The biggest task for this sprint was rigging the two main characters. I created a full rig with FK/IK switch arms and IK legs, as well as finger controls. I also created an animation file template with the rigs referenced so the animators can update the rigs with the final meshes later and preserve their animation.
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| Seita model rigged and ready to animate |
I began work on a ground material that I desaturated and added into the environment. I began looking into vertex painting so later we can have the grass and dirt materials blended via vertex painting.
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| Initial ground material |
I also did a lot of cleanup in the engine. I set up the bakes for the tree branches and got them updated in the engine. additionally, I troubleshot issues with the physics on the pickup objects and moved the entire scene to be more closely centered on the origin to fix the physics calculation errors. I cleaned up material graphs, adding in desaturation nodes to strip color away from the scene as we prototype. Finally, I added variables to the Niagara particle systems so we may control them from the sequencer. To avoid having to remember the desired maximum spawn rate and other key values, I implemented float linear interpolations so that the value keyed for "on/off" for the spawn rate goes from 0.0 - 1.0, making it more artist-friendly.
