Animation questions

Development Character & Animation
1

I have few questions about animation for a game:

  1. For making a game with a large number of characters would there be a way of reusing armatures or would I have to adjust each one seperately?
  2. For a main character that can have different animations depending on their weapon how would I implement it i.e different weapons like swords or a bow.

Thanks for the help in advance and please be as detailed as possible as I’m quite new at this :slight_smile:

2
  1. You should look into retargeting. Whether you use the same armature or different ones you will need to be able to retarget animations between skeletons. Although if I’m not mistaken you can make the characters all on the same armature and import them to the same skeleton.
  2. You would want to blend by Boolean inside the animation blueprint. Set a bool inside of the character (bow equipped? Or sword equipped?). Cast inside of the animation blueprint to the character and pull out those booleans and make the same Boolean variable inside of the animation blueprint and have them set by the character ones.
3
  1. Would it help if I had them as similar sizes for armature to blend easier and have separate ones for more unique characters?

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction too :slight_smile:

4

Yes that would definitely help. Most cases I always have to adjust the starting pose of bones with the engine (using the keyframe) inside the animation. Make sure to follow retargeting guides because it’s always good to do things such as the same pose between characters before retargeting.