Sprint 6

 This week I worked on getting the transitional effect set up properly. The original slide from right to left of crows came across too cheaply. I instead decided to use a hand-drawn sprite sheet placed into a flipbook material to try and get that to render onto the post processing effect on command instead.

I ran into several issues with it. The first was getting it to show up at all, which was solved by a multiply node with the Post Processing 0 node. The second was getting the flipbook to render at the right scale. This was solved by ensuring that the rows and columns were set properly. The third was ensuring that it could be played on command as opposed to just continuously playing. The solution that I currently have set up for that is a IF statement that checks to see if two numbers are equal to each other. Then, within the blueprint I manually change that variable to ensure they are equal to each other when I want it to play.

Currently the effect plays twice, I'm doing this so that we have approximately how long it will take for the effect to play without me hand-animating all 20 of the frames without testing. This is a test that I will expand upon as I finish hand-drawing the animations for this flipbook now that I know it works within the engine.

Here are the two parts to the Blueprint I created to trigger the level transition:

On begin play I get the post processing, create a variable with it, set it to unbound, create a material instance of the material inside of the post processing material, and set the scalar parameter within that material instance called "ifZerothenPlay" to -1.

For this second half, I am first checking to make sure that the object overlapping the trigger box is the hands of the player. Then in a sequence, it does the following: 1. Get the material instance parameter of "ifZerothenPlay" and changes that to 0 in order to begin the flipbook animation. Then there is a delay so that the animation can play, before it is once again set to 1 to turn it off. 2. Get the current player camera and start a fade on it to black, with a slight delay. Then the level designated will open.

I plan to finalize the last 7 frames of the animation so that it is complete for a first pass in the following weeks. As a reminder written here: I will be having surgery to remove my gallbladder shortly and will know tomorrow (Monday) when that will be happening. It'll likely be in a few days / a week. My next turn it may have less work as a result of this.