I’m not very proficient with Animation Blueprints at the moment and want to get stuck in by looking at implementing stop, start and turn animations for a human character using the Anim Pro set on the Market Place.
Are there any good tutorials out there for how to use these with accurate foot alignment throughout?
I agree that would be cool to have such a tutorial in the future. Twitch stream maybe?
Nevertheless, I think I saw in the GDC video about the KiteDemo a quick explanation on how they constructed animation graphs for the deers in the environment, with the transition from idle to walk, and idle to sprint when they run away when the camera comes close.
I think this might be a good starting point.
I’ll have to implement such a thing too in a near future, so if nothing comes here, I may give some infos on how I’ll do this. But I don’t think it’s more complicated than setting a bunch of variables each tick on the animation blueprint (like a sudden change of orientation), then blending to the sprint animation (through a blend space)
I’ve been able to handle transition between movement speeds with Blendspaces, but it’s the stopping & starting that leave me baffled because the anims will contain movement and need to seamlessly connect with movement loops, where feet match up correctly.
You could also expand this tutorial to include info on how to do IK, although I’m starting to get the feeling that doing all of this in Blueprints isn’t very efficient if you’re dealing with larger numbers of characters. Considering that Epic are planning on supporting large worlds I hope that in the future we see some kind of scalable physics driven animation system for characters that is scalable so we can have GTA style character density on similar performing hardware - GTAV can really do alot on older machines.
Wild guess : the start anim would always make the (for example) right foot to move first, and the movement blend space would make the left feet to move first. So when you detect a sudden start, you would play the montage, and setup your state machine to blend to the movement blend space after the correct amount of time so the transition would be OK.
I don’t have any other ideas right now, but I’m eager to read other proposals
Your direction of movement may influence which foot you move forward on first.
I’m guessing what you’d want is some way of playing a move forward anim (probably best if it was 2D Blendscape with turning across 360 degrees for a variety of speeds). I’m assuming the animation wil take care of movement and rotation, not the movement component. You’ll then want to go into your movement blendspace (2D again, includes speed and turning variants) instantly, with the movement component taking over instantly, with no acceleration / deceleration,
For AI characters you’d want to blend into your stop anim a set distance from your desintation and may need multiple animations to handle different footprint configurations. Whereas the stop anim for a player controlled character would need to be instantaneous, with feet moving to a position underneath the body’s current location, rather than ahead or behind it.
I wish a bunch of us could get together to create a versatile animation system for bipedal characters like this that could be used for player and AI, whether they orientate in the direction they move or not. I don’t have time to create one from scratch myself but would happily get involved in one if I could help out.