Hello I am new to animation and am trying to find a tutorial for blender on how to make some simple aim animations or poses for a third person character to bring into UE4 and set up the aim offsets. Please any help is most greatly appreciated. Thank you
Hi AlphaHemi,
This document explains how to do add aim offset and what poses you need in order to blend them together. No need to actual animate the character aim up down left or right. You can use blender or Maya, whichever you prefer.
Hopefully this can get you started
No one knows of any tutorials about this? I also have Maya if there’s nothing for blender. I would really appreciate any help with this.
This helps for sure but I still can’t find anything about how to make and export the poses I need, can anyone make a small YouTube video of that or point me in the right direction. I’m sure I’m not the only one new to this who could use a tutorial on this. Thank you for your assistance.
Hi AlphaHemi,
I never done this before but I will try and walk you through the best course of action.
Have you tried looking at the Content Examples Project? If not, start there and open the Animations level. There’s an example for aimoffset and if you search for aimoffset in the content browser you see all the files made. It looks like they made an animation for each pose which is 2 frames long each.
So first, I would go to Maya or Blender and create the same animation they created in the content example which looks like a still pose for the whole 2 frames of the animation.
I have a short tutorial I made way back on how to import animations into ue4 using Blender. My tutorial is not the only one so I suggest checking out a few of them to get the best understanding.
Here is the link YOUTUBE VIDEO It’s just slides and text.
If you are new to animation, I advise you learn that first. Then make a couple of animations, export them and see if they work. If successful create all of your animation offsets and we will go from there.
Keep me posted on your progress
Thank you for taking the time to help me out. I will dig into everything you suggested and get back to you.
Thank you so much, your YouTube tut was exactly what I needed. So far I’ve been able to get my character and a small idle animation into UE4, I’m working on making the aim offset anims, quick question I had thought is in your video before you exported your character from blender you did something with deleting verticals I believe so they didn’t show through textures. How do you select them or find them? You only had a still image of that and I don’t know what they are. Thanks again hopefully will have some aim offsets soon.
Your welcome,
So there are a couple ways that I know of to incorporate clothing with your character.
If you select your actual character and go to edit mode, you can select only the vertices that appear under the clothing and delete them to prevent skin from poking through when your character is animated. The downside is if you decide to change clothes later it can be a problem
Another way is if you had a body suit like a superman character, you can model on top of it with a little more detail but still have it as one mesh but create separate materials of that mesh.
Lastly and the most difficult is weight painting the clothing. This is an art in it’s self and can be time consuming but can yield amazing results. The clothes won’t poke through as your character animates and you don’t lose any of your characters polygons. Happy accidents can happen where the clothing will actual deform and look like its wrinkling a bit if done correctly.
I suggest the first one for now. If you have more questions specifically about blender, ask me on my youtube page so we don’t go off subject to much on UE4 Answerhub. But if you have more questions about the two working together, please ask them here to help others.
Good luck
Hello Unrealguy, just an update I have made my poses and made a aim offset blendspace for them. the link is my YouTube channel with a video using the blendspace. First Aim Offset - YouTube
I am still a bit lost on how I get the character to use the aim offsets, do I need a seperate animation of my character grabbing and unholstering his weapon?
Wow, I’m so proud!
Yes you would need to make a separate animation for grabbing the weapon and putting it in the holster, that animation could be fired when the player presses the “F” key for example. Once the weapon is actually in the characters hand using sockets, the weapon will be attached to the characters hand wherever he points. You can then tie the controller rotation to camera so your player is pointing in the right direction to shoot.
Here are some questions to ask yourself, will your character always have a weapon in his hand and break the aim offset animation to switch weapons with the unholstering animation. Or would you like your character walking around hands to the side sees weapon (animation) picks up weapon then initiate the aim offset blendspace once weapon is in hand.
Easy way, have no animation for switching weapons, so when the character presses the “F” key for example, within blueprint the old weapon disappears completely or you switch to another weapon. Kinda like how Grand Theft Auto use to do it. I don’t think they had an animation for putting the gun away or pulling it out, back in the day. I don’t think the weapon could be seen on the character either. I may be mistaken.
Your doing great, keep it up!
Thank you for the encouraging words and thank you again for all the time your taking out to assist me. I will dive into this new information right away. Idk if it would help make it easier for you to know what I am ultimately trying to achieve but I will give a brief description just in case because I’d hate to waste any of your time because I wasn’t clear on my vision. Thank you again for all your help.
I wand my character to be able to:
- Walk/run/Jump/fight whatever without any weapons out/and with them out.
- Pick up and store all sorts of weapons and clothes. From grenades and pocket knifes to assault rifles and rocket launchers. Clothes Id like something where everything is inter changeable for example id like to have gloves/hats/glasses/shirts/pants/boots&shoes/Jackets/Backpacks. (similar to how Fallout or Elder Scrolls does clothing)
- I want to have whatever weapons my player has equipped to be visible
- I want to have different holsters and weapon slings the player can find and group to a weapon so say (player finds a right handed thigh pistol holster they can choose their 1911 and group it to the holster so when they equip the pistol that is where the pistol will be holstered and use that holster, I am sure this will require a lot of animation work but as long as I can figure out what all animations I need it will be worth the work. (I hope that description makes sense)
- I also want my player to be able to have say a pistol in one hand and the other either empty or have either another pistol/knife/flashlight ect. if they choose to make something their left hand weapon (something like what DarkSouls does)
- I would also like to have two different stances available to switch to for all weapons (again similar to DarkSouls). For example the one handed pistol aim offset I’ve made so far would be the less aggressive stance with a pistol which will use less stamina or give you longer focus time but make you less accurate with the pistol, but you’d press a button and enter the aggressive stance and say change to an aim offset where you bring up the left hand and hold the pistol with a more accurate two hand stance which would use more stamina or drain focus quicker but make you more accurate. (again I hope this description makes sense)
hello Unrealguy, another update. I have made an animation of my character unsheathing a weapon. It is supposed to look like he is lifting his shirt and drawing a pistol from his waistband. The animation is 40 frames right now, I didn’t know if there was a standard length for something like this or not. Here is the link to the video First weapon unsheathe animation. - YouTube (sorry for crap quality vids, i can’t get Ezvid to work it keeps crashing when i try to upload to youtube). Thank you again for all your help, your opinion and input has been greatly appreciated.