I noticed that the rabbits have the same body proportions as the goblins, and as such their animations could be used for the goblins. That can save a lot of time developing both races animations.
@malley I forgot to ask during your last stream, are the rabbits going to have eye animations like the hearthlings?
How hard is to go back to an animation to add something new, like the jaw for the goblins? (for me, using blender, without the original files, it is hard enough to a point I would prefer to start over)
Do you plan to unify both races into a single animation?
This is actually not true currently. It definitely looks like it is, but the goblins have a really funky mid section. If we do get to the point that we transfer rabbit anims onto a goblin rig, it will be a new goblin rig (new models as well). They layman probably wont notice the difference though.
Nope - we wanted to keep the highlights around the eyes, but that wouldn’t be possible with eye animations (without other concessions). Same problem as giving goblins eye anims - with their eye patches and sunken in eyballs, its just too much work to give them eye anims. We’ll probably break off goblin eyebrows so they get those anims at least though.
Not impossible by any means, but it can definitely be annoying. If you don’t have a separate referenced rig (one file which all animations connect to) then I wouldn’t even want to attempt it - you’d have to add a jaw to every file in the exact same place in the same hierarchy etc. If you look at zilla/varanus(gator) i went back and added a second head onto the varanus rig. I learned a lot too, lol, like I wish I had tools support (i.e. time to make tools) to make it easier, my rigging scripts weren’t designed for two heads.
No but: by making the rabbits the same size as the goblins, we can eventually transfer the rabbit animations over to the goblins and then adjust animations as needed for them. The difference would be like having a rig with a set of rabbit and goblin ears, and a rabbit tail, and a goblin mouth. We could do that, but it gets very hard to look at (while animating) - without tools support to hide some bones sometimes - and we could easily hit bone limit (eventually) and then be plum out of luck - without tools support to only export desired bones. We could probably do it and chance it, but I’d rather take the 10 minutes it takes me to transfer the anims to a new rig and then clean up the anims as needed. Also if we were to use the rabbit rig on the goblins instead of the goblin rig, all existing saves with goblins in them would look all broken. We think/hope replacing the rig and animations but keeping the same name will keep backwards compatibility.
So, long story short, we don’t have the tools be as efficient as you suggest.
But, their animations (as with the hearthling’s) will be nearly identical, unless we add unique ones at some point. Frankly I’m struggling just to find time for the basic stuff : /. Really hoping to get some spear attack anims in at some point.
Sorry I didn’t respond sooner, I didn’t get a message from the discourse about this thread at first : /.
Thanks Malley! As a quick noob test, I run the goblins with the rabbit animations, and honestly it looked good, except for the obvious lack of jaw which made it float in the air outside the head, and some longer ear animations like bending it down would not translate well making the ears go inside the head.
I think I will keep the old plan then. Having a custom goblin model based on hearthling rigs to use their animation, mainly eyes. And not having to worry about missing animations, like the missing climbing animation in the rabbits.
It was actually working fine before.
