Hello There!
This year has been interesting so far, apart from the horrors of the pandemic it's been a year of learning, self-discovery and new horizons.
Early this year I decided to once again to completely change 3D-package. I decided to move on from Modo and into Blender.
The way I do this generally is to just uninstall any other 3D Package I might have and concentrate fully on learning the new package. As for my art, behind the scenes my art has gone through some more changes, I've been learning how to rig, how to animate & going deeper into learning about how to set up VFX.
My two-three latest personal projects are basically the result of what I've been learning from January -> June a lot of which I've also covered here in my blogposts.
June marked a new beginning for me. It's the month that I decided to re-learn C++. I learned C++ in high-school, but back then the application for it was never learning it for video-games it was about creating PC Software stuff and it never really stuck all that well. Now however, I decided to relearn it and deep fully into trying to become a one-man army game developer.
I'll try and list my journey of learning since June.
- Programming: C++ Basics
- Programming: UE4 C++ Basics
- Blender: Creating Armatures/Skeletons
- Blender: Creating Rigs
- Blender: Animation
- UE4: Learning Blueprints
- UE4: Learning how to use the Animation Graph
- UE4: Coding Health/Stamina Systems
- UE4: Coding NPCs & Simple Behaviors
- UE4: Dealing with Items/PIckups/Weapons
- UE4: Player/NPC Attacks & Damage
- UE4: Item/Enemy Spawning Volumes
- UE4: Level Change, Saving & Loading
- UE4: Setting up a Custom Character (from Blender -> UE4)
- UE4: Setting up Multi-Skeletal Mesh Character for Character Customization
- UE4: Created an "Eye-LookAt" function for my Character.
- UE4: Implemented my own Freeform Climbing System that works with moving & rotating Objects
- UE4: Learned how to use IK with the Animation Graph
- UE4: Implemented more character traversal: Learned how to set up Mantling
- UE4: Created my own "Rope Gun" a la Thief (Spawns a rope on location and unfolds into a longer rope)
- UE4: Run-time Spline Creation for Random Awesome things you can do with Splines
- UE4: Created my own Rope-Swinging System
- UE4: Decided to learn UMG for UI/UX
- UE4: Learned how to setup controller navigation in Menues
- UE4: Decided to create my own Inventory System
This basically covers 3-4 months of me learning things on the side of the 8 hours I spend every day at work.
Game-development isn't at all fancy, it's nitty gritty and most of the time things just look whack and considering that, most of what I have recorded isn't probably interesting enough for you guys to look at for the blog, but I thought I'd just show two things that really had me feeling "wow, this is going somewhere".
Developed a new look at function for the custom character I implemented.
Of course there has been a lot of head-aches during this time and I think generally I've gotten a deeper understanding and appreciation for the work that others put into these things and since a lot of this stuff isn't very exciting to look at, here is a quick video-straight from the editor of me trying my own swinging system that I made from scratch.
Kinda cool huh? Blood, Sweat & Tears I guess! But it's been a lot of fun for me though!
Now you know what I'm up to, and the reason I'm not actively posting art-blog things anymore. I'm busy learning more about game-development as a whole and I'm not gonna lie:
I'm loving it :D
but there are still plenty of time left until the end of the year so let's continue working hard and learning new things eh?
Warping out!
/Chris Radsby