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5. Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers
- If you haven't already, grab and install everything from the Prerequisites page.
- Familiarize yourself with some of the common things to all 3 games when it comes to making models.
- Grab one of the templates from this page. These are pre-made, animated kart ready to just drop in and attach a character.
To add your character model to the kart template, go File > Append
Find the blend file for the character you want to add
Then go into objects and select the model geometry and armature
Alternatively if you're organized and use Collections, you can just select the collection that the character model is in
Click Append, and your model is now added!
If your character isn't at the correct scale, simply scale it to fit the kart. You don't need to adjust the position of the character, as that gets applied in the next section.
Assuming your character is rigged and has a root bone; to connect your character to the kart, first go into edit mode and select the root bone
Move the bone to approximately where your character would be sitting on
With the root bone still selected, now go into pose mode and go to the Bone Constraint properties
Add a Copy Location modifier
For the Target, select the "kart_armature", and for the Bone, select "seat_pos"
If done correctly, the character should snap to the seated position, and will now animate with the existing kart animation
If the character isn't seated quite correctly, instead of trying to adjust the root bone position, move the seat_pos bone in the kart armature.
Within Blender you can use whatever methods you'd like to animate your model; whether it be using an armature, shapekeys, or moving the objects raw. Everything has to be animated on the single timeline provided, not using separate actions on the Action Editor.
Since DRRR characters all have the same, universal action names and frame numbers, you don't need to worry about the frame markers as they are all included.
Some characters have more than one frame of animation for their death sprite. In this case, as the death animation is the last animation on the timeline, all you need to do is extend the timeline for as many frames as needed.
An optional step to make making the death animation a bit easier; go to the second last frame on the timeline, select the characters root bone and go to the Bone Constraint properties tab. On the Copy Transform modifier, click the dot next to the "Influence" bar to create a keyframe
Next go to the last frame, change the Influence to 0, and click the dot/diamond to create another keyframe
While not entirely necessary, this will make the root bone moveable again, instead of being locked to the seat_pos bone. This may make things a little easier to pose.
The guide text is there to make it much easier to identify the purpose of each animations. This guide is unselectable, meaning it can't be exported into the .md3. If it gets in your way while animating, simply hide the collection named "guide".