New: bone-driven animation controllers

unit23 · September 11, 2015, 11:40am

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/images/Support/Builds/ReleaseNotes/2015/4_9/image_47.gif

This allows a “Driver” bone to dynamically affect the motion of one or more “Driven” bones. This is great for characters that have accessories attached! You can avoid geometry intersecting during an animation, even when a lot of blending is used.

In the above example, the attached accessory (green) has no authored animations, and is being driven in two axes as a function of the character’s thigh bone. This is all calculated at runtime, so a blend of animations ends up working quite well here, even without hand-authored tweaking.

You can either set the “Driver” value directly with a multiplier, remap it into a whole new range, or just use a Curve Asset to drive the motion. Using a curve is usually the best approach as it lets you define the response naturally and interactively tweak points/tangents, seeing the changes in real-time.

Here are the new settings for bone-driven animation controllers:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/images/Support/Builds/ReleaseNotes/2015/4_9/image_48.jpg

Any idea how the best approach is for “Shields”? I don’t want the shield (hand) to be the bone driver. Is there maybe another fix, maybe something mesh or collision based? Ideas? Input? Thanks