Pitch yaw aim offset

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hi,
I’m working on a small tower defense game and I’m struggling with the tower aim offset.
I have pitch and yaw animations for all directions and my aim offset looks like in the image below.

30572-aim_offset.png
30572-aim_offset.png1115×791 306 KB

When I move the cursor on the Y-axis close to zero the blend seems fine but the more I move it further from zero the tower rotates more strangely. The result is not at all what I expect. I suppose I didn’t place the animations (labeled with red in the image) correctly.
Can you guys give me a hand please?

Thanks.

2

For an Aim Offset, your Up, Down, Left, and Right “animations” need to just be 1 frame, with the character (in this case the turret) posed at the extreme Up, Down, Left and Right positions respectively.

The best way to do this is to create 1 animation that demonstrates the full articulation of your turret. Then capture a frame at each one of the extremes and blend them together. Also, you will probably want to add 5 more poses so your list is like:

DownLeft
DownCenter
DownRight
CenterLeft
Center
CenterRight
UpLeft
UpCenter
UpRight

Then blend between all of those. I highly recommend this page https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Animation/AnimHowTo/AimOffset/index.html

Run through this tutorial and don’t skip any steps, no matter how small. It’ll give you a pretty good understanding of how to create an aim offset.

3

Hi Charlie,
Thanks for your answer.
I tried something similar to what you propose using 1-frame additive animations but it didn’t quite work as I expected.
So I tried a slightly different approach which I described in detail here: Tower animations for a tower defense game - Character & Animation - Unreal Engine Forums
It would be super cool if you could take a look at this topic as I’m still stuck.

Cheers!