I must confess I’ve been hit pretty hard on the head as of late, animations are a can of worms!
I thought I just had to put bones into my mesh to create the armature – or skeleton, or rig, all the same – and use any kind of pose editor to define all my poses, idle, running, attacking, dodging and so on.

Not so fast, young Padawan!
The easiest way to build a rig is to connect all the bones of an armature, which works fine but each bone has to be moved individually to create any pose.
That’s why IK – inverse kinematics – was invented which, in a nutshell, is a way to tell which bones move in conjunction with others.
It’s a fantastic technique, once an IK rig is correctly built, moving any part of the rig will move all other parts in a natural way.

The bad part is that I have – once more – to learn a new job to get all of this working.
The good part is that, as far as I can tell, animation is the last piece of the puzzle and once I am able to sculpt, texture, rig and animate a creature, I will have all the techniques needed to start building content.

Many pieces of the puzzle are falling into place.
I managed to build a server and clients – while I still don’t know how to connect the clients to the server, but that’s true for everything I learn: there are more wholes left than in a Swiss cheese! -, I can make a character move, I learned most of what I need about using blueprints, I have ideas about the map, the spellbook, the effects, the materials and tons of other stuff but there is one thing that freaks me out: animation!

I want to build my first chest, to test materials so I don’t have to texture most objects, just use materials, and I also want to test interaction between the character and the chest: point and click and move to the chest which opens when close enough or use the modern approach: move up to the chest and press E when close enough. I still have to decide.

Whatever, I need to animate the opening and closing of the chest and for that there are 2 techniques: build a blueprint in UE4 and apply rotators to the lid of the chest on a timetable, or rig a chest in Blender the same way characters are rigged: with armatures, basically bones to which are attached vertices and which move following animation patterns that can be exported to UE4 and connected one to the other with a state machine, more on that later.

I can animate the chest fine using rotators but I thought now is a good time to learn object/character rigging so I’m back in Blender 2.8 learning the whole process of armature creation and weight painting.

This probably is the hardest thing in the whole project, everything is going nicely at the moment, to a point I can see the whole project coming to fruition, but I have to overcome animation difficulties. Animator is a job by itself, yet another job I have to learn, and it’s a hard one.

I opted for a World of Warcraft controller system, which means WASD and both mouse buttons pressed at the same time move the character, only the left mouse button rotates the character and only the right mouse button rotates the camera around the character.

This looks so easy, but it really wasn’t.
At all.

The first options screen is functional too, allowing to change the keybindings for movement.

This first step is probably the most important of all and, for the first time, I can say the Althea IV development has started!

Screw the courses, they are tedious and get on my nerves, so I started to create what will be the first zone of the game: the Goblins cave, the first Althea dungeon from back in 2001.

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I completed 5 official Epic courses, the most interesting being about materials and advanced materials, the kind of stuff which makes curtains wiggle in the wind with translucent effects and all that jazz.

Now I’m delving into the Udemy C++ course, which is pretty much the most obnoxious thing to do when it comes to UE4 development. To be honest, I would rather not bother with C++ all together, blueprints are cool and can do pretty much anything.
Unfortunately, pretty much is not all and I need all of the power of the engine at my disposal, for file management mainly.
I need to be able to store all relevant information into files, for server information like date, quests states and the like, or player information with skills, inventory etc.

So, let’s do this, it will either take me hundreds of hours or I will throw the towel very soon, time will tell.