The way the character and animation system works is you query your character controller from you animation blueprint to set animation states.
So instead of just calling any single animation from C++, you setup an animation blueprint to react to a variable changing or an event firing. You can setup the events in code to fire during functions, thus triggering any animation you tie to it.
JonTerp, thanks for the reply.
My only worry is whether using an animation Blueprint would slow me down. I read that Blueprints are way slower than pure C++ code.
I guess this only counts for the comparison between a full c++ game and a full BP game and even this seems to not be a big difference.
You can use the Animation BP without having to worry about speed. And it’s way simpler than using c++.
Blueprints aren’t that much slower than C++ in ~most~ cases. There are of course instances and edge cases where it is noticeably slower during some operations.
Animation Blueprints are very efficient and fast once you learn the system. I think once you look into learning Persona and the animation blueprint system you’ll be amazed at how powerful and useful it is.
*Any comments on whether one could animate skeletal meshes in UE4 using hardware skinning?
*The workflow goes something like this:
-Load an FBX mesh with animation data.
-Extract the bone transforms for the animations.
-Write the bone transforms to a video texture in VRAM.
-Do a vertex texture fetch of the bone transforms and do the skinning on the character using a vertex shader technique.
Any idea how one does something like the above in UE4?