4.15 Animation Updates Preview - Feb 9th - Live From Epic HQ

[anonymous_user_b992fc6b]

Hey guys!

Late question but maybe someone will answer anyways :P.
My question is if there are any plans to adding nested blendspaces? In the stream you talked about the Speed -> Direction -> Angle(Slope) solution which is a great example. It would be great if I could add a blendspace into another blendspace for these kinds of things :). Thoughts?

[MaximeDupart]

Sequencer turning into Maya time editor?
New Blendspace is awesome

[xDiavalx]

Can you talk a bit about performance optimization strategies for animation, please? - For example a scenario with 50+ of animated enemies.
What would be good strategies/techniques to handle this?

[florianbepunkt]

Will this stream come to the youtube archive? Couldn’t find it there.

[nikolobin]

@iniside;664005

Probably to late for question but:

Will the distance matching from Paragon make it into engine sometime this year ?

This has been discussed, but there are a lot of dependency with other data, and curves, it has been a bit tricky to bring to engine. But there is possibility in the future. Watch Laurent’s stream.

[nikolobin]

@xDiavalx;665403

Can you talk a bit about performance optimization strategies for animation, please? - For example a scenario with 50+ of animated enemies.
What would be good strategies/techniques to handle this?

Use UpdateRateOptimization(URO), and with lots of LOD options. URO lets you choose how often they tick and whether they interpolate or not. We do this a lot in Paragon.

[nikolobin]

@nikolobin;667684

Use UpdateRateOptimization(URO), and with lots of LOD options. URO lets you choose how often they tick and whether they interpolate or not. We do this a lot in Paragon.

If you’re running dedicated server, we don’t tick animation unless they play montage due to gameplay related events.

[nikolobin]

@Widunder;665123

Hey guys!

Late question but maybe someone will answer anyways :P.
My question is if there are any plans to adding nested blendspaces? In the stream you talked about the Speed -> Direction -> Angle(Slope) solution which is a great example. It would be great if I could add a blendspace into another blendspace for these kinds of things :). Thoughts?

I think nested blendspace will be something we could consider instead of going for 3D. I’ll bring that up next time. Thanks for the idea.

[nikolobin]

@bishop86;664788

Hey, I guess it’s too late to ask but is it possible to play a root motion animation on an AI character with sequencer and have it actually affect the characters movement and not just move the mesh? At the moment I can’t seem to make this work. Also my character that uses an animation blueprint glitches all over the place if I play an animation with sequencer, I guess they are conflicting with each other?

I don’t think that would work. You should use slot node system if you’re using sequencer to play on AIs. In the track of sequencer, you can specify what slot node it’s playing on.
If you’re using slot node and root motion, in game it might work. In preview, it won’t work. Not sure if sequencer handles root motion properly.

[iniside]

@nikolobin;667683

This has been discussed, but there are a lot of dependency with other data, and curves, it has been a bit tricky to bring to engine. But there is possibility in the future. Watch Laurent’s stream.

Thanks. On stream it was said it will eventually make into engine, but that was quite a while ago.

I personally don’t even need everything from it (although it could be cool to have).
It would be nice to have parts of (Orientation Wrapping) and some samples.
I started working on it and hope to push into engine as plugin, but there are some headcaches I can’t get around (ie getting exact direction of movement for animation switching). Getting direction itself is trivial when moving only in y=-1 or 1 vector. What is hard is when you start to move diagonally it should still keep one cardinal direction (ie E or W), but turn character 45 degrees (in between E and N). Or I possibly overthink it.

[masterneme]

So now the UE Twitch channel is going to host dev’s streams, did I get that right?

[nikolobin]

@cyaoeu;663219

Question: are there any plans to improve the pose asset feature to enable “overdriving” poses (values over 1) similar to how you can have values over 1 for morph targets?

And another one: are there any plans to improve the animation curve editor by adding features like snapping and copy/paste?

>> overdriving -

I missed this. We tried that, but it was a lot more expensive to do that in normal blending. But I know what you mean about overdriving. You want to do like spring blending, and that requires over/under driving.
We still have that in our minds, but not on our short term plan yet.

>> curve editor

Yes we do. We’re going to change our whole curve editor to be more like sequencer, and that is something we plan to do this year or next, so when we do, it’s going to look like sequencer.

[nikolobin]

@iniside;667770

Thanks. On stream it was said it will eventually make into engine, but that was quite a while ago.

I personally don’t even need everything from it (although it could be cool to have).
It would be nice to have parts of (Orientation Wrapping) and some samples.
I started working on it and hope to push into engine as plugin, but there are some headcaches I can’t get around (ie getting exact direction of movement for animation switching). Getting direction itself is trivial when moving only in y=-1 or 1 vector. What is hard is when you start to move diagonally it should still keep one cardinal direction (ie E or W), but turn character 45 degrees (in between E and N). Or I possibly overthink it.

If you can, ask this question on answer hub, and Laurent can answer correctly.

Laurent wants to move to engine, but there are data dependency, - i.e. orientation warping caches certain data, the node will use that - and those are harder to explain. You can do everything inside of node, but then it’s less efficient.
If you ask this in answer hub, I’ll forward that to Laurent.

[nikolobin]

@Tenacity;663704

Really look forward to this. Are there any plans to release the bullet train project file. So much of that demo covers a wide range of VR interaction, AI movement etc etc. It would explain so much for us VR guys. Thanks in advance

Not that I know of. But I made mistake of saying that the pose snapping was used in bullet train. It wasn’t but it’s used in Robo Recall. And I don’t think we have a plan to release that project either.

[nikolobin]

@Xodroc;663486

Question: What’s a good way to get Foot IK working with Physical Animation Component without breaking collision?

Or I suppose you could forget physical animation component, is there a way to get IK to override parts of a ragdoll period? I would imagine the solution would apply to either.

Blending physics weight works, but breaks collision.

This doesn’t work. Physical animation is the one using animation to drive physics. It’s not blending between. Animation velocity is what drives physics. So IK won’t work.

If you want to do this, blending physics is the one in short term with feet being kinematic.

[nikolobin]

@MatzeOGH;663619

Any tips on how to implement adaptive start and stops? Is there a possibility of having I livestream about something like that?

If you’re talking about start/stop transition, Paragon does that, and Laurent talked about it in his twitch. Search for Laurent Delayen’s archive from UE4 streams.

[iniside]

@nikolobin;667903

If you can, ask this question on answer hub, and Laurent can answer correctly.

Laurent wants to move to engine, but there are data dependency, - i.e. orientation warping caches certain data, the node will use that - and those are harder to explain. You can do everything inside of node, but then it’s less efficient.
If you ask this in answer hub, I’ll forward that to Laurent.

Hey thanks for answers.
I posted it here:

Orientation Wrapping

[Cosmik-Debris]

@nikolobin;667689

I don’t think that would work. You should use slot node system if you’re using sequencer to play on AIs. In the track of sequencer, you can specify what slot node it’s playing on.
If you’re using slot node and root motion, in game it might work. In preview, it won’t work. Not sure if sequencer handles root motion properly.

Thanks. I’m already using slots to play the animations (right click the animation track and input slot name) but it doesn’t help. So I guess it doesn’t handle root motion at all. Would be awesome to have this feature some time! Currently sequencer is useless to me if it doesn’t support root motion I am trying to create first person sequences that are seamless with gameplay. If I was cutting to a different camera I could just switch to a copy of the character mesh and animate that, then cut back to the player camera and change the location of the AI character.

[Xodroc]

@nikolobin;667906

This doesn’t work. Physical animation is the one using animation to drive physics. It’s not blending between. Animation velocity is what drives physics. So IK won’t work.

If you want to do this, blending physics is the one in short term with feet being kinematic.

Thanks, I was left with the impression there was some special way of using IK to do it based on an older stream. Sounds like a good solution would be to use hit events to disable blending in certain circumstances. I was mainly hoping to have a fully “active” physics solution. I’ve seen it setup how I’d like it in motionbuilder, but translating that to UE4 has proven challenging.

[cyaoeu]

Thanks for the answers!

@bishop86;668030

Thanks. I’m already using slots to play the animations (right click the animation track and input slot name) but it doesn’t help. So I guess it doesn’t handle root motion at all. Would be awesome to have this feature some time! Currently sequencer is useless to me if it doesn’t support root motion I am trying to create first person sequences that are seamless with gameplay. If I was cutting to a different camera I could just switch to a copy of the character mesh and animate that, then cut back to the player camera and change the location of the AI character.

Root motion works in sequencer for me. (using a Character type blueprint)