Transform Bone on trigger

Development Character & Animation
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1

I’m not sure if this is the right place to put this so let me know if I got it wrong.

Anyway I’m going nuts I can’t find the answer anywhere, also I’m still fairly new to all this so bare with me. I’m trying to change the angle of the beak of a bird as soon as it picks something up, so I’m using Transform (Modify) Bone in the Anim Blueprint for the bird. However, connecting it into the line just makes the beak open permanently, but I need to trigger it only when picking up an item.

How in the world do I do this?

2

You could use a timeline to drive a value from the blueprint actor => anim instance => bone transform.

3

I’ll give this a go as soon as I have a moment and report back thanks!

4

If you don’t need procedural angles then an animation montage with additive animation for the beak movement would be an easier solution, but you would need to tailor animations for each object size.

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5

Why in code? Just use an animation.
Additive would be best.

6

Sorry still pretty new, I don’t know how to create an animation with the desired outcome, I figured code would be easier…

7

So I figured out I can copy an animation, open it and change the position of the bone (mouth open) and use the +Key at the top to make a key frame of the animation and save it. That works fine, but when I translate it into an animation montage so that I can blend it with other animations, and switch the default slot so that it’s only using the ‘mouth’ bones for the animations, the keyframe I added disappears.

Any idea how to fix this? As I said I’m still pretty new so while I’m looking for tutorials and information online, I’m not really sure how to look for what the problem is.

8

Save the frame out as a regular animation. Not a keyframe.

9

How would I do that? I’m so sorry for being a newb here xD

10

Scratch that I messed around and figured it out, now to figure out why I can’t get it to loop… Thanks so much guys!

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11

Montages have a special way to loop. When creating them they need some 2 return/refresh looking symbols.

State machines have a loop option hidden inside the properties of the animation node you link into the output.

12

I found an alternative way to loop the montage, but if I can just check a setting that’d be great! I’m playing the montage from the player bp rather than inside the anim bp so I can trigger it more easily at specific times, so I don’t think I can set the loop option from inside the anim bp/state machine as the animation isn’t in there. But I do have the work around that’s functioning just fine for now! Thanks a bunch!