Retarget Animations from mixamo

For this part of the process, I've been going through tutorials on how to retarget animations from different sources into UE4.

The most important challenge here was that the Mixamo character is not of the same height and it was missing a root joint which makes it hard for UE to compensate the animation.

There are a couple of settings that one has to go through in order to fix these issues and I will be making a video tutorial soon.

Yo soy Alberto y ese ha sido mi post. Happy Codding!

Current Generation Game Engine Animation Systems

I have not written in here for a LONG time, I will be doing some research on a topic that is really interesting to me: Animation Systems.

My goal is that for the next couple of months I'll do as much research as possible about this topic, in particular for the Unreal Engine. The current version for UE4 is currently 24.1 which is where any samples made for these publications will be created and added to the following repo:

https://github.com/labigm/UE4AnimSystems

I will be taking a look at different systems the engine already implements, like Animation Retargeting and Physical Animations.

Yo soy Alberto y ese ha sido mi post. Happy Codding!

2012-DIC-05 Textures in FBX

Using textures in fbx is not as straight forward like one may wish, FBX SDK makes the parsing of the file pretty easy, but translating the information to my own system was not an easy task.

I used the "tutorials" included in the sdk, unfortunately my setup makes it impossible to debug the code so I cant go line by line checking whats going on in the scene. In particular "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\FBX\FBX SDK\2013.3\samples\ImportScene" is a pretty comprehensive example of what to do regarding different structures.

I wasn't able to create a screenshot of this particular progress but at last I'm reading materials and textures from the file, right now I have a completely loaded scene on the program, with materials and textures, hierarchy and it doesn't even need to be triangulated anymore, next step: Animations.

Yo soy Alberto y ese ha sido mi post. Happy Codding!

2012-NOV-24 Texture

I've successfully manage to change the whole texture library in one day, I've spent 12+ hours on the project and its done. The results: slower more imprecise drawing calls, the thing is, I was assigning shaderresourseview pointers every draw call for all the objects I'm drawing in the scene and I thought it was a bottle neck, but passing them in a single call before the rendering loop didn't increase the speed, quite the opposite as for some reason I cant just assign a variable as an array index within hsls, so in order to get the resource view I need from the array I need to either transverse it with a for, or create a switch statement, this slows down the process as It has to be done every rendering cycle for every object in the model, which ironically, is slower than assigning the resource pointer. On the other hand it wasn't a full Array by pointer but an Array of 100 as once again hsls doesnt like more elements in a single array, maybe with a different structure this wouldn't be an inconvenience  but the fact that I need to transverse the list instead of just letting the array know what element to look for makes the whole modification inconvenient, to say the least.

I revert my changes back to the version  before the "improvements" so I basically lost all my they... or rather invested it in knowing that wasn't the right way to do it.

Yo soy Alberto y ese ha sido mi post. Happy Codding!

2012-NOV-20 New Super Mario Bros. U

Being a fan of the Super Mario franchise for decades I have a thing or two to say about this game.

The graphics are simply amazing, that is the way Super Mario games should look like, the color pallet is great and the playstyle is just Super Mario.

The levels are really polished and the power of the WiiU enabled programmers to do some crazy stuff with particles and graphics in the levels, while one might think there is really nothing new to the franchise and most of the game mechanics have been exploited by recent titles Super Mario Bros U has a trick or two under the sleeve.

Regarding the suit many may complain about the flying squirrel suit instead of the Raccoon Tail, I know the nostalgia just demands the Tail, and New Super Mario Bros. 2 has it, but let me tell you, don't let it deceive you it is not the same feeling, the playability is completely different and the way you should think while having this power up is really another thing. First of all Raccoon Mario should gain momentum in order to lift, Squirrel Mario just hoover, but after jumping he can double jump once, Squirrel Mario can stick to walls for a second and doesn't have the "tail hit".

Being able to play the full game in the tablet is awesome, while the tablet doesn't have the full resolution of an HDTV at it disposal it does let the player just sit wherever and enjoy the game, it even comes with a jack in so you don't disturb whomever is seated next to you, in a small house hold I dare to say the fight for the TV would be over.

Super Mario Bros U is a game shouldn't be missing in any collection.

Yo soy Alberto y ese ha sido mi post. Happy Codding!