Animation Techniques used in Paragon and January Game Jam Theme Announcement - Live From Epic HQ

[huatson]

@iniside;688620

Hey

Not sure if you are still reading it.
I recently implemented bare bones (pun not intended), version of animation switching from Paragon.
As of now my implementation consis of bnuch of if’s with carefuly handrafted conditions, to decide where character is currently going (forwards, back, left, right) and while it somewhat working is nowhere near as smooth as it is in Paragon. There are occasional hitches due the inability to decided which direction character is going.

My question. Could you show us, how do you select current direction for animation ?

when you mention current direction for animation, you meant, what is the condition for select certain animation in the animgrah/event based in the character direction ?
using C++ is quite simple, you just need to extract the current player controller rotation normalized. if you want to get the absolute control rotation vectorized data:

float JoyRight, JoyUp;
FVector X(FVector::ZeroVector);
FVector Y(FVector::ZeroVector);
FVector Z(FVector::ZeroVector);

const FRotationMatrix R(Controller->GetControlRotation());
R.GetUnitAxes(X, Y, Z);

//or...
//X = R.GetScaledAxis(EAxis::X);
//Y = R.GetScaledAxis(EAxis::Y);
//Z = R.GetScaledAxis(EAxis::Z);

PCOwner->GetInputAnalogStickState(EControllerAnalogStick::CAS_LeftStick, JoyRight, JoyUp);

//current controller direction
FVector Direction = ((JoyRight* X) + (JoyUp* Y)).Normalize();

…if you use BP, the animinstance offers a const direction function with a float output. based on that they use a custom blendspace for the direction animations.