One great benefit of doing a bootcamp is that they teach you how to use all these resources that you wouldn’t otherwise know to go looking for. This time: Mixamo. Mixamo.com is a website where you can download free, rigged characters and little animation loops to go with them. The site also allows you to add basic humanoid rigging to your own characters too, and I am buzzing to try this as part of my ongoing Blender exercises.
For my bootcamp project I wanted to add a few NPC neighbours to bring my suburb to life. I’d long been planning to add a guy digging in his garden with a shovel as this gives me ominous vibes - I’ve clearly seen too many TV shows where people get buried under the patio. I was able to find an animation pretty easily, although the model isn’t holding anything. This will have to be a problem that gets solved later: for now I’ve got proof of concept that NPCs can live in my world.
Next, now that I’ve built a horrible corridor - the Horridor - under the Creepy Room, I’ve been looking for something off-putting to put at the end of it. I noticed that Mixamo has some zombie models and downloaded one to try. This time, I wanted to try out another technique we learned in class: responsive animations. I set my zombie to lie on the ceiling with an idle animation, then made a Blueprint that would change the animation to a crawl when the player entered the collision box. Hopefully this encourages the player to run back up to the house!
Finally, I decided to add another neighbour. This one lives in the house opposite the one the player gets to explore, she’s a curtain-twitcher. So her first animation is her peering forward, then if the player gets closer to check her out and enters her collision box she ducks out of sight. For this NPC I practiced another bootcamp skill: applying a blend space to smoothen the transition between the two animations. I feel like there’s a lot more potential to unlock in Blueprints, and now that I’ve learnt a few different nodes and how to use them I want to build on that and get familiar with more.
