WHAT
Laurent Delayen and Ray Arnett come on the stream to show how they are implementing character animations into Paragon. They will be pulling back the curtain and opening up their Anim Blueprints to show you the details of how everything works behind the scenes.
Also, we will be introducing , our new UE4 community manager for Europe! Come in and say hey.
Also also, stay tuned until the very end to get the January UE4jam theme!
WHEN
Thursday, January 14th @ 2:00PM ET - Countdown]
WHERE
WHO
Laurent Delayen - Sr. Programmer, Gameplay ](http://twitter.com/LDelayen)
Ray Arnett - Sr. Artist, Animation
Sr. Community Manager - ]()
Community Manager - ]()
Got questions for Laurent and Ray about animations? Let’s hear em!
How many corrective shapes are used on each character? The setup to trigger them inside the AnimBP is done based on each animation or is solely based on rotation angle? could you show an example of the setup?
Will you/are you implement something similar to 3 for animation blending, meaning very realistic behaviour based on what the player is looking at?
Are you using any particular setup inside the AnimBP for adding facial animation?
Finally something im really interested in! Definitely gonna check into this one…
Questions:
Animation:
Are you using mocap clips for the character anims or custom handmade animations?
Do all players share the same skeleton or does each player have his own skeleton with custom proportions and animations?
How is that then dealt with in the blueprints, are all the movement functions in a class that the individual characterBPs inherit from?
How did you do facial animations, with mocap or handmade? And do they show up ingame or only in cut-scenes?
Do you use any LOD system that involves the facial animation system? (or is facial only covered in LOD0 and all other LODs dont have facial rig?)
Are you using any form of IK solver for arms and legs?
Rigging (ignore these if you planning on a dedicated stream for character rigging in paragon):
Are you using ART to do the base character rigging or a completely custom solution?
Did you use any special technique to solve intersections between rigid pieces of armor on moving characters?
How are the facial rigs built? Completely bone based? Completely BlendShape based? Or a balanced mix? Are you using dynamic maps for wrinkles and blood flow? - if so, can you breakdown the system?
What technique are you using for hair physics? Dynamic joints? Cloth sim? Other? Nothing?
How detailed is your deformation rig in terms of anatomical deformation? (number of correctives, additional helper joints, etc.)
Some statistics: Number of LODs, avg number of bones per character/lod, avg number of polys per character/lod, 4 or 8 influences per vertex?
Thats it for now… Ill update this if I can think of more.
Question: Please put the facial joint vs blend shape discussion to bed …just kidding, but would like to know what you chose and why. Super excited to see this one.
If you are looking for a topic for future streams: I would love to see a stream about some programming. Especially the technical background of your networking stuff. Like, how did you setup a master server? How do you delegate a game to a specific server? Does every game has it’s own server instance or does each instance is running multiple games at the same time?
