Since the last dev log, I’ve spent most of my time building out the animation system for the character controller. The character could already move, but everything felt super basic visually so I wanted the animations to properly react to what the character is actually doing instead of just switching between a few animations.
I started by adding a basic locomotion animation system with idle, walk, and run animations. I added blending between the different locomotion states based on the character’s movement speed, so the character doesn’t immediately snap from one animation to another. I also added other details like adjusting the animation playback speed based on the physical movement speed making everything feel more realistic.
While working on locomotion, the animations didn’t look too good because I was simply playing one animation at a given time so I added support for separating the upper and lower body using bone masks, which allows different parts of the character to be animated independently. After that things started to look better but the animations that I had added on the model weren’t good so I spent a lot of time finding and adding more and better animations to the model. One of the changes I made with the new animations was combining multiple idle animations together instead of having the character constantly repeat the same idle pose making the character feel alive when idle.
After that I moved on to the character’s vertical movement. I connected the fall, jump, and land animations to the character state system. The animator now plays the animations based on whether the character is jumping, falling, or landing based on the physics state rather than input alone. I also added separate jump animations for jumping while standing still and jumping while moving, so the animations look good.
The landing animation required more work since it didn’t look polished so I added landing detection based on things like fall height and fall speed so that small steps don’t trigger a landing animation. And finally I added a rolling animation for falls from high places. This took quite a while to get working and it still isn’t perfect but I am working on it.
At this point the character’s animations are pretty much almost complete. Next I want to continue improving the animation system by adding animations for crouching and adding transition animations like idle to walk, etc and also finalizing the roll animation. And after that I want to start making stuff react to the environment.