Comment by jayd16
9 months ago
If you have any animations you're going to want to blend them. If you don't want to make a lot of animations you're probably going to want to use IK for procedural animation.
If you use an engine, you won't be forced to spend time and make it a defacto central feature (because you wont have time for other features). You'll just have access to it.
Evan a 2.5D platformer, a common indie genre, would want animation blending and foot IK without innovating on it.
> If you have any animations you're going to want to blend them.
Yes, if 3d skeletal animation is a central feature of your game it’s not a big deal to spend time making a good system that works for you.
> you're probably going to want to use IK
Plenty of 3D games with 3d animation don’t have IK
> for procedural animation.
Wow your game has 3d procedural animation! That better be the main feature right?
The reason I’m so skeptical is a feature has cost whether it’s written in the engine you use or not. You have to do work to make your content look good for IK, and for an indie games that’s critical resources to invest in that.
For most games, spending time tweaking rigs for IK is not going to make your product better.
> You have to do work to make your content look good for IK, and for an indie games that’s critical resources to invest in that.
This is the entire point of using an engine. You can spend time on the content instead of coding features that aren't unique. Suddenly many types of content are far less costly.
I’m saying the real cost is the content.
It’s not hard to implement any of these features, you just don’t have time to do them all.
I agree an engine can be a good prototyping tool.