Rapid Fire questions From a beginner

Development Character & Animation
1

IF anyone with more experience than me would be so kind as to answer some questions for me that would be amazing?
Im not new to 3D Modeling ive been using Cinema4D for years… but i am new to Unreal and game design in general. Ive been tutorial watching for days. Ive made several levels
and i have a good understanding of the basics to the program so far. But knowing where to start will help me out tremendously.

My current goal… is to make a 1 level game… To go from the main menu… into a character creation process… (name stats clothing body style)
then start level one having a rocket crashing into the ground… releasing an enemy AI… me kill the ai with a charged casted spell with a staff
and the resulting xp would push me to level 2. I then loot the enemy… pick up a new staff… and equip it and exit the level
I then want to be able to quit at that point and reload the game and see the character at level 2 in the character select screen.

ive been up for 35 hours modeling and messing around with stuff. Ive probably watched 14 hours of tutorials today
but im still lost on a few things. So if anyone would be so kind as to fire off some answers for some basic questions i have that would be amazing.
Simple answers will suffice… like say… (Event graph will probably be an answer for some of these… and thats all i need… just a point in the right direction.) or even links to specific tutorials would be great.

So here we go…

  • Do i create the animations in C4D and move them over?
  • Do i need to create a different file for each animation?
  • How do i create a physics asset?
  • Why does the engine only support triangles?
  • Will using Zbrush add too many polygons?
  • Do Zbrush projects also need to be in triangles?
  • In Which software should i create a normal map?
  • Can i re-map Mixamo animations to any humanoid bones?
  • How do i add an animation to a character that is already in game?
  • How do i map animations to triggers (ie bomb goes off and enemies get blown away)
  • How do i create a menu?
  • How do i incorporate classes for the characters to choose?
  • How do i make enemies incinerate upon death?
  • How do i build an AI from scratch(i cant find any decent tutorials)?
  • How do i go about adding a character creation process for the end user (that saves the character)?
  • When i build a game do i need to build it around networking (ie will trying to make a 1 player game multiplayer and online after its done cause me to have to redo everything?
  • How can i incorporate stats?
  • How do i map weapons to a character animation? do i need to animate the weapon some how or bind it to something?
  • How do i swap out weapons on the fly by going into inventory?
2

I’m just going to tackle the animation questions, as I’m not a gameplay programmer. :slight_smile:

Yes. You’ll want to export to FBX version 2014 (2013 will also work for the most part).

This depends upon your animation package - from motionbuilder and from blender I know you can export with multiple “takes” in a single FBX. So it is something FBX is capable of. I don’t know C4D very well unfortunately!

One will be automatically created when you import a skeletal mesh (rigged geometry). I’m sure there’s a way to create one from the content browser but I can’t locate which menu it’s under just now…

With very few exceptions that I’m aware of, game geometry is processed in triangles at the end of the day on your video card. Unreal can import quads and automatically convert them to triangles for you.

You should consider what your asset requires in terms of a polygon budget before thinking about particular applications. Typically, Zbrush geometry is only going to be baked down to lower detail geometry via normal maps or tesselation.

In Zbrush it’s preferrable to work with quads until you are prepared to bake, due to its system of subdivision.

Zbrush should be capable of this but I would recommend XNormal for its additional features, quality and ease of use.

I believe this can be done with animation retargeting inside the Unreal editor, Epic has some good docs on this: http://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Animation/RetargetingDifferentSkeletons/

When importing your animation file, check off any “mesh import” function and simply specify the existing Skeleton Asset to use. A Skeleton Asset has information about the bone hierarchy only, as opposed geometry data which is found in a Skeletal Mesh.

This can be done in Animation Blueprint!

Do some research on UMG, there are good youtube tutorials in addition to this Epic documentation to get you started:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/UMG/QuickStart/index.html

Your animation blueprint will have a state machine where death can be its own state; inside there you can simply play an animation / spawn effects as desired.

You will typically have an IK bone or socket (these are placed in-editor) attached to your character’s hand which will be the point at which you spawn a weapon in code. The actual attachment can be done in your character blueprint or the animation blueprint. Have a look at the Epic Mannequin and their skeletal IK setup! Probably, you should also look at the Shooter Game example project if you haven’t already, it’s found inside the “Learn” tab within the Epic Launcher.

3

you sir… are the man… this helps a LOT… thanks