Yesterday, I worked pretty hard. I had the exciting discovery that Rigify was updated to include FK/IK settings and customizable bone layers. All very exciting! (please excuse me if this was updated years ago). This discovery led to a rigging/weight painting session for my very basic enemy soldier. It was amazing! I had him rigged and weighted within a half hour! Now, to be fair, there's still some weighting issues… but to see a character at the point of animation within a half hour was unbelievable to me. So, I threw on a quick walk cycle, and then the horribleness began.

Chris was super excited to have a character to import into the game engine. Which meant that we started the exporting frustration stage. We have used several different game engines, and every time we try to export something from blender into the engine, something invariably doesn't work. This time, foregoing the rig, we were fantastic! He looked great in the engine! Try to add the rig and animation… yeah, it wouldn't export. We had some sort of vertex masking exception. This was nearing midnight last night, so I didn't pursue the error.

Then came this morning. Open up my blend file, and the rig went wonky! Suddenly hand and toes and fingers were all on backwards! SOOOOO frustrating. I confess to being lazy and just deleting the rig and redoing it (partly out of lingering excitement as to how easy this process was yesterday). This time I did adjust my model instead of the rig. I'm hoping that will prevent anymore rig wonkiness in the future.

So, that's the story so far. Here's the basic soldier with his basic walk cycle.