How the heck do people learn these this stuff

Development Character & Animation
1

Hello, I would like people’s advice on learning the concepts behind animation blueprints and things related to that. The amount of depth it seems to know simply even what you need to about is endless. I’ve watched some tutorials thinking yay I learned something. I go to the documentation and take these for example:

Trying to figure out what these documents mean and when to use them honestly makes me want to blow my brains out. Can you guys give some (non-obvious) tips?

I get so angry at not understanding how these go together and I know its my own shortcoming. Blow to self esteem of course, as it seems like everyone here is for the most part comfortable with all the concepts, and even ones that seem artificial and fake to me like poses that are local-space or component-space. Anyway if someone can help guide me through of this that would be wonderful. It will prevent me from throwing another monitor across the room. Thanks.

2

Before walk you learn finally…
Fall many times you do.

2 Likes
3

I feel your pain …Seriously i do. I have a real hard time grasping this stuff(“ask a guy called franktech”) Sorry that was no help but just to say your not alone bud

6

Find example assets, and study how they do things. This holds true for basically everything. Study, study, study, and practice practice practice.

1 Like
7

Google literally every word. Also join Unreal Discord and search for every word you don’t understand. I disagree with “practice”, he needs to learn what pencil to use. While you can brute force and check which pencil is good for a specific situation, you can also just look up that you shouldn’t use your softest pencil for outlining. Also, being a programmer or having a good grasp of problem solving helps. Usually if you think about a problem and how you would solve it, this is usually the way it’s implemented in the engine :).

8

@malosal What do you want to do? I mean… one can learn everything, but one can’t learn if there is no focus on certain areas first.

Animation requires certain knowledge, that has nothing to do all alone with the Engine. A modeler can model anything and it will work for every engine out there, an animator can animate any properly made model and it will work for every engine out there.

I suppose you are new to game development, and I was exactly on your steps few years ago, so I will put it plain as for the order you should follow in terms of tutorials and their magic search words :

  1. you need to understand character modelling, humanoids or not. Why? Some concepts involving the correct modeling for certain body areas are key for a successful animation, otherwise the mode is just garbade that looks good to the eye.
  2. you need to understand morph targets and how proper model topology helps with twisting the arms, hands, legs, hips, fingers, etc
  3. you need to understand how to create the animation with your modeling tool being that Blender or 3DSMax or Maya (including rigging)
  4. once you know the above, you will be familiar with concepts and vocabulary to know what do you need to be successful in animating in any game engine, since this vocabulary will help you to search the documentation
  5. you need to learn how to import a modeled character, its materials and its animations correctly into the engine
  6. you need to learn how to create animation blueprints. They just tell the engine, through a graph of states and actions, each animation (the ones imported) to play given your model status: idle, running, jumping, bowing, crouching, etc. This usually means that events like clicking a spacebar at keyboard will be translated by your animation blueprint to put the character into a state. One state might be composed by a graph telling sub-states and which animations to play, for example: spacebar is usually for Jump. The character state is therefore Jumping, but Jumping by itself don’t exactly tell how and which animations must be played. Then your blueprint will internally control this state with sub-states for Jumping: start jump, mid-air, start falling and landing. With each one of these states you have now conditions to tell which animation you need to do it.

The 6 steps above are mandatory to understand the “pipeline” (which I didnt tell in details, there is the texturing part, which involves another things, but they are not related to animation) for a character being animated.

You can do it very easily if you follow this tutorial, which you can find along with other at your launcher, in the “Learn” tab and choose video tutorials: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest…hyw/index.html

Once you figure this tutorial, you will surely know what will come next. Btw Unreal is my first engine and my initial journey into game development and it started in Aug 2015. Good luck on your endeavours.

9

I’m in the same situation as you. found Anims a bit vast and deep. the only concern I have is that mostly the Video tutorials are outdated (2015 ish) and seems like UE4’s animation workflow has changed a bit specially after 4.16. would be great to know if there’s a new set of tutorials I’m missing somewhere ?!

10

There are new elements in that interface, they were made more accessible, but the core found on the old tutorials are still there. It can be used in the same interface it is today, you just need to learn to not get that much attached to the interface and more on the what is intended to be done in each step… involves understanding concept and then translating this to what it being done on the video steps. There is no documentation that alone would explain the pipeline or some steps, thats why the video is necessary. Also, at Udemy there are several courses, most of them very cheap as promotion in this very end of the year, once you get them, you can access them for lifetime, I have paid one less than US$10 two days ago about multiplayer dev with C++, Im almost sure I saw something about animation, but my memory might giving me false hint, since I watch too many videos everyday.

11

You’re not alone, this stuff is so tedious to learn. I always end up watching tutorials and replicating what I see on screen without understanding anything at all.

12

I have being through this… and unfortunetely I have learnt that this is mostly the tutorial instructor’s fault and not student’s. Just showing how it is done leads to nothing. It is necessary to teach the concept explaining why it is the way it is, better is showing what happens if otherwise. Today, I tend to skip a video if I feel the instructor lacks the proper method of teaching, second if he does not give the proper explanation why he is doing that way… Saying: “Trust me” is not enough, everything has a reason of doing so, if the person can’t tell in advance, he lacks the experience to teach that in the first place.

14

I am generally concerned when it comes to UE4, visually it does what we need it to do most of the time (even though it lacks many basic things that need to be fixed amended), but how to translate those visuals into functional mechanics that follow the intended design in the first place seems to present challenges well beyond the regular technical issues of a standard game production (especially for indie game development).

In Unity our project (although somewhat less in complexity) has been going very smooth and some of the technical challenges have been solved, there is no sense of real worry, it can be done, if not there’s always some way we can work it. But let’s not assume we can have ten characters on screen with X amount of complexity and expect it to run as it should, fine we compromise.

UE You can have those 10 on screen but it will leave the functionality side to be desired when it comes to what you wanted to do with those ten in the first place and if it was worth it.

UE seems to pose issues well beyond just engineering, yes the docs lack a lot, yes there are lack of resources. But there’s a sense of running into a brick wall and stopping in your tracks.

Ex.
We wish to have X feature without which that one game mechanic or visual appeal that helped sell our pitch cannot be made possible. Can money buy this for us? Apparently not, because it depends on Epic implementing that X feature hard cored into the engine, or if you are super lucky to find that one guy who can implement this feature inside UE4 (he is already so good and hired and can’t be bothered), can money persuade Epic to implement this feature? Maybe, maybe not because they are busy with internal projects and other plans Or we don’t know yet because we first need to show we have the cash before we pick up the phone and ask. And then what? assume we get lucky?

How does one approach or work-around or pre-plan this. Because once an engine is chosen and investment made, people hired, it will be a half suicide move to change mid production or compromise on promises made for the game design on that level.

  • There have been a few games I read about which started using UE4 and then ran into difficult technical problems and some even got cancelled. Now I can’t be sure it was UE’s fault or a combination of things, but some did hint at UE and related ‘Technical issues’ - consider “ScaleBound”. Things like these gets people worried when there are certain large investments at play or to be made.

Lastly this is not to be considered as ranting, Epic is free to do what they wish and sole responsibility lies in us developers to either just drop it and find another tool and compromise with that other tool or just deal with it and come up with a different Idea that doesn’t require a feature not implemented in this engine. In most cases it will be option one, since option two still presents other risk factors when it comes to tech support.

And I consider anything that goes beyond the usual technical difficulties and challenges for a game production for an indie company an extremely risky move that is not wise to take.

15

Animations is one of the coolest things one person can do in the gaming area. Today’s technology as it is means that a successfull game depends a lot on how imersive the experience can be to the user, meaning that most the things related to reality, the better. Being models, animations, effects, texturing, story, social environment (if any), are key elements of success. There are just many key areas of interest in the gaming industry, requiring professionals with “solid” knowledge, but this doesn’t mean they know how to teach what they know. Sometimes their own learning experience came from an unstructured way of learning because they came from an era even worse regarding tutorials/knowledge/experience/documentation/etc, so might be hard to formulate a proper way of teaching.

One thing I can say 100% sure, is that there are exceptional professionals out there with the necessary teaching skills, so sometimes once you figured what to search for, you might want to gather a lot of tutorials and judge which one (professional) seems to be confident enough and with that genious touch on teaching, instead of diving into the 1st video showing up into the list.

I usually watch the first 10min and I save the link in one browser folder for later review, than I watch every video, without touching Unreal or the other tool in use. Once I have watched I can figure which video gave me more insights, gave more hints and concepts, and than I rewatch that same video, but this time with the tool opened.

16

[USER=“202133”] K[/USER] I know that feeling… I have one day to decide which engine I would go for… I could go to either engine, really, I know C++ and C# as much, long experience on both languages, and was zero artistic instinct. I have played with CryEngine, Unity and finally Unreal… for the most part, was a blind travel because programming skills without knowing what to do with them was terrible. I have to make a choice, based on the results from the games created by the engines I got my hands on, and also on the experience which company behind the engine has on delivering games. Unfortunetelly I was pleased by CryEngine, but their business model was too bad at the time. Second I tried to take a look at Unity, and I felt the interface not much intuitive, and I have several issues understanding what to do and where to find more documentation and tutorials, and I didnt like their business model, but it was ok. UE had a better business model, at the time it was easier to find documentation and tutorials, at least at that time (UE 4.6) and Unity was improving theirs by them.

My final judgement today, is that I have seem more cool things done by UE developers than Unity developers. I never had issues understanding how to do things in UE, and even today when I date to look at Unity I have a weird feeling that it does not appeal to me, mostly because Im just not a simple developer (language focused) but I slowly became an artist. Now I can for sure understand why artists prefer Unreal and why programmers like Unity more. I want to be an artist and live surrounded by them, I need to talk their language when it comes to game development, and my feeling is that Unreal provides this.

But in the end, one day it might come to the same as comparing Blender, 3DSMax or Maya, depending on what you want to do, one can do it easiest, or prettiest, for for their same capabilities they deliver the same results. I will be a matter on what business model you are more confortable and what do you expect from them to the future.

17

[USER=“434”][/USER] +1 good stuff.
[USER=“202133”][/USER]
If you get some examples from the learn tab, or the mp you will head in the right direction. I think making the character movement animations are fun. The cut scene stuff I dont enjoy as much. Timing is a big deal. If you watch say a guy open a door. It happens in around one second. So 30fps animation and 30 frames. etc. Blinking would happen in 3 frames. Putting it all together into smooth movement transitions is another deal entirely. I would suggest for inexperience people to rotoscope a larger sequence. Idle to walking to running, and jumping. Then slice it up, and learn to put it together in ue4.