BlendSpace1D, Animations and State Machines

This week, I followed Matt’s tutorials on BlendSpace1D, animations, and State machines.

By the second tutorial, I transformed my character Maynard’s head to be twice its size with the belly dancing animation for the upper half of the body and the running state for bottom half. I really enjoyed Maynard’s freely moving arms as they ran around with purpose.

To show the state machine animation cycle, I too had animations that required a higher velocity jump so that the joyful jump, falling, and landing animation could play out.

UNREAL: Skeletal Mesh

This week on Performative Avatars…

I followed Matt’s Skeletal Mesh tutorials and imported Mixamo animations into Unreal. I became fond of my buddy Maynard, who’s doing a little belly dance for us below.

By the end of the tutorials, I had Maynard defying gravity, running way faster than the norm, and clotheslining other dummy duplicates with the ragdoll physics left on or drifting effortlessly into space. You can also see Maynard 2.0 do a lil twerk. I left all the vestiges of the experiments as I tested all the features explained, my favorite being the imported animation that was linked with the “incorrect” earlier-made test character skeleton instead of the one that was imported along with the animation from Mixamo.

I didn’t come across too many issues when following the tutorial, but now I’m very excited to learn more about the blend space so I can compile better movement animations for my character.