In our next support stream, we’ll be taking a closer look into various animation features with Senior Programmer Lina Halper, and Senior Artist Ray Arnett.
**
WHAT**
Discussion on animation retargeting, importing animations, character customization, upcoming root motion changes, and AnimMontage.
**
WHEN
**Tuesday, November 4th @ 2PM ET - Countdown]
**
WHERE
****www.twitch.tv/unrealengine
WHO
**Sean Palomino - Developer Support Manager
Lina Halper - Sr. Programmer
Ray Arnett - Sr. Animator
Feel free to ask any questions *on the topic *in the thread below, and remember: While we try to give attention to all inquiries, it’s not always possible to answer everyone’s questions as they come up. This is especially true for off-topic requests, as it’s rather likely that we don’t have the appropriate person around to answer. Thanks for understanding!
Question: Is there ever going to be a method for creating/editing animations directly in the engine? I know you guys use the Maya plugin, but most of us indies cannot afford a license to Maya so we are stuck with Blender and the engine. It seems that the engine allows you to manipulate animations pretty well, it just doesn’t let you save the changes. Could someone add the save feature in? Probably a small job for one of your programmers but a huge benefit to those of us that cannot afford all the shiny toys of the big studios.
Tick Pose advances the animation timeline position of the component, evaluating any curve parametres, firing anim notifies and other housekeeping. Refresh Bones actually evaluates the animation at its updated position and applies it to the skeleton, calculating all the transforms at each bone in order to properly render the skeletal mesh.
Tick Pose is relatively cheap, depending on how much information you drive through your animation. If you have any important gameplay state controlled by animation, you normally want this to happen regardless of if you can see the mesh or not.
Refresh Bones is more expensive as it involves a cascade of cumulative transforms which can add up very quickly if you have a lot of separate animation tracks, IK, etc. Since this is purely for the visuals of the skeletal mesh, you also generally don’t need to do this if the mesh is not visible.
The mesh component update setting lets you control when each of these steps is done. Only you will know which parts of the update you need, but generally the middle option (tick pose always, refresh bones when rendered) is what you want. One exception to this, for instance, would be the case of a first person game where you can see your character’s body, or if you drive camera motion through animation. In this case, if you don’t have any parts of the skeletal mesh in your camera, the bones would stop updating and any animation on your first person character or camera would stop working. This is one of the rare cases where you would want to always refresh bones.
Can you change the play rate of animations via blueprint at runtime? For example, I have an animation for the player to turn a wheel to unlock a door (think Metal Gear Solid 2 tanker). Also like MGS2, I’d like to have the player be able to press the button repeatedly to open the door faster. For this I’d need to speed up the animation. I’ve tried to find a node to do this but I’m having no luck.
Can you map animation playing speed to match any arbitrary number ?
For example I have something that takes 2s, and animation have 1.4s.
And I want, animation to play over 2s, instead of 1.4s and then aburtly end or start looping.
Select node in AnimGraph. Click the checkbox next to (As Pin) Play Rate. Then connect a variable to that pin. You can now drive this variable through the event graph or an external blueprint by Get Anim Instance.
Is it possible for physics to influence animations in real time?
For stuff like inertia, Coriolis force, microgravity action-reaction effects
That came to mind when I saw the FPS add-on for Star Citizen, last weekend. At one time, the gravity was shut off, and the players and other actors were floating.
I’d love to have that kind of gameplay but for a third person kind of game. or for matinees. having to just key the main action and let the physics of the engine deal with the minute details
thanks in advance!
[QUESTION] How can I create good melee animations? I mean how to sync them inside the engine. So that the player doesn’t look like as if he is hitting thin air every time.
[QUESTION] How to stop the player from getting through another player while performing a melee animation? Suppose when my character goes to hit the enemy with his bare hands, some part of the player that is outside the collision capsule goes through the enemy.
[Question] with the Amimation Starter Pack the “Aimoffset” is all 1 anim with different poses, is there a way to use this anim without trying to split it up by exporting and re-importing
The Root Motion Problem is still unresolved. I’ve posted a question on the answer hub detailing my problem. Please help me get an answer as my project is stuck on this.
is the link to the question https://answers.unrealengine.com/index.html
