Best way to play 2 animations at the same time.. like breathing and eyes blinking and running or idl

Hello,

i am new to animation of characters. I tried a few things and learned a lot from the epic youtube channel. But i dont know what is the solution for the following problem:

I made an animation with morphs only for eyes blinking, and some other life like things to have a animation-loop that you can use on top of other animation. I mean you blink eyes when you run or while you stand idle, or even if you sitting down.
Dont want to make this eye blinking in every animation loop seperatly, so just once and blend them with other animations during time.
So Idle is a sperate animation as sitting down and run is also. But how do i blend the blink and lifelike morph/animation on top of the run, idle or sitting-down anim? I only find solution where i can blend 2 animations, but that´s not what i want, they should
play simultaniously and not one after the other.

How to do it?

I just want to use it in the sequencer, so it doesn´t have to be for the player during play status. I am doing a 360° VR film with the unreal engine and need some animations i create with iclone -> UE4.

Any hints i can use? Is it animation montage? Is it complex to do or just easy if i have the different loop animations?

Thank you for your help.

Martin.

I can think of a couple ways to accomplish this.

You need to have all of your character movements such as run, idle, start, walk, etc as parts of your animation state-space.

Then on top of that, you have a couple choices.

The first is to use Blend Nodes, where your base pose is the output of your statespace and the blinking and breathing animations are the additive poses using this:

The second is to have breathing and blinking set as animation montages. You can use the node at the bottom of this link to add montages on top of the usual statespace.

I used a combination of the two above methods to blend roars, calls, and bite attacks in an animated dinosaur with its usual walk / run / idle animations.

1 Like

Hi.
so animation montage is the way to look at. Thank you for that.
I think i tried it before but with no luck to play 2 animation or morph curves at the same time. It just let me play one after the other, thats not what i wanted.

Do i have to use the anim manager and use 2 different groups to add one animation to the other? In one group the run, walk and idle animation and in the other group the breathing and blinking eyes? Do they have to be the same group or has the other one to be an additive group?
Can´t really find the right youtube videos for that. Maybe someone has one, that helps me to get it right.

Remember i just want to play this anim montage in the sequencer. So it will be good not to work with anim blueprints, event graph or anim graph. Just a montage where i have setup a run cycle with life-like motions, a walk cycle with life-like motions and so on.

Thank you very much for your help!

Martin.

Oh, or is there a way where i can copy the morph curves in one animation to another animation. Let´s say i have made 20 complex morph curves with keyframe animation in one animation-file, let´s say idle. And now i don´t want to edit the same morph curves on the run-animation.
How can i copy the 20 morph curves to the other animation. I thougt that anim montage would be best for it, but maybe there is a better way to do it. :wink: Thank you for hints and help.

This doesn’t work at all.

Montages just override. They don’t play additively.

Blend nodes cause the character mesh to get massive and deformed.

I just want to play 2 anims simultaneously. Like the breathing example.

Custom Metahumans - Auto Blinking using additive animation in Unreal Engine 5.1 - YouTube

Skeleton Reference Pose at 7:50 and then choosing play additive or play space mesh additive solved my blinking issue and not freezing my avatar in T-Pose

if you dont do the 7:50 fix, your avatar goes big and deformed