Skater Gurl
With this project I wanted to challenge myself and learn more about scripting in Unreal Engine. This project grew when Kim showed me his model and asked if I wanted to animate and rig it. I took on the character, but I wanted to be able to skate around with it. When I was younger, I was a skater girl, and I have plenty of friends that still are. Therefore, I challenged myself to learn about scripting and made a prototype of a skating game.
Character Artist: Kim Kristiansson Stenberg
Scripting
Learning about scripting in Unreal Engine whilst making a skating game was not an easy task, but it was very rewarding. The hardest part of this wasn’t finding the resources on how to actually do this; I have great teachers and the whole internet as my source bank. But to get the controllers feel good and make the animations, IK and the modify bones to respond well when people where testing it I had to really understand my scripting, not just follow instructions.
Modified bones, IK feet and an Aligned Skateboard
rig and animation
As my reference, I used Sky Brown, the youngest professional skateboarder in the world, as well as my friend Björn Lundkvist. Sky was a great reference since she is such a young person, who is not so controlled in her movements, which was something I wanted in my character as well. Björn was on the other end of the spectra and let me get first hand experience and quick feedback.
I had made a squash and stretch spine before, but I wanted to push it further and so started looking at how I could implement IK stretch on the arms and legs. After adding it to the rig I could really exaggerate the kickflip, 360 flip and the push for speed move.
Problem solving
During the polish week I realized that my kickflip had a bug. After I had done a kickflip the IK was disabled and if I tried to do another flip after that, the skateboard would rotate, flip and eventually break the aligning with the ground. I had made a custom event for when the IK’s were supposed to be enabled and disabled when the kickflip would play, but there weren’t any issues with that. I tried several different solutions, basically rebuilding the blueprint from scratch. Of course my initial thought was that it was something wrong with the blueprint since it was my first time doing advanced scripting. It turned out to be a pretty basic solution. I had imported the skateboard and the character with different front axis, and none of the front axis followed unreal standard. When the jump played, the skateboard and the feet had a different component location and therefore could not sync.
