Hey guys, can anybody help me please with finding good tutorials on how to build advanced animation blueprint similar to what Paragon Characters have - from scratch - for my own characters? I’m specifically interested in a shooter type of characters like Paragon’s Murdock for example, with some advanced features like aiming with a gun up and down, running in the direction the Character is facing etc.
I tried watching a couple of Unreal’s Live events featuring some Paragon breakdowns but to be honest they’re extremely hard to follow and also very long. Are there any good tutorials or breakdowns that would cover specifically the beautiful animation blueprints system of Paragon Characters? Thanks in advance!
Something that I noticed is those new to blueprints and system design tend to jump right into the project by seeing the project based on the sum of the requirements rather than breaking things down into bite size, modular, sections which most if not all tutorials I’ve seen overlook the need of first setting up the structure.
To understand what I’m saying do yourself a flavor Google “Top down versus bottom up design”. Tutorial wise once you understand the logical of top down over the straight ahead approach you can easily figure the requirements of Locomotion and where to included the need for aim offsets with in the migration path as to the required state changes.
From top down once you have figured out and succeed in the locomotion state, making the character move is a must, you can consider that part of the job done and the focuses on on other down stream requirements as to action states.
Hi, thank you for your reply. I have absolutely nothing against going the full range from very basics to advanced stuff, the only thing I’m kindly asking for is guides on where to start that learning path which would allow getting to the full range of topics from the very beginner to advanced workflows. Are there some resources that cover the full complexity range of topics involved into making such great functionality from the very beginner level to an advanced one - enabling me to do what I mentioned earlier?
As a starting point you could do the examples in the learning centre that does cover what I assume that you are looking for. Just don’t take what is presented as gospel
In reality the reason there are no “full” tutorials on these is that we all implement stuff differently depending on needs, and in-so-far no one I have seen is actually capable of animating and coding yet bothers making free or even paid tutorials.
If you are looking to make a custom system you definitely need knowledge of a wide variety of things:
animation, mesh skinning, IK setups, along with trigonometry basics and a good grasp of physics + what the engine does (which is changing rapidly with chaos physics).
Also a lot of out of the box thinking and about 6 months of engine usage on the subject to be able to say what should be a montage, what should be a state machine etc.
Top down / bottom up is all pointless drivel. If you sart doing, you end up figuring stuff out after bashing your head into the problems you get as they come up.
there is no “right” way anyway. It’s only about what you think is right for the specific engine version (since things will change a lot over time)
Some thing I did back a bit as to how to add as many weapons you wish to the character BP based on using logic blocks. By putting state changes into a box so to speak you can focus on state changes as needed with out having to included all with in a single state machine.
The problem with doing tutorials it’s difficult to lay out the big picture when faced with the needs of a given project design so as a starting point a schematic diagram of the migration pathways would be more helpful as to how things could connect together due to the modular nature of UE4.
This in part is how the iteration process could be done and then scale up the level of complexity.
Thanks a lot for this great breakdown FrankieV, some places were (quite expectedly) a bit misty for me but still very useful overview even for such a noob as I am! Thanks a lot once again!
Thanks a lot once again!