Hi, I’m new to animation. I’m trying to have the player character raise his left arm to check the time, on key press. And hold it there until key pressed again to lower the arm. Should be able to do this while moving too.
What should I use between Motion Matching and State Machines? Thanks.
Edit: This would be just one of many animations that the character would play on input. And the animations need to be “saved” to be able to be restored on “load”.
Hey there @AllGamesSuck! I wouldn’t recommend a whole state for this, but I’d just use a looping montage of the arm doing the time checking animation, and use a Layered Blend Per Bone to make sure only the arm/clavicle is modified. Here’s a tutorial that goes over how to use this node:
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I wouldn’t recommend a whole state for this
Why not? I should’ve mentioned that this would be one of the many animations the character would play throughout the game for various actions. I also need to be able to save that animation, to be able to restore it on “load”.
I thought, since I’ll have many such animations for the character, that I might as well dive into state machines or the newer motion matching if that’s better?
Personal preference and sanity mostly. In my experience, states should denote the major state of the body itself (Idle, Walking, Running, Jumping, Sitting, etc.) and you can manage lesser animations that could technically be overlapped in many states aside from it. For example, raising your watch arm can be done walking, running, sitting, jumping, etc, but you don’t want variants of the arm raised state for each of them.
You can still use motion matching or state machines for the underlying full states/poses (and I’d recommend them), but for actions I would usually recommend montages.