Unreal Engine is a perfect toy to have some quality hobby time
Figured I’d start posting some small projects with hints that might be helpful to the community.
1. Turn in place using distance curves
https://youtube.com/watch?v=glsza0tNpX4
Hints:
First you need to see these talks:
https://youtu.be/YlKA22Hzerk
https://youtu.be/1UOY-FMm-xo
Also, as I was a complete animation newbie before I started this toy project, I have got a lot of information from “Animation Blueprint Setup & Walkthrough” live training series with Jay Hosfelt. Here is the link for the first video: https://youtu.be/ffuq5k-j0AY
Make actor follow control rotation. Basically, you back out rotation using ‘Rotate Root Bone’ node and use distance curve to look up angle and to scrub animation.
Some more notes:
You would want to do control in C++, blueprint spaghetti would be too much. Also, I see now why Epic is not releasing Paragon nodes, they’re most likely too custom to be made generic anim nodes.
If you can, have only a two step turn animation for 90 degrees. For 180 have 2 step most of the arc and then tiny step in the end. My animations are 3 and 4 step respectively and foot sliding on small turn angles is unavoidable. With 2 step animations you can have feet perfectly planted with no sliding.
If you use motion builder, put DistanceCurve on root bone as integer custom parameter and do ‘save as’ for your fbx - for some reason if you ‘export motion file’ it wipes out custom parameters.
When accessing animation curves, use EvaluateCurveData method on UAnimSequence instead of accessing raw curve data. When packaged, raw data becomes not accessible due to compression.