I want to prototype a fighting game, but I can’t find any free animations to use. How can I prototype a fighting game if I have nothing to work with?
At a certain point you can’t really do anything without the animations so you would have to make them or pay someone to make them for you.
Is there a way to make the animations inside of unreal?
The easiest way would be to team with someone who can make them. Otherwise, do some Blender tutorials and make some placeholders, only worrying about positioning and time and replace them with better ones that will be the same length later.
You should check out Mixamo.com they have plenty of animtions you can use as placeholders. and the best thing is they are alll currently free
As an animator “having” the actual animation is not a necessary requirement as compared to the need of the code or BP being use to be able to pass the current state to the animation that triggers the desired animation. This is a gap in development of a much more complex animation system beyond making a character walk or run and to a point the movement component added to the character BP is able to do this with out the need of having the animation in hand to finish the action.
It’s the age old catch 22 problem where code that is needed must work today versus the animators need to be able to see how the animations interact in real time based on a given triggered event.
The ideal would be for the coder to ignore event driven animations and focus more on giving the movement component a brain, so to speak, by just passing the current world state as either as a numerical token or descriptive string that the animation BP can cast for as a single var with out having to play 20 questions as to the “possible” current state of the movement component.
I almost think you would storyboard out the moves, and then have some very low quality animations done to match the timing and then set up the gameplay and do the final animations once you’ve got it nailed down.
I just started doing what you want to do a week ago and I had no experience in animations or developing and before any work in unreal engine I finished a blender tutorial for character creation that was awesome and let me tell you I wouldn’t have made half the progress I have if I didn’t do that. It taught me about character creation from scratch, rigging, animations, morph animations, UV wrapping and some very important details about importing to unreal. When you finish that one I recommend you also do this one Blender Animation Tutorial: Run Cycle - YouTube that will teach you a bit more about animation and flipping animations so u have to do half the work, which might not be the best way to do it but its perfect for placeholder animations. And try not to rush thru the tutorials, but soak up all the knowledge from them. Took me about 8 hours to get a hang of everything and I was able to make my own punching and blendspace animations that look great for placeholders.I might even keep the punching just touch them up a bit.