Dragon game update: additive blending, contorted transformer and slender dragon

Hello again!

This has been a pretty big week for my game.
I've refactored the rendering engine simplifying some stuff and improving performance a lot. I've also added smooth shading to my dragon model and had a fight with blender over exporting models (I had to change roll of some bones which turns out isn't as simple as I though because all animations get screwed up).

As for additions to the animation system:

• Additive and Subtractive blending. Allows me to create an animation I can lay on top of other animations (eg: small variations when running)
• Skeleton masking: Allows me to select which bones get affected by a node
• Triangular mesh node blending resulting in Head rotation: Ok, this isn't completely new but I did remove it for some time when I did the animation tree refactor

I also did another small anim tree refactor meaning it is no longer a tree and more of a graph with a root node and leaf nodes. This means I can now have one source animation node being used in several other places which is really useful.


Anyway, here's the latest update video:

And here you can see what happens if you don't subtract animation from a reference pose:  
 

 

Also my dragon is apparently a transformer, here he is as a spaceship:

That's all for this week. Next week I'll be working on leg IK, adding flying animations and I'll also work a bit on the texture. I'd love to do an IK tutorial eventually since it's a topic I already got myself quite familiar with, and there are a couple of techniques that are easy to implement that you don't need to know too much math to add to your own game.

Either way if you have any questions about animation blending/trees or IK feel free to contact me either by commenting or through twitter @SpliterCbb

Cheers!

Working on a new game

Hey!
I've been neglecting this blog for quite some time since I was thinking of moving to wordpress but without ever actually committing.

So I decided that for the time being I'll keep updating this blog with the news of the game I;m currently developing.

The end result I want is a game where the player is a dragon from the start of its life in the egg up to the end of the life. I want it to have a certain storyline but It'll be free-roaming/open world for the most part with story taking place in specific areas, one of the key focuses of the game will be the animation as I want to combine keyframed animation, IK, physics and procedural animation to have a dragon that controls great but still responds naturally to the world.

I'm developing it on my own engine since I want this to not only be a great game but I also want to learn the hard technical parts as I'm making it.

So far I have a basic resource management, a rendering system and the beginnings of a robust animation system.

Here are the video updates so far:
Update 1

Update 2

A funny bug related to my direction setting resulting in wobbling.

Update 3