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Description

Hey guys, it has been a long time. I hate to make my first art post in a long time a Minecraft mod post, but this one is particularly special to me as in the artist comments, I want to leave a reminder to myself of just how difficult this particular project.

This is Immortal Arcanine, inspired by the Immortal unit from Starcraft II and is the signature addition to the upcoming Legacy of the Void update to my Minecraft modification, Kindred Legacy.

Immortal Arcanine is easily the 2nd, almost arguably the most difficult mob model to animate for my Minecraft modification. Yah, this gives Bloodmoon Ninetales a run for its money in terms of difficulty.

This mob features pretty much every major animation feature already in the mod. BUT, what made this one so hard? Well, I will run you by all 5 of the new addition challenges I had to overcome with this guy:

1) New leg animations

A long standing standard now for all mobs, particularly the 4 legged ones, are the movement animations; Almost seamless transitions from all unique movement animations including idle, walking, running, and jumping/falling. However, the ability to add turning animations has long been available too, just not applied to the legs. Arcanine now features a very subtle turn animation with its legs.

However, while doing this, I went back and did extensive testing to figure out that my walk and run animations overlapped when they really should have been exclusive. So I went to fix this and it was excruciatingly difficult to fix. REMEMBER: I control all animations with ALGEBRA. I have to come up with the math equations to make this work.

2) New tail animations

For the longest time, I was never truly happy with the run/walk tail animations but I could never figure out how to get them to do what I really wanted. After doing the leg animations, I sat myself down and worked this out. It took some crazy trigonometry to pull it off, but finally, I got it to behave exactly like I always wanted it to.

Okami Espeon has also been update with the new features above, but that is the only other mob to get these new standard setters. Opened up Okami Sylveon, and that shut my attention span down almost instantly. x.x’

3) Mounting animation

YUP! You read that right. Arcanine is a mountable mob in the modification. However, when mounted, Arcanine will not have usable cannons (this was due to concerns about making Arcanine game breaking by being able to kite enemies). To impress upon the player the guns were not in use, I wanted them to be rotated up and behind the seated player.

Sounds simple, right? ...right?

Nope, this was very complicated to figure out and I even posted a help request on the Minecraft Forge Forums to figure out how to attempt this. This problem revisited my old nemesis of Client/Server side discrepancies. Animations happen on the Client side but knowing if a character is mounted only happened on the Server and I had to figure out how to get the Server to tell the Client a mob was mounted, which amazingly has never been simple.

With the help of the forums, they gave me the idea for a cheap trick that works beautifully and even better, allowed me to actually perform an animation upon mounting. So when you get on Arcanine, you actually see the cannons rotate up and back.

4) Conditional cannon aiming

Getting a mob with a cannon or whatever is pretty easy to animate in Minecraft. What you do is tell the model to take the “mob looking at you” values (or head animation as I call it) and apply them to the model part.

But… how do you animate that so it only points its cannons when it is actually going to shoot? Otherwise it would look awfully strange for Arcanine to be point its guns everywhere like a paranoid soldier.

Like mounting, it sounded like it should have been an easy thing when I first realized I needed to do it but it too wasn’t for the same reason. Thankfully, the mounting animation fix could fix this problem as well. The cannons were already complicated to animate and this added yet another layer of math to what you see in the challenge below.

5) Aiming the cannons

So above I mentioned you can just copy/paste the head animation code to get a mob to point a cannon at you. I could simply do that here, no? Wrong. In the top right screenshot, if you look closely, you will notice the cannons are angled slightly towards the head. I didn’t want the cannons straight up and down. I wanted them to look more organic.

I knew this would take a little work to work out but it ended up being soul crushing to do. I’m typing this now and I can’t even fathom how I finally got the algebra to work. But I spent hours upon hours pushing math around to finally get the cannons stay line up to actually point at the target. (and yes, it does aim upwards and downwards too).

I also had to set up maximum rotations so the parts didn’t rotate through the body or the floor. Somehow even this wasn’t simple to add to the rest of the animations.

----------------------------------

So there you go with my mini-dev blog on what it took to get Immortal Arcanine to where it is now. A lot of why I wanted to write this was for a personal reminder of the extreme difficulties I overcame with this, because otherwise, Arcanine feels rather underwhelming to tie up so much of the mod development for months.

Immortal Arcanine is extremely useful to the player. 1) it is mountable; 2) its cannons are anti-armor, they don’t just ignore armor, they punish mobs with high armor by dealing bonus damage based on armor stat. This makes Arcanine extremely useful against the heavily armored mobs like Clay Commaner Delcatty, Clay Luxio, Armored Luxray, and the newest mob addition, Proxy Pylon Carbink. As such, Arcanine is a very late game/mod mob to get; probably one of the last ones you pick up due to how expensive it is.

Description

Hey guys, it has been a long time. I hate to make my first art post in a long time a Minecraft mod post, but this one is particularly special to me as in the artist comments, I want to leave a reminder to myself of just how difficult this particular project.

This is Immortal Arcanine, inspired by the Immortal unit from Starcraft II and is the signature addition to the upcoming Legacy of the Void update to my Minecraft modification, Kindred Legacy.

Immortal Arcanine is easily the 2nd, almost arguably the most difficult mob model to animate for my Minecraft modification. Yah, this gives Bloodmoon Ninetales a run for its money in terms of difficulty.

This mob features pretty much every major animation feature already in the mod. BUT, what made this one so hard? Well, I will run you by all 5 of the new addition challenges I had to overcome with this guy:

1) New leg animations

A long standing standard now for all mobs, particularly the 4 legged ones, are the movement animations; Almost seamless transitions from all unique movement animations including idle, walking, running, and jumping/falling. However, the ability to add turning animations has long been available too, just not applied to the legs. Arcanine now features a very subtle turn animation with its legs.

However, while doing this, I went back and did extensive testing to figure out that my walk and run animations overlapped when they really should have been exclusive. So I went to fix this and it was excruciatingly difficult to fix. REMEMBER: I control all animations with ALGEBRA. I have to come up with the math equations to make this work.

2) New tail animations

For the longest time, I was never truly happy with the run/walk tail animations but I could never figure out how to get them to do what I really wanted. After doing the leg animations, I sat myself down and worked this out. It took some crazy trigonometry to pull it off, but finally, I got it to behave exactly like I always wanted it to.

Okami Espeon has also been update with the new features above, but that is the only other mob to get these new standard setters. Opened up Okami Sylveon, and that shut my attention span down almost instantly. x.x’

3) Mounting animation

YUP! You read that right. Arcanine is a mountable mob in the modification. However, when mounted, Arcanine will not have usable cannons (this was due to concerns about making Arcanine game breaking by being able to kite enemies). To impress upon the player the guns were not in use, I wanted them to be rotated up and behind the seated player.

Sounds simple, right? ...right?

Nope, this was very complicated to figure out and I even posted a help request on the Minecraft Forge Forums to figure out how to attempt this. This problem revisited my old nemesis of Client/Server side discrepancies. Animations happen on the Client side but knowing if a character is mounted only happened on the Server and I had to figure out how to get the Server to tell the Client a mob was mounted, which amazingly has never been simple.

With the help of the forums, they gave me the idea for a cheap trick that works beautifully and even better, allowed me to actually perform an animation upon mounting. So when you get on Arcanine, you actually see the cannons rotate up and back.

4) Conditional cannon aiming

Getting a mob with a cannon or whatever is pretty easy to animate in Minecraft. What you do is tell the model to take the “mob looking at you” values (or head animation as I call it) and apply them to the model part.

But… how do you animate that so it only points its cannons when it is actually going to shoot? Otherwise it would look awfully strange for Arcanine to be point its guns everywhere like a paranoid soldier.

Like mounting, it sounded like it should have been an easy thing when I first realized I needed to do it but it too wasn’t for the same reason. Thankfully, the mounting animation fix could fix this problem as well. The cannons were already complicated to animate and this added yet another layer of math to what you see in the challenge below.

5) Aiming the cannons

So above I mentioned you can just copy/paste the head animation code to get a mob to point a cannon at you. I could simply do that here, no? Wrong. In the top right screenshot, if you look closely, you will notice the cannons are angled slightly towards the head. I didn’t want the cannons straight up and down. I wanted them to look more organic.

I knew this would take a little work to work out but it ended up being soul crushing to do. I’m typing this now and I can’t even fathom how I finally got the algebra to work. But I spent hours upon hours pushing math around to finally get the cannons stay line up to actually point at the target. (and yes, it does aim upwards and downwards too).

I also had to set up maximum rotations so the parts didn’t rotate through the body or the floor. Somehow even this wasn’t simple to add to the rest of the animations.

----------------------------------

So there you go with my mini-dev blog on what it took to get Immortal Arcanine to where it is now. A lot of why I wanted to write this was for a personal reminder of the extreme difficulties I overcame with this, because otherwise, Arcanine feels rather underwhelming to tie up so much of the mod development for months.

Immortal Arcanine is extremely useful to the player. 1) it is mountable; 2) its cannons are anti-armor, they don’t just ignore armor, they punish mobs with high armor by dealing bonus damage based on armor stat. This makes Arcanine extremely useful against the heavily armored mobs like Clay Commaner Delcatty, Clay Luxio, Armored Luxray, and the newest mob addition, Proxy Pylon Carbink. As such, Arcanine is a very late game/mod mob to get; probably one of the last ones you pick up due to how expensive it is.