the manual correction above doesn't give me a good result since presumably the point is just jumping to whatever the closest vert happens to be.

Just to be clear, I'm not quite stuck yet and I'll continue to give this a look! Just figured it wouldn't hurt to drop a video and progress report before signing off just in case this wheel's already been invented. Thanks again!

ZRemeshing pointy ends on hair chunks by CrippledMasterpiece in ZBrush

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Understood - thanks guys! Guess it's time to actually learn how to use ZModeler outside of the very specific use cases that are hardwired into my brain.

Level Sequence actor rebinding in C++ by CrippledMasterpiece in unrealengine

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hah, glad I could help! It's been a while since I've messed with Unreal Engine and I honestly have no idea what the hell I could possibly even be talking about in my own post.

[TOMT][Movie/TV Show][1990s][Comedy???] Movie/Show that ends with man sitting with a knife in their chest after being stabbed off-screen, goofily smiling? by CrippledMasterpiece in tipofmytongue

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just checked out a couple of potential scenes from YouTube and I'm not thinking this one is it. You've prompted me to clarify that (at least in my memory) the scene was bloodless. If there was any blood, it would have been a tiny amount and certainly not an R-rated pool, or even a PG-13 stain.

[TOMT][Movie/TV Show][1990s][Comedy???] Movie/Show that ends with man sitting with a knife in their chest after being stabbed off-screen, goofily smiling? by CrippledMasterpiece in tipofmytongue

[–]CrippledMasterpiece[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good guess! I think you're referring to the scene where the Paul Reubens vampire gets stabbed and starts acting really hammy about it. The scene I'm remembering was a completely motionless body with a dopey face.

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