Join me tonight at 9PM GMT-5 to see how much life we can breathe into this pupper.
Mythruna - “Basic Dog Behavior” Live Stream
https://www.youtube.com/live/QZ8kgqrVdiA?si=hT6kOMUyrZPKbhle
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I really like how you added your own dog to your game, that’s really cool. I’ve always wanted to add my cat to my game, but since I stopped doing the modeling/animation myself I unfortunately don’t think I’ll be able to do that anytime soon.
Also I don’t know if you solved it yet or not, but I noticed you were talking about the issue with the dog looking like it was sliding when it would rotate/turn.
I don’t know If my solution is the best, but I give all of my long 4-legged enemies 2 different rotation speeds: one rotation speed for when they’re standing still, and then another much smaller rotation speed for when they are moving at their max speed. It seems like most of that sliding effect can be negated just by slowing the rotation speed while a long model is moving fast, since long things tend to naturally make wide turns. I always think of long models like a fast moving bus that can’t realistically do a sharp turn while moving. And then if they need to do a faster rotation, they will stop walking and stand still to do a sharp rotation before they are allowed to start walking fast again.
True. Though I can tell you from experience that my dog in real life can do a 180 degree turn. 
…short of a state machine that can pick from one of several situational animations, my plan is to do almost exactly what you say. Though I am also really tempted to make “walk in circle left” and “walk in circle right” animations for tighter turns.
One really big issue is that the origin for rotation seems to be over the front feet which makes the problem even worse as the back legs swing around. I need to debug whether that’s a model problem, a rig problem, or a physics engine problem (and several glue layers in between.)
This weekend I’m working on perception shapes, though. Trying to get the broad strokes in these next two weekends and then spend a week tweaking what’s left into a semi-releasable state.
Edit: to add…
I think I mentioned it in the stream but putting a real specific dog in the game was actually harder than just putting “any old dog” into the game. I took maybe 100 photos of my dog to try to get the model closer… it would have been way easier to just make a plain Labrador retriever.
So I 100% empathize with your being reluctant to model your own cat. It’s a job that screams for never-ending tweaks trying to approach perfection.
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