I have this mining drone. I want to animate the arms. I can think of 2 ways to accomplish this:
I can use actual animations, which will probably deform the model at the joints and I am unsure about how it will handle the twisting/rotating.
I can use timelines and transforms/rotators to move them, but this will require a lot of timelines and timing to get the movements right.
In total, there are 10 pivot points (elbows, blue arrow) and 9 rotation points (red arrow). I already have the arms divided up into separate static meshes, preparing to do it with method 2.
Is there another animation method that handles ridged models better, that I am overlooking?
Which method would be easier (opinions)?
Which will have better performance?
Any other suggestions on how to do this that aren’t mentioned here?
This will be a cornerstone of gameplay (gathering resources), but the animation will be relatively low impact (you’ll mostly be watching/doing other things). I am hesitant to put a ton of effort into this, but I do want it to look good.
The best and easiest way is to create the animation inside Blender and bake it into fbx file. Then, you can implement the usage of anim notifiers to trigger a specific function, for example, the moment the object being attached to the arms. You might be right, using timeline(s) to do this can be quite messy.
Hey there @Elryk1! I agree with Legion, for the most part baked animations (built with Inverse Kinematics) would work for your use case, unless you wanted the joints and hands to be able to procedurally move a bit, then you could set up IK inside of Control Rig in Unreal and that would allow more controlled movement, but the setup would be more complicated. Since you mentioned the animations will be of low impact, I’ll assume standard baked animations should be fine.
Here’s a video in blender of a solid way to rig hard surface models like this:
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Thank you both for your input. I hadn’t considered doing the animations in blender. I only really use blender for minor fixes to my models (mostly face shading fixes). With that video and a few others I have found, I think I can make it work this way.
It seems I have a lot of tedious work ahead of me to rig an animate these arms, but it does look like the best of the 3 options.
If you’re more accustomed to working in Unreal’s control rig suite, you could handle rigging and animation there, it would also allow you to use the IK if you wanted to handle procedural animation, grip positions, and generally having more control at the cost of some more effort/performance.
If you have any questions about either workflow, let us know!
