Corpsephage's Blog

 We've made a character model in Blender , and we've added bones to it so we can move it around. Now we can start moving this character into poses which we can save to create animations.

Now we've made a character in Blender , we can start adding bones to them in a process called "rigging". We can move around these bones to move around parts of the character's body. We animate our character by moving these bones around into a pose, saving the pose then moving the bones again to create another pose. We can put these poses into a precise order to make them play one after the other, creating an animation.

 Before we move on to rigging and animating the character, I'm going to take a very quick look at adding clothes to your character. The simplest way I know of doing it is to take some of the geometry from your character mesh, separate it into its own object, then use the solidify modifier to thicken it out.

I don't know how to set up 2D character controls in Godot. I'll just confess that right now. I've tried, ladies and gents - I've drafted this same blog post four times, each time trying to approach the problem of 2D movement from a different angle - and every time, without fail, something has screwed up, and I've not been able to find a shred of information online on how to fix it. October is a very busy month for me, and I'm already days behind on my monthly schedule, because I've been spending way too much time trying to figure out problems like why my character won't go up slopes or why they constantly jump in mid-air. I've been watching several tutorials on the subject of 2D movement, but all of them approach it from a different perspective, which only ended up confusing me more. And honestly, I think if I tried to make a from-scratch movement tutorial here, it would only contradict all the other tutorials out there and confuse you even more. Bu...

We now know how to create a set of tiles to draw into our 2D game, and can now form a level in which to put a 2D character. But before we do that, we need to make sure that our tiles have colliders - otherwise our character would just fall right through them.

While working on my write-up for 2D character controls, I hit a snag - I didn't have anywhere to actually put the character to test their controls. For a 3D test, I would've just put in a plane mesh for them to walk on or something, but in 2D everything visible is a sprite, and there's just no way I or anybody else is going to hand-draw every little platform in the game one-by-one - which is why God gave us tile sets. Tiles are the literal building blocks that the stages of every pixel-looking game are made out of. They're little squares that are copy-pasted all throughout the game to form floors, walls and the like.

Using what we've learned in our last Blender tutorial ( https://corpsephageblog.blogspot.com/2023/09/beginning-with-blender.html ) we can now try making our own character model. I've started off in a simple default Blender scene with a cube right in the middle. I'm looking right at it on the X axis, by clicking the red X on the compass in the top-right corner of the viewport. Now, this isn't really going to be a tutorial, because there's no right or wrong way of making a character model - as long as you've got a shape that looks like a character by the end, you've got something you can add bones to and animate, and it doesn't matter too much about what you used to make it (mostly - if your shape's very complicated and got billions and billions of vertices on it, you might have to make another layer on top of it that's just simple low-poly geometry, so it's more manageable to animate).