Project Revamp Part 7 (Patreon)

This week:

• Assets
• Look Software
• Pickup Software
• Auto Head Jack Software

Video shows the summary. The text shows the technical! That is the format of my development blogs.

Assets

The rocks were actually taken from a free Unity store asset. The rocks had a good shape but the UVs and the texture work was not fit for my game. So I took the assets, remeshed, reunwrapped, and repainted them. Definitely consider doing retouching work like this if you are an indie dev! It's fast (if you have a quick asset pipeline) and FREE.

Look Software

The look software is very simple but you have to be careful and implement it in a way that can be smoothly interpolated. The robot basically has a list of things in view and occasionally randomly checks one to see if it is the closest item. If it is, it targets it.

The targeting is just carefully interpolated look quaternions that influence the head and eyeballs. I had to make custom Animator curves so that this look effect is blended away during certain animations when it is not needed. Like when the robot auto head jacks itself, it needs to look down to reach the back of its neck, since the look animation would interfere with that animation, flags are read so that the look is ignored.

Pickup Software

This is not my first rodeo writing logic to maneuver through physics and pick up items. How I like to do this is to first get the character to walk near the item and then play a pickup animation that blends between "item is really high up" and "item is really low on the floor", that way there is an appropriate blend value chosen when it reaches down to pick up.

The hard part is making sure that all inverse kinematic poses blend between each other. There is one pose for holding the item that was picked up, another for reaching to pick up the item, and the default one when not holding anything.

There are currently not yet any finger animations so the palm is always open even when picking stuff up. This will be fixed later down the line as I would like to have realistic finger poses that dynamically wrap around the target cylinders.

Auto Head Jack Software

This was actually implemented because it was a pain in the ass to connect the robot when you were doing it often. And well, you are very often running back and forth between outdoors and your computer, so the robot being able to do this for you was a charming and a useful upgrade. I expect to do more quality of life upgrades like this in the future.

There isn't much to talk about this software module other than it's a simple animation that plays depending on the hand that the head jack is being held with. An interesting fact is that there is no code to "connect" the head jack to the head. It is using the same physics proximity code that the main player uses to connect stuff around, so in a way the robot indeed has learned to position its head behind its neck and "release" the physics object to connect it.

Stay tuned for more. Much much more!