First, HUGE thank you to everyone that liked our previous post. By far the biggest response we've gotten since starting this adventure. Also is quite humbling and motivating. Really just wanted to post again to show appreciation, but we actually have a bit to share as well! 😄 Not quite as big an update as last week but, still progress is progress.
The plan after showing the level was to start really going hard on some gameplay systems. 
Have not really tested any of it yet, but here is a sample of the main portion of the damage calculation. Keeping it relatively simple but adding in some elemental affixes and armor stats should help keep things interesting.
Need to add some abilities and get started on the ability system for Eddy now. Then we can test out the damage calculations.
Some may remember our post waaaaay back in March when we talked about rigging Eddy in Blender. The gist of things back then is the rigs from most plugins did not work very well with the game engine we were trying to use, so we ultimately built a completely custom rig.
Since we switched to Unreal this is no longer the case. Basically everything has a way to export their rigs to Unreal. Including Auto-Rig Pro which we had purchased back then.
After hand animating the custom rig for everything so far, we were a bit committed to it. However, as we start working on abilities the realization that we're going to need quite a few ability animations, and doing it all by hand wasn't working out super well, the thought occurred to maybe try ARP again. So after a couple days of relearning we put together this rig, did weight painting and brought in a few animations from Mixamo.
This has turned out to be a mixed bag so to speak. Was really hoping this would just all go super smoothly and we'd be able to set up a bunch of abilities and get it all in Unreal in no time. It... almost went well... 😅 The "smart rig" went pretty quickly, except the fingers. Mostly the thumb ended up on the armor plate. This was easy to fix. The automatic skinning went okay with the voxel heat diffuse plugin. Still had to manual weight paint to fix things of course.
Retargeting Mixamo animations to the rig was both easy and a pain. ARP has some nice utility here. A preset bone list helps a ton and the interactive adjustments are great. However, the animations would almost always be off in the hands (again... those big things just like to cause problems!) So manual adjustment after the interactive tweaks had to be done on basically every animation.
Another thing that is both a positive and negative is the exporting to Unreal process. Working with the custom rig we were able to use the send to unreal plugin for Blender. Makes 'exporting' and 'importing' into a single click. ARP's rig cannot do this. Instead, it has its own exporter. This makes the process a bit more involved, which kind of sucks. BUT it does a really good job of exporting. It sets up the skeleton for Unreal about perfectly. This gives a ton of benefits, including being able to use the Unreal Mannequin animations and any tutorial that ever focused on the Mannequin.
Did try to set up Game Rig Tools addon. It would have been cool if we could have used it to bake everything from the ARP rig to a game rig, then export the game rig using the send to unreal plugin like we always have. Sadly, even though it all seemed fine in Blender, the rig in Unreal would mangle Eddy severely no matter what settings we tried. So that was a bust. This did also think about possibly trying out Rigify. If there is a good retargeting option for Mixamo to Rigify, and Rigify works well with Game Rig Tools (seems to be the focus so thinking it would) then this may be another good option to have a nice rig that can make premade animations possible and the streamlined process of sending to Unreal.
At this point... despite all the benefits it could offer to use the ARP method, the not so great things about this new process has been a little disappointing. So we are debating on whether or not this is the best path to go down. Or should we just keep the custom rig and take the time to do custom animations for every ability... or even try out Rigify again. Just not totally sure at this time but will be making this choice in the next day or two.
Thanks for reading! As always, if you like what we're doing, please follow. 😀