Full-body first person prototype
I finished the full-body first person character prototype which uses a F.E.A.R.-style body subdivision. The lower part of the body is controlled by locomotion and the upper part by the rotation of the player view. With this method the hierarchically structured bones relevant for aiming are attached to the first person camera’s rotation. This allows the player to see the complete body of the character, even its shadows.
To test the physical behaviour, I enabled the character based colliders and implemented a punching mechanism based on Unreal’s content example animations. You can see the finished prototype in action in the video below:
The next step is to evaluate the pipeline for applying motion capture data to this full-body character. We examine the applicability of the low-cost motion capture system Noitom Perception Neuron for this scenario. Previously conducted experiments with a setup consisting of the Noitom Perception Neuron and Autodesk Motion Builder showed promising results.
The shown first person model mesh, its textures and animations are property of Epic Games Inc.
These assets are used solely for prototyping purposes and will be replaced during development.
Hey that looks great! I’m a bit confused though, does this mean that the upper section of the body pivots from the camera’s transform point? Does that mean the spine disconnects from the lower portion of the body and swings out, stretching away from it’s original parent bone?
If so, is this noticeable in the shadow from certain angles? Or is that problem pretty negligible?
I guess the solution is to just have another mesh that plays anims that look good from third person and use that for the shadow and other player’s view.
I had been trying to use additive anim blends to do something along the lines of, UP/DOWN spine motion is handled by a simple rotation animation, then add the weapon grip anims over top of it, but that seemed to produce really unpredictable results! I use Unity but I’m hoping the principles are close enough…
The camera is actually attached to the head bone and does not rotate at all. The actual player view rotates an upper spine bone, about between the two shoulders. As the head is in the underlying hierarchy it rotates automatically. This slightly offsets a “perfect” head rotation, which is negligible for our project.
As this does not disconnect any bone from the skeleton, the shadow looks quite natural with no noticable artifacts.
Usually there is a third person model, but if your animations are good enough you can go with just a first person model.
Hey, thanks for the breakdown, I’m having a lot of trouble on my end, so this is really great to help me think of this from a different perspective, everything else is coming online in my project but this has been one of the big blockers, so I really appreciate this post and your response! Thanks for your input!
No problem, hope you manage to get it working.
If you need a video or some samples I could post something.