Hey folks,
as you're aware, we're a small team dedicated to BattleJuice Alchemist. With our combined efforts, we (that's Patrick and myself) essentially have the workload of one single full-time artist covering everything from 2D and 3D work, including modeling, texturing, and animation. Additionally, we create every asset ourselves, foregoing the use of marketplaces or asset stores. This poses a challenge for a comprehensive RPG, and today I'd like to shed light on a magical tool we use to add diversity to our characters despite these constraints: animation retargeting.
In the image above, you see three skeletons of different sizes. Upon closer inspection, you'll notice that they aren't just scaled versions of each other but have distinct proportions. Given our limited resources, creating individual animations for each character is impractical. This is where animation retargeting becomes invaluable.
If you just slap an animation onto a character without retargeting, things can go quite wrong, as you can see here (image from the Unreal Engine wiki):
Animation retargeting in Unreal Engine is like taking dance moves from one character and teaching them to another with a different body shape. It saves us a lot of time by reusing animations for various characters, even if they don't have the exact same proportions. The process involves setting up a translation of movements and rotations to fit the new character's structure, ensuring that the animations look good on different in-game personas. This allows us to efficiently use and share animations across various NPCs, like these two very different characters:
Here is what the teeny-weeny Leprechaun looks like in-game in comparison to our player character:
As we navigate the challenges of developing BattleJuice Alchemist with our lean yet dedicated team, animation retargeting turned out as a great ally, allowing us to breathe life into diverse characters without overwhelming our limited resources. Eventually, we plan to individualize animations more and more. For example, a giant should walk with more gravity than a Leprechaun. However, it is surprising how many animations work well, especially from our top-down perspective, when shared. I believe this is a smart approach to our work, and it has become one of our prime directives: We must choose our battles wisely by adding detail only where necessary.
Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!
Alain