The Encyclopaedia of Riding Poses

Never think something is easy before you have ever done it!

But are you humans really alright doing this… on a horse…….

Blender really drove me crazy when I was firstly doing the animations with more than one pair of the rider, which was the two humans on a camel one. Because I used the same rider prefab appended into the model, the two humans were always in the same poses although they have respective rig. And if I made multiple actions for one model, like the common horse, then they always messed up with some actions seemingly gone nowhere.

So I stopped to look for some explanations systematically for the action editor to avoid keeping wasting my time trying to clear up things or losing my animations that I paid great efforts on….

This should be basic knowledge of using Blender but I still wrote it down here… So actually each single object can take only one action at one time. That object is the ‘user’ of that action, and each action can have multiple users which is shown as the number after the action’s name (4 in the picture). When no one uses the action, it will disappear after closing the file; and F is a fake user which means there will always be the user for the action.

So when I used two humans on the camel, they were identical because I was trying to make them in the same action… and they got alright after I allocated them into different actions. And I can keep many actions for one model which is obviously better for my importing them into Unity later.

But I was still quite worried if Unity can play the different tracks for one model since I had just done some simple single animations before. So in this project for the first time I opened Unity and created my project today lol.

 

 

The model imported into Unity is still separated by object as they were in Blender. And actually I just set the default take and it was exactly how I saved the animation (set it ‘legacy’ and loop time to make it keep animating). However, some small things in the models did not work properly, like the eyeballs. I made them separate objects to the body, but in Unity they came out of the head, and also I feel the relative position of the humans to the camel is slightly changed. This is not a good sign… but for now I just test if the animation can work in Unity so that I can go on with my work in Blender.

Anyway, so far more than a half of the circle has been done. I now get quite familiar with the process of parenting the rider prefab with the bone of the mount where he sits on, and then making the animation for other parts of the body.

Did very delicate key frames for not only the body pose but also the gesture and facial expressions, and cleaned up the problems in weight paint along the work. Now feel great satisfaction when looking at these together! Really hard work literally did nothing but this for the whole days but the time is still extremely tight for the tremendous pit I have dug for myself……….

Animal Modelling – Quadrupeds Day 3

Finally finished everyone (however, just the mounts) in the circuit. I am feeling exhausted especially when thinking about this is just a small part of the whole work……

I found that I actually left all those don’t-know-what things for the last day and that might be why I felt so tired today.

Like the rabbit/cat, the bear’s face is also very different with the horse-like animals which needs a rebuild, a different shape of the body and different paws. I won’t say tail and ears though because everyone has its own kind.

The pig, or porcupine. The hair on its back drove me crazy but I would not say so after making the next one… Quite like the shape though comparing to the bear which seems kind of too cartoon.

Totally no idea what this big shaggy is. I can only see its head on the painting but that is interesting enough to imagine its body!

A griffin. This guy seems really cool but I had totally no idea how to reform from something else, so I just re-modelled it from zero which took me the whole night.

I thought I had finished but suddenly found this guy on the left-down corner of the circuit, raising his head up high and looking like a frog or something… I had lost all my patience to think about what it should be and made it always like the position it is on the painting. Quite nice though! Lol.