#mcpink

so first thing's first, i (sorta) got head tracking to work. the reason it wasn't before is because cpm doesn't let you deform top level stuff (head, arms, body, you get it) so i had my structure set up like this

which of course makes sense if i'm needing to deform everything. where it breaks is if you don't disable vanilla animations, it screws everything up. and to get head tracking you need to enable vanilla animations on the head. i got around it by just cutting and pasting the rotation and position keyframes from "head part" to "head." for whatever reason it doesn't work when you're moving though which i'll have to figure out.

i also added start and end animations for everything. it doesn't look like it because they are extremely short but i just took the start frames from one animation and the end frames from another and put them next to each other. making them longer would smooth things out, but it would also delay the animation it switching to. give a little get a little. but i'll figure that out when i refine everything.

towards the end you may have noticed a "bomb" emote which does a hand raising motion. that's because i did a self-destruct emote and didn't realize until too late that i was doing stuff way outside of cpm's capabilities. it was a 3 part thing that summoned a bomb which then blew up. but everything was on different textures, so if i wanted to implement it i would have to merge it all and then fix all the uvs. even if i did all that, i also did a charred texture which if used would require me to figure out how to swap out textures which is its own hassle and i don't even know if it's possible. not having it kinda takes away from it. so for right now a stripped down version is kinda here but may be cut later.

on that note, i also modeled bombs and a staff. they'll either be joined at a later point like i mentioned or put in a resource pack

not sure what i'll do with the summoning frames. probably ditch them if i don't end up trying to merge everything.

and so now technical issues.

first off, the cpm plugin uninstalled itself and i had to reinstall it and then import the cpmproject file because i'd already saved over the bbmodel file, which caused a bunch of things to break. i had to copy over several animations manually. the biggest offender was that all the tail animations disappeared, so i had to copy+paste the keyframes for all 4 segments from the original bbmodel file. i'm also a little bit dumb and didn't realize that math frames didn't transfer into cpm. so since i can't use sine waves i have to go through everything and keyframe all the trembling manually at some point.

also for some reason in addition to the head tracking being fucky, the crouching is just totally broken. the movement works, but the second it stops it just reverts to the default pose. i need to figure that out, of course.

oh, and another consequence of the way my structure works is that i'll have to go and key in held item locations manually.

so for animations left to do, i need to make a climbing animation, a sitting/riding animation, elytra flying, creative flying, swinging/hand movements, eating/drinking, wading, jumping, bow animations, crossbow animations, trident animations, blocking animations, spyglass animations, goat horn animations, brush animations, crawling animations, and then spear animations. if i wanna be extra with it then based on the dropdown menu i also seem to be able to do on fire, freezing, speaking, muted, health, hunger, air, using container, invisible, and light level. i can only infer what a couple of those mean and doing invisible seems like a massive waste of time but i do want this thing to be as expressive as possible so i'll probably do them (minus invisibility because what)

then for assets i need to do armor. i have plans for what i'm gonna do with that but for now i'm leaving it for later.

and then polish stuff i need to do. mostly just adding back in facial expressions to stuff like the stomping and bomb animations, but i also want to add blinking. i also added a spiky end to the tail for when the emotion is scared or angry. a lot of this is show/hide keyframes which i can only do reliably in cpm, so that's probably gonna be some of the last stuff i do. and then of course i need to retime the walking animation. the running and sneaking animations are actually fine but the walk is a bit slow. and then i might do a final texture pass and reorganize it to be more accessible too.

so overall, uh. well. work is being done at the very least. it's not being finished tomorrow that's for sure. but yeah.