Hey guys, i have the problem of making a character using the mannequin of Epic Rigging and Animation tools. What i planned to do is to just have the basic proportions and then animate so the team can prototype without waiting to the art team to finish the model. However, we still don’t know if the character will have cloth or not, and if so where is it going to be. The final concept is not ready yet but we want to start prototyping fast.
If i make an animation with a mannequin who doesn’t have for instance, cloth bones. When the final concept is ready we will see where the cloth will be, or if he wil have a ponytail, etc. We don’t want to loose the animations done for the character, instead we want to add the missing bones to our original skeleton and then animate the cloth sycing for each animation. Is that possible? Can we add bones without breaking the existing animation and reimport the new skeleton with the new animations inside Unreal?
Animation is an absolute as in the animation “has” to match the current rig design or else things will fly off into space.
The exception is if an addition is a child of an already animated rig so if you add a pony tail as a child of the head bone then the animations will still work but if you add a joint between two parent bones that will break your animations.
Now this is not that big of a problem depending on how you have you iterations set up to accommodate any changes you come across.
For example the power tool we use is Motion Builder where all of our animations are layered to separate takes so if we need to add a bone or two to the main rig we just need to update the base model and remap the animations to the new rig and export by take name. In UE4 it is then just a matter of hitting the re-import from source control and it’s done. All in total maybe just a few hours work tops.
If anything planning out your set up, source control, should top you list of things to do and except the fact that you will in all probability have to redo something that was over looked and be prepared with work in hand that will make the iteration process easier.
Sorry there is no way around it as in easy and iteration is just another part of the process.
Ok then, let’s say i have a running animation ready without cloth, when i add the cloth bones they won’t have any keyframes and then i can sync them with the older animation. The problem is, how can i save the old animation so when i animate again i reuse it and animate the rest of then bones? Or do i have to animate again with the new cloth bones?
Personally I would not animate any kind of secondary action like cloth as part of the iteration process and would be last on my list of things to do or would put any effort into detailing the animations beyond what is necessary to get the player model moving.
I just know from experience that no matter how perfect you think it’s going to work out it “never” does as you have to take into consideration not how the player is moving with in the current animation cycle but what it is moving from or into that will require micro wedging of corrective posing.
A crafted set of animations might only be a few 8-way movements but you could in the end land up with a hundred or so adjustment poses based on the context of your movement system.
Now if your working on the movement system yourself this would make things easier as far as iterations goes but as far as making “working” animations goes you should only be supplying the coder what is necessary to see clearly that once they are happy and sure what they are working on works as expected.
This is the nature of game design in that the content creator “must” always follow the direction of the coder and then do the polish work once they are satisfied they got their stuff working as to predictability.
My recommendation is if your still in the prototype stage is to only do what is necessary to ensure that the code works as expected and leave the bling as the last thing you do before the game goes out the door else you will find yourself doing the same things over and over again.
As for reusing animations that depends on the tools you are using. If you can’t retarget then you have a problem but rumor has it that a future version of UE4 will have the ability to retarget which will be interesting to see how they pull it off. HIK maybe.
Thanks a lot for your replies Frankie, i just want to say that i just tried to export an animation, added new bones, reimport the animation and the data worked perfectly :). Just needed to add frames to the new bones i created and reimport. But you are right about making them simple, i will just work on basic animations and when i have the character ready i will polish them. Any suggestions if anyone have another workflow to share?
