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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