After half a year at House of Math (HoM), it became apparent that the old dragon pet animation system needed a rework. We had 3 different dragons, and a bunch of different animations for each of them and wanted to add even more. Our goal was to improve the current rigs – but also to unite it all under one system, so one animation could be played on all 3 dragons, vastly reducing the animation work needed. What’s more we wanted the users to be able to buy clothes for their dragons adding another layer of complexity.
With this in mind I set to work…
Nobody had ever made a dynamic clothing system for our game engine (PlayCanvas) that we knew of, so I had to do a fair amount of experimentation to figure out how to do this. What’s more the 3 dragons already existed on the portal, and they had not been designed with any of this in mind. Their differences in anatomy was the second biggest challenge for this project, since that meant an animation couldn’t just be directly played on different dragons, nor would a piece of clothing necessarily fit. The final solution accounted for all these things, and although there was a lot of complexity behind the scenes, the result was a “super rig” which translated its animation to all 3 dragons, and a dynamic clothes-fitting system, which allowed the same asset to be fit to the 3 different dragons, thus significantly reducing redundancy.
I was very happy with the end result, though more than anything I got very intimately familiar with the many considerations to be made when designing such a system. Next time I hope I can be there from very start – before anyone decides to make 3 anatomically different dragons with completely different UV sets!
(All animations and clothes depicted in the video was also made by yours truly.)
