Non-humanoid character animation - Persona okay or different workflow necessary?

Development Character & Animation
1

I am asking this as small timer who is using Unity but very interested in UE4. These probably sound very amateur level because they are. But I’m early enough in my Unity project that changing to UE4 is a reasonable action.

I’ve gone over UE4 videos, documentation, tuturials about importing characters for animation. All of the documentation just shows bipedal humanoid characters.

What about a complex monster? For example, a giant spider.

Can Persona, or the Maya toolkit, be used easily with non-humanoid bipedal characters? Must multi-legged, bizarre shaped creatures be developed with different UE4 tools from the start? Can the same physics editing features be used? (the tutorials only covered a human)

Also, about animation blending. How does UE4 handle blending animations with non-humanoid creatures?

Two animations of a bipedal blend pretty smoothly without any manual adjusting. This is the case with my current work in the other engine. I presume UE4 blends human animation smoothly as well. Like going from a running to a trip and fall. UE4 calculates frames in between and makes it look natural. If adjustment is needed, is that when a “blendspace” is manually inserted? I’m not familiar with blendspaces.

Anyway, how are complex creature animation blends handled? A spider walking, raises its ****, shoots fire, curls into a ball and rolls away. Is this a smoothly blendable job?

Sorry I rambled long. Hope my questions are clear.
Thanks.

2

I am no expert yet so I do not know to be honest, however I would imagine so. From all the documentation I have read about it this new system provides greater control then a animation tree would.

And again I could be wrong but all your normal movement would be in a blend and this is the part I am a little lost on but a montage or blue print is where you would call overrides to that normal movement. What was known in the UDK at top slot / bottom slot calls to the skeleton to be taken over to a new animation but blend into the current animation. Or even allowing you to isolate what part of a skeleton you would call upon and control IE top Slot.

So in short I would say yes this engine can handle what your looking for. I just can’t entirely tell you how yet…

3

Persona doesn’t make any assumptions about what kind of creature you are animating!

4

Note, the Maya toolkit (ART) is currently biped-only. It’s possible to create a character and rig other than a standard humanoid with it, but for something like a spider, I would definitely just make a custom rig from scratch. But, like James said, UE4 treats all characters equally regardless of number of limbs, etc. Blending, physics, animation blueprint, etc would all work the same for a spider.

Info on blendspaces here: Blend Spaces | Unreal Engine Documentation