Greetings!
How do I animate a character operating a boat? I can animate the movement of the boat, and the entry, but I don’t know how to animate the character rowing in response to the user’s input.
There’s no response or information in these forums I could find.
Well, do you already have some basic animations for your character rowing? If so, then you could just use a Blend node between your idle and rowing animations. The blend value could be bound to the VectorLength of your player input vector.
There are two ways of doing the.
The first is to physically (kinematically) moving the oars, and then using IK to place the hands on the oar handles. If you look for “kinematic animation” and “Inverse Kinematics” in the documentation, you can find references to the functions and objects involved.
The second is to animation “rowing” similar to how to animate “walking.” You build animations for the skeleton in a tool like Maya or Blender, and import them into the engine, configure them for the skeleton, and then add them to some kind of “rowing” blend space that you can call from your animation blueprint when the character is “rowing.”
Thanks for the response. To be clearer, my point is that I need to be able to call these animations during a POSSESSION of an inanimate object. How does my boat access my character’s animation blueprint?
If you don’t mind, see above.
Wait, maybe I was thinking of this wrong.
***Should I not possess the boat in the first place? ***
Should the coding only be in my character’s event graph, and not the boat’s?
As in, I should attach him and have boat animations firing once a condition has been met? Will that work?
Because when I possess the boat, I can’t access any of the character’s animations while he’s in the boat.
I’m pretty sure that the mannequin will process its animation blueprint even when not possessed, so you likely will need to posses the boat pawn. If your boat is a skeletal mesh, then you could just create a “Rowing” state in both the boat and mannequin animation blueprints. Just make sure you retrieve the Blend node input values from your player controller.
As long as your AnimBP’s depend on the player controller, it shouldn’t matter what is possessed; I only suggest possessing the boat because it will be easier to process inputs and movement.
Am I screwed that the boat is a static mesh? Because I know that if it’s a skeletal mesh I can assign an animation blueprint.
(I’m a 3 month beginner, so I really appreciate your patience).
Not at all! However, you presumably need a way to move the oars, yes? So the easiest way would be to rig and animate the boat as a skeletal mesh. However, you could instead use Blender (or your preferred software) to separate the oar meshes, and then use a Timeline to rotate them in your boat Blueprint.
“A static mesh” is a form of presentation. You can add a static mesh component to a Pawn blueprint / subclass. Thus, you can make a BP_Boat Pawn subclass, and possess that, to make sure the boat gets the player controller input.
You could then Attach Actor to Actor to place the Character in the appropriate seat in the boat. The Character subclass (maybe a BP_Character or whatever) can then either know that it’s attached, and extract the BP_Boat from its attach parent, OR you can make the player controller update a “TheBoat” property on the Character which it can use to control the animation blueprint of the Character.
Your character animation blueprint would probably have an “in boat” state, where it had a sitting pose, and used a blend space for the steering/rowing/whatever action.
…oh, no, no, no… no you don’t. Unreal is enough. I’m not adding Blender to the list. Thank you for the help! It worked out!
OMG… I never even considered that! Thank you. I’ll mark my question as answered. You, and “Jmancoder” have helped a great deal.
