Hiding Arrow & String for Bow & Arrow Animations

Development Character & Animation
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How to Hide Arrow & String for Bow & Arrow Animations

Hi everyone,

I’ve retargeted Paragon Sparrow bow and arrow animations to two of my characters and the animation looks great. The problem I’m having is that I noticed on the Sparrow character, for most of the animations, the bow string doesn’t appear and I don’t know how they did that. Other animations only have the arrow appearing at the beginning of the animation, then it smoothly disappears when it supposed to be shooting out of the bow which makes sense.

I know how to hide part of a skeletal mesh, but what I don’t know is how to hide part of a skeletal mesh only during certain frames of a specified animation. I see that the Paragon Sparrow character has custom animation curves like “dissolve amount” and 'distance curve," but I don’t know how this is making the arrow or bow string dissolve or not appear. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can do this?

Here’s a short video to show what I’m talking about

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Look into animation curves.

Some directly output to materials.
Thats one great way to control a material from an animation directly.

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There are additional bindings you need to set up, to make sure those animation curves are either read by your character and acted on, or bound to the appropriate material properties that perform the appropriate effect.

Because these characters are taken out of a specific game, where they had a bunch of character specific code around the characters, a number of things like this will be less clear, because the art and the code are built in context of each other.

I think Epic did a good job of lifting the assets all out of the game, but there’s only so much that can be done :slight_smile: