Creating the Minion NPC Base

This week I made a start on a base class for Minion NPCs. The main subclasses for Nemesis: Showdown at this stage will be the Henchmen for the Villain, and the Police for the Hero. They will be AI controlled and will eventually have tasks such as protecting areas and battling the enemy player.

This time around however, I noticed a repeated problem with the skeletons of the meshes during conversion and after going to the Mixamo Converter discord for help, I discovered that I had done the conversion process incorrectly the first time, causing the most extreme bones on the skeletons to be removed (which probably led to the fingers and faces of the player characters to be a bit off during animations).

The un-converted skeleton of the Hero's mesh on Mixamo.com

The same skeleton after I converted it for Unreal (missing extremities)

Converted Hero flying animation has head following neck bone, so it is lowered

Original skeletal mesh with the flying animation. Head is higher up and more alert

The solution was found however, and the Hero/Villain models & animations will be re-uploaded in the future. After this, I gathered the Rider mesh and rifle animations from Mixamo and utilised the Mixamo Converter application by Terribilis Studio to make them Unreal-ready.

I then found a rifle in a free gun pack on the Unreal Marketplace, created a socket on the skeleton, and attacked the gun mesh to the socket, angling and positioning it until I found the best fit. A slightly infuriating issue I found is that the Mixamo animations aren't consistent with the hand placements, as I'm not using the gun model (or mesh) the animations were originally created for. This caused some off-sync situations in some animations, where the rifle doesn't make contact with the character's off-hand.

I added a base set of animations, such as walking, idle and shooting, and made a start with the Anim BP.

Adding a Socket to the Minion's Skeleton

Aiming animation - the gun fits in both hands

The rifle is off-sync during certain animations