I’m currently working on creating my game’s movement locomotion in UE 4.27.2 and I’ve downloaded what I could find to study them but all of them are quite advanced for me use different approaches. To list them; ALS, GAS(in separate UE 5.4.4) and someone uploaded City Sample’s movement with some parts missing.
I want to create a smooth and responsive system, having run start and run stop animations, IK support and, realistic looking smooth movement similar to games like RDR2, and probably many AAA titles. I wanna add my own flavor to the locomotion but I need to get it right first!
I can settle for a lot less than AAA quality of course but I wanted to describe what I’m aiming for. I’m learning by studying these systems but there’s a lot under the hood which I cannot fully comprehend. If there’s a course or tutorial for this case, and some can point me in a direction I’d be grateful!
How quick your animations should start playing depends on how you handle the triggers in your character blueprint.
Locomotions aren’t divided into two being IK supported and not supported ones. You just add control rigs on top of the animations that are currently playing.
This doesn’t have anything to do with locomotions either, the smoothness between animations can be adjusted to your liking. By smooth movements, if you mean motion matching animations, you can check out the Game Animation Sample Project which you can download for free via Epic Launcher!
Now, there are many great tutorials out there that you can find online, but I think this one right here is the simplest one:
If you don’t have an animation blueprint yet, you can watch the previous video in the series which is the #9
You can handle different locomotions like ground movement, air movement, etc. by creating seperate state machines for them.
I may misuse some terminology as I’m not well versed on the subject.
I will check the tutorial you’ve attached.
I already have a simple locomotion if that’s the correct word. A simple Idle/Walk/Run/Sprint with blendspaces. It works good with quality animations, but I want more out of it. The projects I’ve mentioned all feel very responsive as when you move towards right the feet movement act accordingly, you feel a certain momentum while starting running and stopping as the character quickly but not instantly comes to a halt.
Tbh, ALS is very complicated for me to understand completely even in a few weeks. GAS was really awesome too, but that one uses Motion Matching and root animations, which I cannot make use of as I’ll be using UE 4.27 with no Motion Matching feature and also I’ll avoid using root motion animations for the movement for now. Maybe later I’ll be able to incorporate them together.
All I want is to understand the logic behind it. AimOffsets(for later), animation blends with upper and lower body, start and stop run animations, smooth transitions etc… I don’t want to slap a system I found online and call it a day. I want to create it from scratch so I can have control over it as I will expand and build on top of it.
Many tutorials now are for UE5 and it’s not easy to find anything for UE4.27, and also this one is a bit more advanced and there’s not a lot of resources to be found everywhere.
I think the simplest way of doing this would be triggering another state once your normal movement state is done, where you’ll play slowing down / speeding up animations respectively (btw you can have both in the same state) and create blend spaces for each of these to adjust them to different speeds.
You can use the Layered blend per bone node, plug an animation or a locomotion (I refer to state machines by locomotions, and by plugging a locomotion in, I mean plugging the cached pose. You can create a cached pose by dragging the output pin of a state machine out, releasing it on an empty space and typing in “cached” on the menu that pops up, and selecting the New Save cached pose option.) into the base pose, then plug the animation which you want to only affect a specific part of the body into the input (Source) pin of a slot node (You can right click on an empty space, type in “default slot” and select the "Slot ‘DefaultSlot’ " option. Then click on the node that has just been placed, navigate to the details window, and under the Settings section, click on the bar next to the Slot Name setting and change it from the default one to your desired one.) and plug the output pin of that slot node into the Blend Poses 0 pin of the Layered Blend per Bone node. Also, to create a new slot for your character, you can simply open up an animation asset, navigate to the Anim Slot Manager window (if it’s not open, you can open it by navigating to the Window option in the menu on the top left and selecting it) and click on the Add Slot button.
That’s exactly the right way of actually learning things! You’re on the right track!
I think the course I’ve provided is a pretty good starting point. (Don’t mind the leaning part of the tutorial, I just wanted you to check out the state machine part of it) You can add more things on top of it like creating a main locomotion (state machine); separating locomotions for ground movement, air movement etc.; using the Apply Space Mesh Additive node to blend your existing movement animation / blend space with that leaning blend space if you like to use that as well; and more!
I hope I was able to guide you on your objective of course there are more things to cover but I think these would suffice to get you a better grasp on the context. Good luck!
Thanks for your time on these really appreciate it.
I will be following the tutorial once i’m on my pc tomorrow some time.
I’ve also noticed what you’ve mentioned that I can place multiple state machines or animation related stuff inside the AnimBP which is really cool! The Echo animation BP also has that if I’m correct. One state machine controls the main movement, one controls states such as inair, onground, crouched, etc… one can cantrol aimoffsets and the system brings it all together.
It’s quite a powerful system but I need to understand how it works. As far as I can tell having states(like what gait you’re at e.g. running, walking, sprinting) is important as state change conditions can get messy with similar conditions in the state machine.
It is a bit of an advanced subject for me I knoe but I’ll get the hang of it soon to have a satisfactory result!
I will also do my research on quite a lot of info you’ve added here and get back to them once i can test and learn.
of course there are more things to cover but I think these would suffice to get you a better grasp on the context. Good luck!
really appreciate it.