Progress Overview: Model, Rig, and Movement System

Good day, dear Viewers.

A month of work has passed, and it’s time to sum up the interim results. Going back a little, the previous post had a lot of information about the current project, as well as a plan by which you can track progress. This is what we will follow step by step.

So, I’ll start with a summary of the current month if you don’t have too much time to get acquainted with the results, and then I’ll describe everything in detail below.
Every goal was achieved, and I was delighted with the results.
However, some tasks required special attention, which I will discuss later.

What we have in short(✔— ready feature; 🛈 — characteristic, ready; → — in progress):

• Character Model (appearance):
  ✔Body, clothes, accessories.
  ✔Materials.
  ✔Morphs—Shapes (more on that below).
  →Textures optimization.
• Character Rig (skeleton):
  🛈Engine-ready (compatible with UE4(including ALS)\UE5 skeletons).
  🛈Suitable for animations in a side editor.
  🛈Convenient for retargeting (transferring animation from rig to rig).
  ✔Drivers for bones that control shapes (more on that below).
  ✔Custom bones (breasts, buttocks).
  →Weight (how model responds on bone movements) fixes.
• Character Movement System (animation and logic):
  🛈ALS (Advanced Locomotion System) as a basis for development and improvement.
  ✔Integration of model and skeleton into the system.

Thus, as tests have shown, we have a character who walks, crawls, runs, jumps, somersaults (and shakes her buttocks and breasts). I'll make a .gif of her motion for Part 2.
Below, you'll find a more detailed description of current progress.

Character Model

Among many, I liked this model more than others, and I decided to create an image for her that would suit the game setting. She's our main character.
As you might have guessed, it's 4k render on default settings. Such "picture" in the game is "redundant" and resource-intensive, so the textures will be optimized to ensure you can play it without stress. There are many techniques that can help with it (mipmapping, caching and so on). However, when the time comes, we will return to the topic of graphics in the game.

Morphs and materials were also tied to the character model upon export. There were difficulties at literally every stage, but, to be honest, I didn’t expect anything else.
The most important thing is that the ways to solve them technically met my expectations.

Character Rig

Typically, a rig (or a skeleton) consists of bones and their properties. The bones that you see on the image are called deforming bones. In addition to them, there are about 250 more bones in this rig, which help the deforming bones breathe life into a model.
Unlike deforming bones, they (usually) won't be sent to the game engine.
However, the bones must have the correct directions when exported, as well as names if we want to integrate it to ALS properly. ARP (Auto-Rig Pro) helps solve this task.
The skeleton was also created using this wonderful plugin.
Custom bones are on the other layer for my convenience, which are also deforming ones.
So, as I pointed out earlier, it's engine-ready, suitable for making new animations, and convenient for retargeting.

Drivers and Shapes (shape keys\morph targets). In a nutshell, Shapes can create corrective (or additional) shape where bones cannot cope (or are redundant). And drivers are, as a rule, a mathematical equation that calculates, in our case, what position the bones are relative to each other and tells the Shapes what value to take based on the result of the equation (e.g. left picture side has the value "1" when the right one is "0").

Character Movement System

ALS is a comprehensive character animation system that provides a solid basis for character motion. I discovered it about 2 years ago for UE4. This system can be improved and changed to suit the needs of the project, and I realized that this is what I needed.
Having studied this system, you get the opportunity to create a flexible, complex character capable of running, jumping, and, in the future, climbing and fighting with bare hands or weapons, and here the matter is limited, mostly by the developer’s imagination.

What is important is that I have come up with an approach that I hope will be able to integrate any character into the system that will gradually be developed according to the needs of the project.
Thus, we will get a unified system that will be able to give all characters the same basic capabilities, and subsequently, each character, not only the heroine but also NPCs can be personalized. Sounds very inspiring. However, everything has its time.

Next step

Yesterday I finished testing the character and achieved the desired result. Now for the next couple of days, I will be tying off any loose ends. Well, there is a lot of work ahead.
We need to adapt this system to our needs. It already has simple animations for climbing on surfaces. What if we need to climb over the fence without climbing upon it?

For the next update in three weeks, I will prepare a test site and demonstrate a few more capabilities of this wonderful system. I'll continue to work mainly on the character's movement system, but I may also surprise you with something else next time.

Keep working,
Absent.Dogma