[Chase Cooper] Senior Technical Product Manager. Chase has spent a good part of the last 20 years creating digital characters. He is currently the Product Owner for Rigging in Unreal. Upon joining Epic Games he spent a good amount of time creating characters for the first two chapters of Fortnite.
[Greg Richardson] Product Specialist. For the last 3 years, Greg has been involved in designing and managing new tools (Sequencer, IK Retargeting, Control Rig) for animation authoring in UE5. Greg is the Product Owner for Sequencer and Full Body IK & Retargeting in UE, working on designing and supporting new cinematic/animation authoring workflows for all Unreal users.
[Thomas Sarkanen] Tom has been at Epic 10 years, shipping UE4 & 5 as well as working on most of the games and demos that Epic has produced in that time. Tom runs the UE Animation Runtime team, developing and supporting all the game and editor-facing animation features (animation blueprints, animation sequences etc.), as well as leading the effort to develop a new basis for animation systems in UE.
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What do you think are the best resources/videos/etc. to use in order to become an advanced animator in UEFN? I’ve just begun learning the level sequencer and animation, but unsure where to look to learn all the things I need
How do you move things relative from something?" and what i mean by that is that when something moves on the X axis for 100, and the cinematic ends, it does not reset the moving prop and the cinematic will restart and will continue adding 100 on that axis.
Are you planning to add a way to create custom animation code in Verse which can run locally at the games framerate, or will this eventually be done with Blueprint nodes?
Can you explain how a control rig is used after it is made?
Any plans to expose Morph targets and additive animation curves +keys?
After using Mixamo to rig a character, I get an error when exporting that merges all bones together and it breaks the entire project animations’. What is the recommended way to auto-rig without issues like that happening (I set skeleton as a UE4 mannequin already imported into the project). Would love a little demo of that process.
A sequencer does not keep state if an animation is set to play on a character, any idea why (keep state is on)?
Is there any trick in simulating root motion on our own (since its not exposed) so that the character is perfectly moving without sliding their feet?
Whats the best way to animate UI?
Can you explain cases where additive and relative tracks are useful? I am only using additive from base, rest I cannot figure out.
How can I track a state of a transform between two level sequences (I have one that sets an object in place, and another that rotates it, but I cant track the object in the second one correctly and it adds offsets, keep state is on).
Why are level sequences skipping keys on wireless connections (even on high connection speeds)? Fade tracks make players stay with a black screen and custom camera may never switch back to player camera.
Any plans on exposing state machines in UEFN or IK Retargeting?
Many custom maps destroying all building parts by players just plainly so i wondering why not to make a sequence with some vfx buildup energy pulse to destroy all building parts.
On the other matters would be nice to get more information about how to make intro sequences before game starts. Or fancy zoom ins onto the character.
Good question above about UI control. Would be nice to get a nice tool to view and move UI on the screen how we pleased.
Is there any support or planned support for virtual tracked cameras in UEFN? (i.e., holding and controlling a tracked object to represent a virtual camera for organic camera shake, etc)
What is the best current process for facial animation inside of UEFN? Are there any easy or out the door solutions that work?
There is quite a broad question - but is there any type of support for external APIs in UEFN? (An example of this may be playing voice lines into a cinematic that are controlled or changed by an API or stored on an external cloud service, or music that is streaming into the game from a third party API) – Assume the answer is a fat “NO”, but love to see if this is even feasible with out UEFN is built, even if it’s down the road.
Any planned improvements for the Video Player device? Is there any known way to play 2d animated images (gifs or the like) or to play pre-rendered cutscenes / cinematics?
Since Morph Targets fail validation in UEFN, do you have any best practices for capturing facial animations that are applied to/drive a facial bone rig instead?
For context, my initial pipeline was to use Live Link with UE5, then bake the performance to an animation asset which could be migrated and played back on the same SK mesh in UEFN.
I would love to have the ability to duplicate an object along with its relative animation to a different part of a map.
For example:you have a door with a complicated opening animation. You want to use that door and the animation on various parts of your map. It would be great to be able to select the door and duplicate it in a way that it duplicates the animation as well, so you don’t need to reanimate the door each time you use it. This way you could easily populate your map with the door, along with the animation.
Is there a current way to accomplish this? Thanks for doing the AMA!
