Makoto Vid Part 1 (Silent)

WHEW!
I know there aren't any particles or FluidNinja at this time but these final weeks were battling for destruction effects in Blender.
They look fantastic every time but sometimes the setup doesn't make sense. Like a bottle will break perfectly, but the railing will crash it or disappear when using RBD Labs. But despite workflow adjustments to the new stuff, it's powerful new stuff. Although I do have fallbacks like Fracture iterator for the last railing when RBD Labs just doesn't want to work anymore.

Other workflow changes happened because of footwork. So next time I won't move feet from a heel ik but from the ball of the foot that previous ik parents to. It's like 60% faster for nearly everything. Idk why i never thought to do it before. Also the ik and pole targets shouldn't parent to anything and should use 'child of' modifiers. This will be important for limited animation usage. Even the hip isn't parented to the root directly anymore! That also uses the modifier. This adds a lot more control for swapping to fk and baking the animations into limited 'on two's' animation.

And then when I was trying to render this shit. Level instances are new powerful way for UE5 to group objects... But hiding the wall for the camera seemed to always stop working the moment rendering happened. Had to convert it into a blueprint and animating the lights individually. Still powerful but not for whole areas in scenes.

As for approach changes, storyboard and have an overall idea that's strong so I don't change ideas in the middle of making the damn thing. That was time consuming for the wall jump, as awesome as it was.

Overall, 1 week plans that have me try new things can turn into 1 month of unexpected things to get used to. The fact I haven't started yet on FluidNinja and particles makes me think that will be 1 month of learning as well because of how... different it is. Or it might click faster than I think.

I didn't expect to learn all this from a small video part about optimizing workflow, but here I am.