How We Did Stairs Animations And The Challenges + Easier Second Floor Wall Placement (Patreon)

Good Friday to you’all :)! Alejandro and Richard here with our first Patreon post. 

First, we wanted to show you our new stairs locomotion, then our new tools for easier floor creation and finally a nice collection of bugs that we think all of you will enjoy seeing :)

Stairs Animations

As we are working on features related to floors, we also needed to have our characters move from one floor to the other. Chloé and Jérémie have been working on the stairs in the build mode, while Alice and I (Richard) have been working on the live mode part of it: character stair’s locomotion animations! 

The first step was to make the characters play the animation while moving on the stairs. But, one of the challenges is that we have different character heights. Imagine if you were a giant, you would be covering a long distance with a single step. In Paralives, the characters can’t be THAT tall, but the height difference still has an impact on the animations which causes feet to not land perfectly on the steps. Here are some examples:

The steps of my characters don’t cover the exact distance to correctly land on each step.

 Richard is now landing on the steps correctly because I changed the speed of the animation. But only characters with this height are animating well.

Here Alex is not moving at the correct speed.

Alice and I figured out how to fix all of those issues. We created multiple versions of our stairs animations for different character heights. Look at the result:

 Everyone’s animation is now fixed and looking good, let's go upstairs to party :D

Is it me or does this look nice?

Easier Second Floor Wall Placement

Hi! Alejandro here, first time writing for you all! I have been working on features to make it easier for you to build second floors and above.

When placing walls on the second floor, I made it so if there’s a curved wall on the first floor, it will snap to it and create the exact same curve.

The wall will automatically adapt with the curved wall below

And if you do not feel like having another curved wall, you still can place a straight wall if desired by pressing “ALT”.

Floor Duplication

Another feature I worked on that will facilitate the building of multiple floored buildings is the floor duplication.

 When selecting any floor, the duplicate floor button appears.

 It will duplicate everything on the floor, including rooms, items and swatch selection

We are thinking of adding more options like copying exterior walls only, for instance. However, for the first version we wanted something simple.

Bug Highlight Reel!

While trying stuff out, what happens can be pretty funny. Here are some of the best bugs.

 Before Alice found a solution in blender, I was trying something to make the animation look more natural. This wasn’t a success, we didn’t keep it :)

I may have mixed up the going down the stairs animation with the crawling one. Is that what we should do for toddlers?

Alice is in perfect control of the animation until there are no more stairs.  

This is it for us this week. We hope y’all like it :). This was fun for us to make, and we will be making more of them. Have a great weekend, eat your vegetables and see you next time 🙂! 

Alejandro and RichardEdit - July 18th, 2024: This post is now public, feel free to share it!