Spiky Block Blueprint Class

The Spiky Block, or SpikyDAD like I like to call him is a simple hard working grunt that guards treasure 24/7. This subspecies of SpicusBlokus is a very simple life form. All they know how to do is hover above the ground motionless and because of their small brains they startle very easily, causing them to lose their breath and fall down temporarily. Here we see them in their natural habitat, really just there occupying space until Jumping Jim walks underneath them. Even then they aren't really much of a threat and Jim would have to stop moving to actually be crushed. Still, SpikyDADs try their best. Bless their hearts.....and their potato brains. They have no ill will towards Jim but their small brains can't help getting startled when Jim walks under them. SpikyDADs are outfitted with the latest fashion of spiky golf cleats to protect them from the harsh world.

          

 This challenge assignment was a nice wrap up to the basic blueprint material. It really challenged me to try to incorporate all the basic blueprint techniques and knowledge I have learned over the past weeks. Animating with the timeline made it much easier to organize and optimize my node network. Although animating with the timeline in Unreal isn't the most glamorous feature. 

            

Here is the Blueprint Event Graph for all the features and animations

   I tried my best to keep everything relatively clutter free and organized. Since I am a very visual learner it serves as a reminder to stay focused and organized instead of cluttered and chaotic.

   Originally after the initial class when we created our character we didn't jump into dynamic materials or animating the facial features. I decided to try and make the shadow scale, and have a dynamic color changing material before the following class. That is why there are two different styles of color changing. The eyes change color with the use of a timeline, where as the body changes colors in a more manual way. I used a series of nodes, with exact hex color codes to change the color of the main body blue and then back to the original color. Later when we were introduced to color graphs in timeline I decided to have the eyes utilize the timeline and the body stay separate with its own line of code. Simply because I wanted to keep a visual reminder that there are 7 billion ways to crack an egg.

   Everything other than the timeline is very basic, using the event begin play node to gather the relative locations and scale of actors on the top left. Camera shake and play sound cue on the top right, nothing innovative on my side since its very basic and just as how my instructor showed us.