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Late 2015 - Early 2016

MODULAR CHARACTE RPROJECT

The Modular Character System is a project I worked on around late 2015 to early 2016. The goal was to make a advanced modular character system that was universal and could be used as good basis for any 3rd or 1srt person game/project I might want to do in the future. 

Core Features:

  • Blended Root Motion Movement: 8 directional movement blending for multiple character stances.

  • Accurate Character Collision: 2 Part character capsule collision for accurate representation of character proportions and interacting with any physical environments.

  • Multiple Character Stances: Character has 3 different stances Stand, Crouch & Prone.

  • Rag-doll​: Character can go from and to a rag-doll state with supporting animation for getting up

  • Jumping: Different jumping states for different movement velocities. 

  • ​Climbing: Ability for the character to climb up or vault over difference objects.

  • Item Interaction: Ability to interact with items, weapons for example are able to be picked p and help by the character using an ik system.

Challenges:

  • Character Model: A goal for the character system was to have modular clothing & appearances. The current model was created in a program called Fuze, this allows for some what modular clothing but was not flexibility enough.For example, It would be required that the characters head mesh would be separate from the body for culling purposes while in 1st person.

  • Base Locomotion Animations: A large variety of different locomotion animations are required for a character system like this. Currently the animations been used are from Mixamo, but are not ideal. The animations are from their fps pack so by default they are all in a weapons stance, like the character is holding a rifle.

  • Head & Leaning Animation: The way I’ve set up the camera system is that it requires the character to lean forward/backward when the player looks up and down. Head animations where needed for when the character free-looks so the head moves where the character is looking, independent from the body orientation. These are specialised animations that will need to be custom made, Iv'e looked into motion capture for this.

  • ​Climbing Animations: While I’ve pretty much completed the climbing system, the animations I’m using aren’t that compatible with my system. I’m using a variety of miscellaneous animations from Mixamo. Most have to be cut down and tweaked to work with the system but they aren’t very fluent animations and transitions because of this. I really need some good climbing animations designed for my system.

Stand Locomotion blend tree

Main State Machine

Parameters

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A list of the different parameters used for the characters state machine and blend trees

Standing Blend Tree

 

The Standing Blend tree is the most complex since it has 4 different speeds, which branch off into 8 directions and an idle state for each.

Code snippets from the project, keep in-mind that this is something I wrote in 2015 and my skills and knowledge have greatly improved.

Click on the images to see a brief description of the code.

Character Inspector

Movement

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This component controls the core of the characters: collision, animation state, audio & gravity.

Look​

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This component controls the player camera for 3rd & 1st person, leaning, free look and any head ik.

Wave & Equipment​

These components allows the character to wave and pick up and drop items

Movement

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This component controls the movement of the character, as well as speeds and climbing

Health

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Controls the health the layer has and any effects it might have on the

character (blacking out, slowed movement etc)

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