The road to becoming an advanced animator is all about learning the mechanics and basics of animation. Learning how to animate a bouncing ball, ball with legs to practice walk cycles, and pendulum exercises.
Some wonderful resources that a lot of us have used -
The Illusion of Life (book)
Richard Williams : The Animators Survival Kit (book)
There are several really good online animation schools which could also give you a really really good understanding of learning animation.
AnimationMentor
AnimSchool
IAnimate gameanim.com
For more advanced techniques, I would take a look at talks from Richard Lico. He has workflows that he uses to speed up his process.
For unreal specific animation techniques, we offer a sample project with prebuilt animation Control Rigs that can be used to learn the UE animation tools, with a tutorial video from Unreal Fest 2022 by Epicās own Fredrik Nilsson.
At the moment, if you have one sequence playing on top of another and if the base tracks are absolute, blending between them is not possible. However, with subsequences, you can blend those in one root sequence. You could also have your second sequenceās tracks to set to Additive from Base to have it played at the end of your first sequence.
The Spawn Control, Spawn Bones, and Spawn Null nodes will let you build the rig procedurally (automatically). These are incredibly powerful and can be used in a variety of ways in the construction event to create reusable rigs.
I get a lot of questions about the node Project to New Parent which is one of my favorite nodes. It basically lets you reparent transforms under rig elements, similar to the Parent Constraint or parenting a control to a bone. For the inputs, the Child input will be what you are parenting, and the Old Parent & New Parent inputs should be the parent and the same item.
One of my favorite special nodes is the Chain Harmonics, you can apply this to the root of a chain and it will drive those bones with a chain based harmonics system, in laymens terms adding automatic movement to the bones.
The Sphere Trace node will let you trace against level geometry, creating interesting setups such as tires colliding against the ground or foot sloping for characters to attach them to the ground.
At this time, it is not possible to record the camera flying through while in the editor. However we are aware of the demand and will be looking at this for the future.
The rotation of objects still doiing some crazy things in cinematics and the Camara itself as wellā¦ when i tur it to one direction over a certain point it makes a 360 to the other sideā¦ And when i animate a prop it does the sameā¦ How i can avoid that?
You can copy and paste keys across your duplicated doors. However since those are absolute, you would need your duplicated doors transform track to be set to Relative, this would need to be done before you copy/pasted keys across.
I would suggest first finding something that inspires you, whether that is games, animated content, or film and start creating animation in a similar style. Animation takes practice, and practicing on something that you really enjoy animating will make the process much more enjoyable. Its important to learn the technical process and understand it such as rigs and changing curves, but learning the basics such as timing, weight, & posing is key to success regardless of the type of animation you want to make. There is also a variety of animation to create, you can animate characters, or animate FX such as explosions, and even animate cloth and hair. All animation fundamentals will apply to these areas, so no matter what you decide to focus on it might be fun to play around with what really inspires you.
Iāve added some resources earlier in this thread if youād like to check them out here.
You would want to have your first sequenceās affected track to be set to Keep State (right mouse click on the track/section in the timeline, then going to properties and changing the When Finished property), then on your second sequence you would set your affected track type to be Additive from Base (right mouse click on the track/section in the timeline, then going to properties, and change the Blend Type) and also set the When Finished property to Keep State.
Thatās all we have time for todayāthanks to everyone for joining us! Special thank you to Thomas, Chase, and Greg for lending us their insight and expertise today!
