How to animate a character drawing images

[teknonomicon]

Hello all.
Long time UE enthusiast, first post.

So, in my project I’ve got to have a cut scene where the character picks up a piece of chalk and draws an elaborate design, similar to alchemy circles in Full Metal Alchemist, but I’m not sure how to get it working.

I’ve got the circles in svg format. I’ve tried using animated materials, but the design tends to fade in from different directions, depending on what settings I play with. I need the image to basically follow the hand animation one line at a time.

Guess I’m just not sure what i need to do to get this sort of effect.

Appreciate any guidance you can give.

Thanks all

[L1z4rD89]

Hey @teknonomicon

you could let the character draw the shapes. You would use a render target

Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial - Making a Usable Whiteboard

So the hand of your character would move in a circle and draw it on e.g. the black-/whiteboard.

To start / stop the drawing when switching the shape or when your character picks up the piece of chalk you could use Animation Notifies.

Animation Notifies

How can I listen for anim notify events in Blueprints?

I have a skeletal mesh component within a blueprint class which plays an animation. At some point in the animationSequence, an anim notify event is triggered and I would like to handle it in the blueprint class that called it. How can I go about listening for anim notify events in the blueprint? Thanks Note: This is not in an anim blueprint - the skeletal mesh is not a pawn, and the bp inherits from a class other than animinstance

[teknonomicon]

@L1z4rD89

Thanks for the response. I’ll give that a go when i get back to my rig. Here’s hoping.

Thanks again.

[teknonomicon]

All right,

So for those interested, i tried a few animation notifiesas suggested, but it never looked quite right for what i was trying to achieve.

Delved back in to the docs, and came up with an idea. I ended up using texturepacker to create a sprite sheet and rendered it in UEs paper 2d.

Played with that system a bit, pretty fun actually.

Ended up rendering to a decal, and with some BP fu, mostly ganked from YouTube tutorials, assent it to a decal and controlled the animation timing and transitions in sequencer.

Thanks @L1z4rD89 for your help.

Your suggestions didn’t get me the result I wanted, but I wouldn’t have gotten there without you.

Can’t post the actual content or animation due to project privacy, but will hopefully have time soon to build a quick tut video on how I did it at some point.

Thanks again.