Hey everyone, so basically am working on a blueprint system in Unreal Engine 5.6 Project where I want to animate a metahuman body via json values where I have a set of rotation and translation values for each bone along x,y,z which has to be translated to the body animation through a key press or begin play action in the character blueprint . I am currently working on it and not able to figure out the exact blueprint setup as I am not familiar with the blueprint coding and I have installed plugins like XiJson and VaRest to read Json files. If anyone has any idea please help me out. Thank you!!
There are native plugins for HTTP communication and JSON parsing. I can’t say it’s necessarily easier or different than VaRest, but it’s worth knowing and trying. They are called “HttpBlueprint” and “JSON Blueprint Utilities”
There should be plenty of tutorials out there for VaRest. I think the hardest part if you’ve never coded anything similar is understanding how to parse the JSON structure. Here’s an example I did for Open Weather.
Their API returns a JSON body that has the results I want under a field called “current”, i.e current weather. The temperature is held in “current.temp”, and the sun and clouds icon is held in “current.weather.icon”.
In Blueprints I can “Get Field” for “current” and then “Get Field” for other properties inside that.
Your character animations will have a very different structure to the JSON, but ultimately you have to use that same logic. From the JSON you “Get’ the bone name, then from there Get the rotation value. It really depends on your data format. I also don’t do much animation stuff myself, so I can’t comment on the best way to actually move the skeleton. You might want to look into the Live Link system.
Thank you, I will try it out and let you know if it works.