Hello Guys,
OK first off animators here not Devs : ) and it’s been the third day starting up with blueprints and we’re trying to do the following:
So basically we have a run cycle and I want to do a quick 180 turn, a sort of animation were the character goes into this animation state of sliding a little bit and turning 180 to run the other way.
(Please note: capsule based animation here, also character is always running and no buttons are pressed for it to run, if it helps make sense in blueprint because we understand adding additional buttons/triggers from input device could make things less complicated when it comes to “telling BP what to do”, but it is not so in our case).
We’ve been trying everything, allow me to split this into a couple of sections so that you guys can better understand what we have tried to do so far:
From animation perspective: First of all we’ve tried with capsule animation but this is tricky for this kind of move as the capsule has to be manually shifted and rotated to approximate the animation somehow through blueprint, and this so far has been very painful to do. The second major issue are the controls in blueprint, right now we have some elaborate thing going on (please note the character is not typical third input movement based, but rather more like God of war control style) In simple terms we need to tell unreal the following:
1- When the Character has reached maximum speed running to his right (or left/up/down) - and then there’s a “sudden” input to turn run left = play 180 quick turn animation before you go back to run cycle again.
We have tried to find some kind of function in Blueprint to do this more elegantly, right now we have this whole network of telling unreal this by time delays and seconds that the inputs are triggered, which may not be the best way as seen below. This already can become a slight bit unpredictable at times and then there’s this matter of trying to match the animation with the capsule, by having the capsule manually moved through blueprint curve graphs and so on.
Any tips or novel ways to do this is most welcome!
2- Root motion: we thought could make things better since we don’t have to deal with capsule on that complicated turn, but this has its own problems in unreal. The question is how to tell unreal to match capsule rotation with that of the root motion without delays so that the animation and input can be excatly coordinated, right now this is whats happening when we tried it with root motion:
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Character running to the left (capsule non-root motion mode) we input run right - this is where root motion should step in for us, but since we were in capsule mode the capsule turns first for like microseconds before the root motion has kicked in turning the capsule even further, this forces the capsule to be offset by a few noticeable degrees by the time root motion stops and capsule based run cycle starts to play again… so the character ends up 10 - 50 degrees off 180.
We are still trying to see how to solve this. -
the other major major issue is that ofcourse root motion does NOT get blended between itself and capsule based animations resulting in a glitch or stopping of capsule for a few milliseconds before the capsule based one starts playing again. How can we solve this or is there no other way? Is this where animation montage comes in by any chance will anim montage help blend between root and capsule? since we haven’t looked into that yet.
Thank you!