Update 3: Git LFS setup, animation state machine, and water
Here's a short list of the stuff that got done today:
- Git LFS setup -- not a pain at all these days.
- Built an anim graph; Polly now has smooth state transitions between idling, liftoff, and gliding/flapping, and the transitions look great with minimal effort -- success!
- I decided to make the Bird inherit from Pawn rather than using the Character or CharacterMovementComponent gameplay framework classes, since these things are better for land creatures and human characters.
- I made a C++ Pawn for Polly and a blueprint that inherits from it to override defaults.
- Built a water material with reflection/refraction/edge foam. Here's what the material graph looks like:
I did run into one big issue that sucked up a couple of hours today:
After finishing up with the initial anim graph, I went ahead and bound it to the skeletal mesh in the new Bird Pawn, and was greeted with a slew of new compilation errors in the anim graph. At that moment, I immediately slumped down in my chair, realizing that I hadn't yet slain all the import dragons. It turns out that Polly's imported skeleton asset just suddenly disappeared from existence along with most of the animations. I was able to get the skeleton to re-import and map the one remaining animation to it easily, but couldn't get the re-import to pull in the remaining missing animations. I had to resort to running the importer in a fresh directory and configuring it to only import the animations there. After getting them imported again, the editor crashed while I was trying to relocate the assets, which put the new assets into a broken state where they were no longer visible in the editor, but still existed on disk. I eventually cleared out all the new and old assets, re-imported one final time, and all was well.
Another issue I noticed was that, despite my careful and deliberate attention to getting the axis conversions right during both the Blender export to FBX and the import to UE4, Polly was actually facing in the Y direction, not the +X direction... (UE4's forward direction). After some trial end error, I noticed that an option akin to "Force +X as forward direction" was unchecked on the importer dialog. Flipping that on got it working as I'd hoped.
I feel like it's starting to look kinda neat with that water in place! There's still a lot I'd like to try with the terrain shading, but I should probably focus on building some rocks and trees to use as obstacles soon.
See you next time!