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.