Working on preproduction for an animated short and I’m in need of some advice for how to approach some things. (for context, I have a good amount of UE4 and UE5 experience both with filmmaking and simple/intermediate game blueprint programming, having completed 3D shorts and a VR short in UE)
For a simple example of my problem - an outdoor scene on the sidewalk may have a dozen or so people just walking around.
I would like to be able to animate a few variations of walks in Maya, then in Unreal have all the people (skeletal meshes) use basically the same skeleton so all the animations could be applied to the different people.
How might I approach this in general?
My wants:
- animate a few walk variations in Maya for these BG characters (to start)
- be able to drop in different people actors (Pawns maybe?) in Unreal into the level, and have the different walk animations dynamically blend together based on parameters in the blueprints, with as much automation as possible (I’m ok with having to manually create “paths” for each character, though if there’s an easy way to have some of that be driven by blueprints that would be great, too)
- be able to adjust parameters on the character blueprints for things like Mood or speed, that would affect things in the animation (maybe animation blueprints??) like how the different animation assets are being blended together, but also it might be nice to be able to adjust bone rotations/positions for each so for example if a character has an attribute labeled “mood,” it might affect the spine rotation pitch up/down on the animation assets so the general pose is slightly different
I’m just not entirely sure how to approach this whole thing for use in the sequencer. I (generally…) understand how to create pawns and animation blueprints and blend spaces and all that, but this is all going to be need to be controlled quite closely for artistic reasons AND all need to work in the sequencer (having trouble getting things like pawns, etc, to play back properly in the sequencer).
I’ve messed with the Take Recorder a little though all the tuts online seem to be for recording a player character. Maybe that also works for NPCs?
All that feels a little over-complicated, but I would really love any suggestions / advice on how best to approach.