Now that I have textured the mug, I want to make it into a simple rig so that I can animate for my game. I found this tutorial by this animator called Monica who explains really clearly in her tutorials. I watched and followed step by step.
Below I have added in 6 joints from the root of the model to the head. It is centred in the middle of the cup so the movement is even through out the model.
I decided against so many joints as 3 seemed enough if I am only doing simple movements.
In my outlined I have parented each join from the root up towards the head in the correct hierarchy. Now I need to add in nurb curves so that I can use them to control the mug. I used large circular curves larger than the circumference of the mug so that I would easily be able to access the controls and not touch the joint or model. I went through each nub and parented it to the joint with the model skin fixed to it so the model moves to the controls.
Animating Rig for Unreal Engine:
Now that I have finished rigging my mug I need to figure out what I need to do next to import the animations to Unreal Engine. The tutorial below is an extremely in depth and clear tutorial of how to set up the game character from start to finish. It is about 4 hours long and took a long time to watch and follow but I wanted to make sure I learnt how to use Unreal correctly even if I didn’t get too far with it. It is important that I learn how to use it more so than finishing this project because that was the main objective.
I needed to create different exported animations of the character moving depending on what it was doing in the game e.g. jumping or running.
Idle Animation:
The idle animation is basically when the character looks as though they are breaking continuously when nothing else is happing. This gives a sense or realism to the mug that is needed for this mug. I followed the tutorial in how many frames the breath should be fore and overlapped the spine when splining the movements in the graph editor.
Jump Animation:
Now I am moving on to the jump animation, I thought I needed a good reference that I could use online from one of the Disney characters like Miss Pots from ‘Beauty and the Beast’ but then I found the dancing mushroom jump sequence from Fantasia. As you can see in the reference, the mushroom has more joints than my model because the mushroom has two feet and knees which allow him to move in this way.
I thought that because the mushroom moved this way that I needed to copy the style of rigging of this game character tutorial. I tried putting the model into the rigging workspace to create a skeleton so I have more control in the movement of the mug. However, even though I learnt how to do this, I don’t think it made sense and was over complicating the movement of the rig. So I decided I would stick to the original rigging.
In my Sponge Bob Squarepants Nintendo switch game I saw that Patrick the starfish has a double jump switches worked well for his inflexible body type so I decided I could do the same for my mug to give it a bit more movement.