August 31, 2018
Animation Blueprint Setup & Walkthrough Stream Recap
“Animation Blueprint Setup & Walkthrough Part 1” shows how you can take our 3rd Person Animation Blueprint we created for Shinbi and retarget it to other Paragon characters. In the video above, I cover some of the fundamentals of an Animation Blueprint with things like blend spaces, aim offsets, state machines, cache poses, montages, anim notifies, etc. This broadcast is a great starting point if you are new to animation in UE4. In “Animation Blueprint Setup & Walkthrough Part 2” we cover how to change the run system to a strafe system by using run direction blendspaces. I also cover how to retarget animations from one character to another and also plug in a very simple turn-in-place system. “Animation Blueprint Setup & Walkthrough Part 3” covers the concept of melee twist, upper-body animations and custom animation curves. “Animation Blueprint Setup & Walkthrough Part 4” gets even more advanced as I cover how to create custom input actions, which I use to show off hit reacts. I also cover additive animations, virtual bones, IK and a few tips on faster iteration times between DCC apps and UE4. Part 5, entitled "Getting the Animation Results You Want Part 5" covers a more complex version of turning in place, where a character will turn in place once they hit a certain value in their aim offset. While all these systems were worked on piecemeal during the streams, I thought it would be useful for you to have a project where all these things are combined. Please feel free to use, re-target, modify, or backwards engineer to learn more. This is free to use in your own projects! From the first stream to the last, I continued to iterate and tweak the Shinbi animations. Below is a short video that shows off that efforts-recap.