Hello fellow Vikings!
Welcome to this year's first devlog! How are you doing? We have work, work and more work. My introductions team is constantly working on the game and preparing for many exciting things coming in 2022. but we'll have time to show it off later ;)
Referring to my team. You often ask me how we're doing. Let me just say, it's great! The team I am currently working with on Viking City Builder are true professionals and passionate. Every day they prove to me that I could not have made a better choice. And although we've been working together for a short time, it wouldn't be all of this without them. Guys, thanks so much for this!
Ok, let's get to the main topic of this devlog ;) This time we’d like to tell you about the process of making animations and show you some of them.
The animations created during the development process, which ultimately reside in the game engine, begin their process with the character model. A character that has been modeled and textured should be painted with weights assigned to specific bone.This allows us to move the limbs with the bones according to the movements that can replicate the correct movement of the character from a physiological point of view. The character's skeleton itself is simplified relative to human physiology, while retaining appropriate mechanics. We additionally use "helper" bone to move the character, which control the skeleton hierarchy. With this technology (inverse kinematics), we can control one bone that affects the others. Application example: hand bending, where using two bones we influence the other bones that interact in a hierarchy relative to each other. This technique allows for a more accurate and much faster implementation.
The combination of the above bone mechanics is called a "rigg," which controls each bone contained in the skeleton. Controlling a character's movement involves keying frames of video to the correct location in three-dimensional space, which is assigned to the appropriate place in the timeline. This allows us to control the trajectory of bone movement and its duration. The corresponding set of keyframes of bone movement form an animation. To best replicate the movement of the characters we use recordings of ourselves performing specific actions. This makes it as close as possible to the natural structure of human movement phases. Animations are made in external software and then the whole is assembled in the engine, combining previously made animations.
And moving from theory to practice: below is a finished animation on the engine showing Saltmaker.
Salt was important and expensive resource used for preservation of food. It could be obtained through trading or by evaporating water either from the sea (while seawater on average contains 3% salt, Baltic Sea has a salinity of 0.3 to 0.9%) or saline springs using lead pans. Latter source was preferred because of higher yield which is reflected by “wich” towns of Droitwich in Worcestershire, Nantwich, Middlewich and Northwich established by Romans near salt springs in Britain. Anyway, the process was time and fuel consuming, so a clever leader should perhaps look for other sources of this treasure - like foreign lands filled with soft people ;)
I hope you made it to the end. Let us know how you liked such material. Don't forget to check out our Discord, where there's also a lot going on.
See you soon!