Can you cover playing a reload animation while locomotion is still active (so walking while reloading)? Thanks!
Please Please show us the magic of Root Motion on Unreal!!!
Great stuff, thanks for the stream 
We are working on a 3rd person game at the moment, where I have created a custom character with a custom skeleton and animations (because he has floating limbs like Rayman) and we are having issues with the jump state machine.
I was wondering if there are any resources on how to make custom animations for the 3 stage based jump? I haven’t been able to find any on how to specifically animate for it in a 3D app, just how to program for it.
I’ve tried copying the method used for the blueprint character as close as I could, but this was my first time animating a full body character, so I dont’ know if I messed something up.
What are the things you should consider when animating a jump animation broken into 3 stages like this?
Hey, I’ll post responses to questions in the next few days as I dig for answers but wanted to post a quick update as to why the character rotated funny during the stream…
I forgot to decrease the Alpha value on the LookAt node that was controlling the Spine. >.<
We only want a portion of that to be used not the full value which is why the character was rotating so much.
Setting it to .3 instead of 1 gave it just enough to get the character’s body to turn slightly.
Cheers guys.
-W
Nice stream, clear and easy to follow. But please get rid of the magnification next time, it makes everything unnecessarily big and forces the presenter to constantly shuffle and resize windows. Quite annoying tbh.
It was definitively a good streaming for all the peeps starting in animation, good job Wes!
Tryed to look it up on youtube, but I cant seem to find it.
Frankly I’m kind of bummed, especially this one (since i’m an animator myself), I keep on saying it :), Epic staff (including the good speaker here) should NOT be wasting their time presenting basics that can so easily be found in a hundred other YouTube videos or even the docs!
Some people here have asked legit questions which i too would like covered for instance in the live streams and so do many other users.
Sorry, Epic Staff have so much more to offer us.
Bring us more advanced/intermediate to ‘expert’ level content please, especially dealing with animation movements, I would also love root motion coverage mixed with capsule for instance, pros and cons chatter, as well as more serious IK workflow (I know you guys have warping tech now but we do not), quadrupeds, Blend spaces on more complicated character movements, multiple anticipation animation blending and respective conditions (tips), Workflow between main packages, interaction of elements with the character and respectively blending animation to that, instances of two characters having sword fight, accurate sword interactions.Conditional blend shapes according to values and bone angles (more such examples). I could think of so many livestream choices. I strongly believe moving away from more beginner to early intermediate content can be a far more valuable time spent by Epic for the community.
I don’t mean spoon feeding here, I mean even a 5% of a good tip off from Epic could help guide many onto a better path. And this stream was almost 2 hours. Imagine how much info can be shared within that time.
This reminds me of an older livestream about lighting which at the time I was waiting for with great anticipation, only to be disappointed when the poor presenter had to spend something like 15 mins on a 45 mins stream answering to a beginner as to why good UV unwrapping matters to prevent light leak! and so on…
A little too late don’t you think? Where were you when they just posted this announcement? Could have put in your questions here…
I think you missed the point I was trying to make.
That live stream was very useful! Well explained, nice examples and great tips. Looking forward to more streams featuring Wes!
I got a lot of use out of this too and thought it was a good stream.
I was looking at Unreal Engine´s YouTube channel… But i couldn´t watch the live tutorial…
where is it now? it wont be posted?
For all who missed the stream, you can go to their twitch and search for the last live stream recording. Anyway for the lazy here is the direct link <3
If you have a Youtube account, you can click the little bell icon next to the Subscribe button for the Unreal Engine Youtube channel to get notifies. Then you’ll see in your messages drop down something like *“Unreal Engine is live: Unreal Engine Livestream - Character Animation in UE4”. *If you click it, it will send you to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVC-DL9Ibf0
For whatever reason it’s set to Unlisted. Why? It was a pretty good stream… Was it set as unlisted because someone’s planning on editing it or something? Or did you guys just fuggetabouit?
Also, maybe next time you guys can talk about the “Blend Depth” setting from the “Layered blend per bone” node.
I couldn’t find anything that explained it properly.
Wes is the Boss of livestreams !
Hey all,
Here is a follow up to the questions that were asked that I didn’t get to on the stream. Hopefully these will answer your questions, if not we’ll do a more advanced verison of this stream in the future:
WB: Hopefully answering all three questions with this response. The Blend Depth setting on the Layered Blend Per Bone node determines how far down the chain of bones you want to start distributing the blend from.
For example, if we use the following Blend Depth on our Layered Blend Per Bone node:
file:///C:%5CUsers%5CWES~1.BUN%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_image001.png
It will take the 4[SUP]th[/SUP] bone in the chain and distribute the blend among the bones back up the chain.
The blend is stronger starting at the Neck, then down to Spine 2 and Spine 1, weaker when reaching the Spine bone which is why there is less twist in the animation with a higher blend setting (and more twist with a lower setting as 100% of the blend is happening at the Bone Name we specify).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap7r0PTcHXY
While you can’t do a 50/50 split of the Hips in this case since that is the root bone, there is a way to negate the effects of the Layered Blend per Bone node by entering a negative Blend Depth specifying which Bone or chain of Bones to ignore.
For example, if we want the hips (pelvis) to follow the attack, we can take both legs and add them to the Branch Filters, setting their Blend Depth value to -1. It will negate the Blend on the chain of bones starting from the Bone Name specified.
In this example, we add the Bones for the legs and set the Blend Depth to -1 so that the hips follow the attack better. You will have to experiment with different settings to achieve the effect you want, but it’s already an improvement over the previous setup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGPez5NlT5I
WB: The performance impact of cached poses is negligible compared to additional State Machines. Having to evaluate multiple State Machines is more expensive than taking a reference pose from the evaluation that already occurred on a State Machine.
WB: Pro is that you can visualize better, you could see the flow of the State Machine better. More State Machines, however, mean more depth and more evaluation happening.
WB: Montages cannot be placed in AnimGraphs, I probably could have told the Character Blueprint to call an event inside the Event Graph of the Anim Blueprint to play the montage instead. You could, of course, skip using montages all together and use the State Machine to handle combat animations; it’s a matter of preference. In the stream, I discussed why it may be advantageous to use Montages instead of a State Machine and using the State Machine to handle systemic animation logic.
WB: You could layer that on top of an existing animation. You may also want to look at using Pose Assets to handle facial animation.
WB: If they all affect the multi-directional navigation, for example, a broke leg and the character limps or hurt arm so the character holds it differently. I’d probably look at using blend spaces for the navigation and layer on top the upper body or lower body the conditional animations. You could also set up blend spaces for your conditions and selectively choose one of the blend spaces based on those conditions. Maybe we’ll cover this in a future stream as well, I’ll need to dig into it more.
WB: I’d say the later, you could use a Run on Server Event to call a Multicast Event to play the Anim Montage.
WB: Would you happen to have screens/video of the issue. Or a test case I could follow to reproduce it on my end to see what the problem is?
WB: Similar to the previous question, would you be able to provide some test assets for us so that we may diagnose the issue on our end?
WB: We can look into this. If it is not a video tutorial series, perhaps we can cover it in a future stream. I’d like to get Laurent to do one so I can learn from him as well! J
WB: I personally do not have a best practice for this just yet, however, I’m hoping that in future releases when we adopt some of the techniques being used in Paragon that we’ll have better features to handle this.
Take a look at the video I talked about from Laurent here at the 12:00 mark where he talks about Movement Prediction, Distance Curve (reverse Root Motion) and Speed Warping. I don’t have a timeline of when these features will be available, however.
To get the weapon pointed precisely where the crosshairs trace hits is complicated. I have it working well but it is a bit involved. The basic idea is to use LookAt on the right hand bone (I used Transform(Modify)Bone with FindLookAtRotation). The complication is that the right hand bone and the weapon barrel are not aligned along the same vector. To solve this you need to know the offset between the hand bone and the point on the barrel that is closest to the hand bone. That difference can be used to determine what location the hand bone should look at given the location that the barrel should look at – you just add the barrel/hand offset to the barrel look at location (think parallel lines). And you can add sockets to your weapon skeleton (one for barrel location, one for hand bone location) to help you figure out the barrel/hand offset. On BeginPlay, get the offset between the two sockets (I find this preferable to hard-coding the offsets, but you can do that instead if you want).
hi,
i want to make a third person character that can walk, crouch, run , strafe left and right , equip / equip weapon, aim , fire … etc 
what the general way to handle animations in this case ?
should i create 3 blendspaces (unarmed (free hands), crouched, armed) or there is a way to make less by using layered animations and animation montage?
ah and i have forgotten walking on cover in standing and crouching modes
i am a little confused after watching too many youtube videos 
thanks .
[USER=“48”]Wes Bunn[/USER]