Hello,
If you’ve checked WIP forums recently you know I’m working on a fighting game. Now the way I implemented animations (a lot of animations involved in such game) is by calling Montage Play in the characterBP. Not the best way I have to say. The problem with AnimBP is I couldn’t figure out a practical way to animate the character when calling punch, kick… etc. I tried blend by bone, by int, by pool none of them gave me a nice result. Would like to hear from you what would be best practice to do those moves? Share pictures or videos, if possible (unfortunately I’m restricted to what to share atm but should be able to share all about it in the new year).
this is a very good questions. I have the same issue as there doesn’t seem to be a best practice for animation, I haven’t found any. Playing montage is always a way but you loose almost all control when you play a montage. Playing montage in AnimBP is not possible and when you play plain animation you can’t animate only parts, like upper.body.
Would be good to have some explanation or best practice, or at least how someone does it with a larger project that has more then one montage.
I like the “blend by Int” but the trick to getting it to work right is to set the blend weight so the animation plays smoothly into and out of each clip.
The thing about fighting games is they are generally very robust where the animations have to react instantly to player input using data drive friendly setups by combining matched 8-way 2D blend spaces, as on option.
Montages are good for locking a player into a single move that must be completed before exiting and state machines are good for simple things but any action that requires an argument to get into and out of a state adds to the input latency that can add up over time and additions
A thing i do allot of when i work is have Video’s up on my off screen with “Making of “X Game Title””.
The last of us on youtube showed an amazing tip when it came to their combat and they called it “popping” When your character is hitting an enemy, have the ai/ other character reaction animation pop further in to the animation, it adds ALLOT of impact and force to the impacts.
As for general Animation practice my workflow goes “Rough - Refine - expand - Refine - Polish - Refine” by separating out the phases and adding in a “Refine” stage between each part you get allot more covered and helps polish things allot better