Animation Blueprint Setup & Walkthrough | Live Training | Unreal Engine Livestream

hi and welcome to the Unreal Engine news and community spotlight so last week was a really big week for Unreal Engine we had a lot of great news coming out of GDC 2018 we announced Paragon assets we released over 12 million dollars worth of character assets and environment packs they're all available for free on the Unreal Engine marketplace so please go take advantage of those and make awesome projects with them we want you to check them out see all the different kinds of animations textures materials and other items involved in them and take them apart learn from them and play with them have fun with that we also announced that we are support we have support an engine for the magic leap SDK or their magic leap 1 lots of really cool stuff they're going in the virtual world and reality space there so go take a look and we also had our keynote on Wednesday we have the state of unreal we worked with ILM xlab and NVIDIA on a beautiful real-time ray-tracing demo called reflections we announced a record and replay system that will be available in fortnight but you will also be able to implement it yourself via the engine soon we also had a really really incredible work done with three lateral we had a siren or a woman named siren digital human along with Andy Serkis just some fantastic demos if you didn't get a chance to see them they're all available on our website so if you go to unreal engine comm slash GDC 2018 all of those things are available there we've also uploaded all of our Tech Talks and learning theater talks that we're done from yerba buena at our keynote and on the theater or the show floor so lots of really great information there definitely encourage you all to take a look at that and we had a really wonderful time at our booth we had over 25 different developers from all over the world hanging out with us and it was just incredible getting to see all that we hope you had a chance to stop by if not definitely be sure to check us on next time so on to our weekly karma earners these folks are jumping in and helping their fellow community manager or community members so we give a shout out to nebula games Inc Thompson one three roughhouse games Shadow River blink is e3 death ray rayd fired net static void LOL connie punchy and mia views thank you all you all its our first community spotlight for this week is a coffee bar demo by warner v they've set up this beautiful scene they've done a great job setting up it looks really gorgeous just a your you know typical architectural visualization but they've done a really wonderful job and we always love seeing the different kinds of things our community members are making you should keep up the great work our second spotlight project of the week is actually a brawler that has been created with the Paragon assets so Alden Fillion created this in his spare time and it looks really sweet we're all passing around the office and would all totally go play this game so this is just an example of what you can do if you grab those marketplace assets run around give them a you know take them for a test drive and see what you're able to prototype really quickly I mean they've only been out a week and a half and you put something together like this so it's really really cool to see what y'all are able do and so great were called in we really love it and our third and final spotlight for the week is a streamer or a streamer called Mike named Mike well khoka he's been working on swords and magic and stuff we just really love how much he's reaching out he's supporting his community he jumps in streams and he's always really great he's actually relatively new to development but he's sharing that experience with other developers always happy to jump in help them with questions if he's able to answer and he's also working on this fun swords and magic and stuff game which is a casual multiplayer video game and it's you're running around swords and magic you're adventuring with your friends and it's cute but perilous world full of action and adventure so your role is defined by the items you carry and the way you would like to play a great job keep up the awesome work and that's it for our news and community spotlight [Music] hey welcome to the Unreal Engine livestream I'm your host Amanda bot and with me I have Tim Slager our newest community manager and J hospital who's one of our lead animators the energy so we're really excited we're gonna be diving in with J to talk about how to get the paragon assets up and running as far as their animation blueprints we'll walk through Shen be great yeah we're gonna start off with shin B because that's we gave you guys a basic animation blueprint with her so we're gonna use that as a starting point and then diving a little in with crunch and actually do the steps yeah I'm going to basically walk you guys through how to get shouldn't be stuff over to crunch as quickly as possible and so even if you're not interested in animation I can show you how to get that set up quickly and if you're really interested in the nitty-gritty of how everything works I'm gonna cover that once I do that transfer and we'll do that on crunch awesome so before we dive in we want to talk to Tim a little bit so you guys are gonna be seeing more of him we're super excited to have you join us now you come from six foot I do and you what what projects were you working so it's six what I was working on I started working on gray goo which was a real-time strategy we moved over to working on the project called Ryan which is a puzzle adventure game once we kind of closed out the puzzle adventure game we start I was I was supporting the dread-nots team and then it came here and know is social media so at 6:00 when I was filling a couple of roles that was the community manager for for gray goo and for rime and then I was handling all the social media for dreadknot and so that was just it was a wide breadth of experience and things to learn very different games too so it was very much like that like I have to put on my emotional hat and then I have to put on my my combat hat and so it was it was fun and you know engaging with people on on two different projects it's it's such a unique opportunity to talk about you know an emotional experience and then like get a like hey I'm gonna I'm gonna blow your ships up in combat and in space and and both those projects weren't unreal and it was just it was a great opportunity to work on and you know it was it was just a lot of fun getting to we did a lot of cool things like we did a Lindsey Stirling music video for rime we did a lot of just a lot of cool engagement things and I think that a lot of that's kind of what I want to bring here and start carrying over to our development community so it's gonna be a lot of fun like the I'm gonna talk about swords and magic and stuff I hang out in that chat with the twitch guys all the time and they're just they're just super awesome people and it's it's such a fun opportunity to watch people work in the engine and see what they're developing and so it's it's just it's been great so far and I think this is this is day 14 21 or something yeah poor Tim they started a week before we all left for GDC I was here for two days before flying to Chicago for train Jam which was also an incredible experience if you've never done train Jam you're just on I train with like 340 other devs and they're all jamming and then distracted by mountain scenery that's three three days two days you leave Thursday and get there Saturday yeah so here's here we're here with him a couple days all right well we're all gonna go please hold down the fort make sure it was the the user count of the office was dwindling after Wednesday because I'm the rest of the people on Friday everyone was gone it was kind of it was that Ricky Bobby moon where I don't know what to do with my hands but everything was great it was and everybody here has just been so awesome it's such a great experience to be a part of this so you're gonna be seeing a lot more of Tim probably on the streams with us they'll seem very active on social in the forums and diming and discord so if you have any questions for Tim or us hit us up and now it's him that's all about Jake all right Oh what are we doing the animation part is about it but we need you to be animated yeah oh I get to do both all right so all right so as you guys know we really a ton of paragon assets and initially we released all the animations and we realized that animations by themselves are a little bit meaningless so we delivered shinbe with animation blueprint and we base that off of our third person project which is a pretty simple animation setup and we added a couple things to that just so you guys can get started so today what I'm gonna do is show you how to take what we did with shinbe and just map it to any of the other characters we've released so far and then I'll dig in and start talking about the concepts the goal today is I really want to give an introductory to how our animation systems work with these characters so if you're a pro Yui for animation power user stick around there still may be a couple things I could show you but this is definitely going to be entry we want to bring a lot more people into this and show them how to work with these assets and as time goes on we'll do more twitch streams and get more in depth with you guys's feedback so right now I'm going to show you guys if you have not opened up shin-bi's animation blueprint I'm gonna show you what she comes with so right now she comes with essentially a level start a level start animation we have her doing a run for locomotion she's not strafing like we had in Paragon she runs to the direction that her capsule is moving and we have her do a jump when you turn with the mouth she will lean into her runs which that's something we added that the third person tutorial doesn't have and she has start and stops and then I also added a three-hit combo this all comes with the workplace this is the asset download marketplaces as a functionality she currently has if you look at our animations let me run through our animation directory real fast you'll see that we actually have a lot more animations than we're using today the Paragon animation system a lot of it was specific code to the Paragon build and our goal is to get you guys that into the the public version of unreal that's going to take several months so we're going to go ahead all these animations as is we're not going to modify them too much to work with this current animation blueprint because in the future we're gonna do a new setup that uses everything we used in Paragon that has a lot of systems like speed warping let's see distance matching slope warping all these systems we put in place to keep the feet from sliding and give the animation of just a high level of fidelity so the goal today is to use what we have set it up this should be really good to learn for people who have like maybe a low amount of assets you don't have a big animation team this setup we have on shouldn't be use this a minimal amount of animation so so let's start off I'm just going to show the quick and easy way to get her animation blueprint onto a character or like crunch so let's go back up so the three things you need to copy this over to another hero is the animation test map the character animation blueprint and the character blueprint so these three things right now I'm going to start off by just retargeting her animation blueprint over to crunch so what you do is you go over to the retarget and in blueprint we're gonna duplicate and a blueprint and retarget so you'll get the screen here and we're not going to retarget any new animations it's only the animation blueprint so we're not concerned about the compatible skeleton so i'm going to turn that off and so now you can see i've crunch skeleton in my scene oh and be sure you will definitely need soon being crunch in the same project so before you get started you need to go ahead and add shinbe to your crunch project or migrate her from another project okay so here we have the two skeletons what we want to do is we're not going to create new animations we're actually going to use crunches animations in her blueprint that's being retargeted so I'm gonna say allow remapping to existing assets and then right here I'm for the replace with I'm gonna go ahead and replace shinbe with crunch I'm going to change the directory so the animation blueprint will go over into crunches animation folder okay so now when I hit retarget I'm going to get this screen and what this is asking me is all right I have shouldn't B's animation over here that's called called jump recovery additive and I assume you want to go ahead and use an animation for crunch that you already have with the same name now you can go in and search through his animations and find the right one but we have this really cool feature where we can just hit autofill using best guess take a second and that auto-populated this list with it tried to find the closest animation name to match and some of these heroes have slightly different naming conventions because over a period of four years we kind of honed in on a better naming convention but let's go through these real fast and make sure they're good so we have jump recovery additive jump plan looks good if you look here idle for whatever reason it chose a cast animation we do not need that we need an idle so I'll type idle in the search and let's do let's do idle combat that sounds good and on the montage section you can leave this blank let's see the rest of these are looking fine jog uphill jog down hill we have a bunch of idle aim offsets and then we have level start down here this is the actual animation that's being used in the level start montage up here so this looks good but let's say I made a mistake it's okay we could always refill back in the the animation blueprint so now if I open up crunches animation blueprint we have all the same logic going on and I'll cover this stuff once I get the the stuff working right now I'm trying to do the really fast and easy transfer over so here we have his animation blueprint so we're set up there so now we have the we want to load him in the map where we had shinbe earlier and I'm gonna go ahead and move these two other assets I'm gonna go ahead move them over to the crunch directory okay and I'm gonna go ahead and rename this just because I know this is gonna be crunches hard to see isn't it yeah luckily I got LASIK a few years ago I could see laser eyes yes all right so I'm going to open up this this character blueprint and this is where it I can see what mesh and animation blueprint I need to use right now it's pointing to shinbe so let's replace shinbe with crunch and let's do something cool let's do a crunch military I don't know if you guys have seen whoa that skin it's gonna take a second world first actually you know what I should have done I should have just kept a simple gone with crunch because it's probably compiling shaders right now that's what I get for being fancy well in the meantime just for clarity all these assets can only be used in 419 correct yes this is absolutely for 19 and any updates we have since since this was not working for 18 okay so if you guys do want to use these assets make sure you get updated to the latest yes make sure you do get the latest now let's see while this is thinking do we have any other questions I'll do a couple all right so they're actually wondering if we're gonna add more edition B then what they've already been given with the blueprints for example blending the four different cardinal direction things like that that is a good question so when we got shin-bi's animation blueprint out we really wanted to get you something really easy to understand and simple and over time we are going to add more at least to one of these I feel like what I want to do is work with you the community and start building up something more complex on the other hand we definitely have all like all the new animation systems we have coming so we we have to keep a lot of things ready for that to come and once that once we get the new features from Paragon we'll have far more complicated animation systems to show you guys somebody else asked just a real quick question is how hard do you think it will be to translate this into top-down project that is that's honestly a matter of where you want to put your camera really I mean that's that's more of a gameplay type thing but these animations will work with the top-down view all right so we finally got crunch up and running I'm gonna go ahead and use his base skin right now because we don't have time for the materials to compile so I'm going to go ahead and point him to his animation blueprint so I move this off the screen real fast [Music] I'm gonna go ahead and say if his character blueprint now let's all cross our fingers this test map should now have I'm gonna say don't say right now risky let's see we might need to go to another question yeah let's do another question it's on this this computer is thinking a little bit that's we should see crunch pop up here in just a second see do you know if there are any plans to release the Maya control rigs so along with the Paragon characters so there is not a plan to release the my control rigs however the art rig tool that we use it's a Maya tool that's free to the public you can find it on our market place I believe or github I think we have it on both and there are ways to take one of our skeletal meshes out of the editor and and go ahead and play it all right here we go alright I got it running okay let me go to full screen so as you can see here we have crunch and he can run and there's a few things you're gonna see here when he jumps the the jump feels pretty strange when he turns towards camera he jitters that's because he's playing a blintz space that is switching between negative 180 and 180 we're gonna fix that as well and if I hit the left mouse button he's not punching so I'm gonna walk through how to fix those real fast but we have them in the game also he is using shin-bi's camera right now and I'll show you how to pull the camera back so are these kinds of things like the punch not working is that going to be different to each character or is it consistent this is gonna be some consistent that's good question there's gonna be a consistent problem you see across the board basically we did copy over the the blueprint but there's a few things like I said we set up these assets to work with our Paragon animation system and there's a few changes that you guys just need to make and these are common across the board so the first thing I'm going to do is let's go ahead and open up animation blueprint and I'm gonna fix that jump that's one of the easiest things we'll fix here here's this blueprint and I'll get into this later but these are his state machines I'm going to open up the state machine that has his jump land in it and I'm opening up his jump land asset and this is an additive animation we convert it to additive so it'll play on top of an idle or a run and right now it's using mesh space additive we're gonna go ahead and just change that to local space additive and that's it and that will fix the jump so let's let's play this again and you guys might not have seen how the jump was broken but it's right now he's now he's leaning forward into the jump it looks more natural when he's looming yeah so then let's go ahead and fix the same offset issue again this is an aim offset that works with our Paragon system but we can quickly convert it to work with this third-person demo so I'm gonna go into the EM offsets directory and we have the crunching offset so right now it right now he can turn his head let me zoom in a little so you guys can see right now we have a blend space freakin pretty much try to look all the way behind him over his shoulder since he's running towards the camera now when you run backwards we're just going to go ahead and read of these and let's replace it with the center aim offset center center I'm going to drag and drop Center down and then we'll drag and drop Center up and we're gonna go we're gonna go ahead and do this on the other side on his looking behind him on his other shoulder so let's go I'll do Center down here and Center up and I'll show you guys in just a second why you want to do this alright let's save let's hit play again all right so earlier when I was running towards the camera and moving my mouth the the aim offset was really causing him to jitter out but now he's using basically just his same Center up and down aim offset natural when he leans in with them it's more natural but you actually just get rid of this pop where he's trying to blend between negative 180 and positive 180 on the blendspace and then one more thing right now he is missing his punch animations this part is a little more in-depth but let's get into it so his we use a concept called mana I'll go into this later but we use montages for any times we do an ability like a punch or melee move or even a firing a weapon move so I'm gonna do it I'm gonna go in here and most of our primary for like left mouse button we've named them primary and sometimes we don't so here it looks like we didn't so I'll look at melee let's look up one more ability combo okay so each of these heroes had kind of different names for their abilities and I would just say go through and just find the ones you want so I'm just so here this is called ability combo so here we have ability combo one I'm gonna go ahead and turn that into a montage I'm gonna go up to the top create animation montage I'll go ahead and leave the name the way it is and let's find ability combo number two here it is oh man I'm so glad I can see I can't and then we have ability combo number three over here let's turn that into a montage and these are the things we need for our combo system to work okay think about montages is there are essentially scripted events that can be controlled outside of an animation blueprint this is why a lot of designers like using them so here I've opened up the animation montage this is going to be a very simple animation montage I'm only going to have one animation in it the thing you need to do is change the slot name to default group let's see it's go down default upper body and if your character goes into a pose like this that's just a quark going on right now so I'm gonna go ahead and save save this montage and actually while I'm here we're gonna add a couple notifies for the the combo system so let's see okay so we're gonna create new brand-new notifies for him so I'm gonna go down to here click right click on the notify strip here and you're gonna add add notify go to the bottom do no new notify now let's do that again because I lost the box let's see notify I'm gonna call this one reset combo and I'm going to make another an emotive eye brand new one and let's call this one reset attack I believe that's the right one the intent of these these notifies this is for the blueprint I'll go into this more in depth in just a second but these the basics of what it does is in the game you could spam your left mouse button you know countless times but we don't want the animation to reset over and over and over every time you do it so this basically tells you when will the animation reset again when you're clicking so reset attack actually I think I missed named that one this one should be called save attack let's add okay so basically this is where you're gonna set it to where you you know you don't want the player to interrupt the move before this part happens so let's go ahead and let him punch and settle on that punch frame a little bit I'm gonna move that save attack notify there since this is a combo you know like all fighting game combos they can timeout if you don't press the button soon enough so this is where I will let the user I'll give them time before they can hit the button again before the combo times out so this is essentially the comp the timeout setting I'm gonna put that at the very end of the animation and let's go ahead and save that so real fast I just want to do a double check here this is it's always good to double check any naming conventions you have before you start doing a lot of other naming so I'm gonna look at shin-bi's montage I just want to make sure I'm naming these notifies the correct correct way okay so yeah save attack reset combo that's what I've typed right yeah all right and that's all happening within for crunchy was all happening in under a second yes yeah his combo is pretty fast so let's go back to crunch and that's what's cool is you only have the the good thing is you only need to create those notifies once once you create them it's going to add it to the skeletal asset the skeleton asset and then it's always there for your later ones so let me open up a new montage and this time all I have to do is right-click let's get paused so now all I need to do is go to my frame I can right-click and I want add notify and I want it to be the save attack next I'm gonna move that back a little bit cuz you do want him to kind of hang on that pose for a little bit and then let's go ahead and add to notify reset combo go remember also you want to put the right slots on these so this is going to be default group upper body I'll explain the slots in a little bit and then let's go to this third combo he's doing this little upper uppercut here so same concept we're just going to wait for him to do is move let's settle on it for a little bit so the player can tell what happened and let's add go to the notify add notify and save attack let's reset combo and this is good enough for now I'm again I'm not going to forget to set a slot sometimes when you're working with montages this happens with animators all the time our stuff just isn't working it turns out we just left a slot name off the montage so just you always gotta get in habit of checking these things I'm gonna save okay so let's cross our fingers again and let's hit play sing them out and he should be hitting and he's not Oh yep I missed a spot so there we go fun about this is the trial and error real time real time this is real time game development actually you got people may think we do this like we try once and we get it working no it we usually try 50 times before it works okay so what I forgot to do is on crunches player character blueprint is where we have the combo setup and like I said montages can be controlled outside of an animation blueprint so in this case the characters non animation his blueprint is controlling these montages with our combo system so what I want to do here is I need to plug in his actual montage this so let's go back to his animations and we have montage one let's plug that in here montage number two we'll plug that into a second combo and then let's plug in his third trying to keep this all in one window for you guys and let's hit save that's going to hit compile I'm pretty sure it's compiled it's been a whoop save and let's play again alright so here he is he's punching he's doing his three three-punch combo so if he's standing still you can see he does full body and if he's running right now we have a setup to to do upper body it's a pretty simple upper body blend per bone blend but that's you get you get the visual feedback of the action you get the visual feedback so this is this is very typical a lot of games kind of do a cheap version upper body we ever live a pretty cool upper body system and our Paragon tool set that's coming down the line but in a future one of these I do want to show kind of what we'd call a poor man's version of setting up what we call melee twist but it gets rid of that that extreme amount of twist that happens right at spine one especially when you're running you get you get a very strong disconnect between the hip motion and what's happening I'm looking would break their back a little bit yeah and and right now by default you are gonna see this on some characters one of my next dreams I'll cover how to fix this but this is one of the you know designers love the freedom of a character running around and punching with the freedom to move animators we really despise this setup when when it's asked for it but we found a way that kind of allows for both and like I'll cover that in a future one so alright so let's get out of here so what I did here is I basically copied all this shouldn't be stuff over to crunch and he's now working exactly like shinbe is working so if that's all you want out of animation you're use my character to move and not understand much of it that's that's a part I'm gonna show you one more part of this before I get in more in-depth so let's go back to crunch so right now the camera is pretty close to crunch let's open up his character blueprint the character blueprint has the camera in it the camera boom so let's go to the viewport and you could actually see where his camera is attached to this capsule so let's just take his camera boom and let's just move it out a little more so now he's not so so big on screen you can just adjust that camera and just get it to where you want you can change the height than the distance back this goes to the question about translating this will top-down yeah you just move the camera above them and yeah exactly your animations would still look the same it would just appear from a different perspective and in this case I actually moves the pivot where the cameras looking so when he runs at you it's actually really off so that's that's not a good thing so you can see here where I move the boom by moved essentially I just move the pivot before that is what you want to do is move this guy there we go oh so you adjusted the camera but yeah I just did the it's not the boom it's a follow camera I think you want to move let's see so now when he turns it should so when he turns it shouldn't get so crazy let's let's try it yeah no it's not so crazy he's not so in-your-face when he runs at you I don't know that I'd be happy about him being in my face okay especially punching especially though that yeah an uppercut I think at the end is just so-so like I said that's my simple copy over you're done now you have another character moving but now I want to get into the nuts and bolts of our animation system I might not be able to cover everything today about I'm going to try and like I said this is introductory concepts but I assume there's some people who just want to get started they may not know much about Paragon I'd rather start with this and then walk everyone up to the more complicated parts later so let's open up crunches animation assets and as a very basic introduction when you make an animation in Maya and export that animation it's going to coming - it's going to come into the Unreal Engine as an animation asset so let's open up one of these animations so obviously this is your timeline so this animation was 20 frames long it's dirty frames a second and this is pretty basic it's all I'm really going to cover with the animation asset close that out I went I went into the animation montage a little bit I'm gonna explain that just a little bit more so a montage is like a container for your animation and it has a lot more data you could put in it it's where you can put your notifies you could set your blend in and out values over here so by default we have this set pretty of what as an animator I think of 0.25 blend times pretty long it can get pretty mushy you know but you can change it you can change the point one you change the twittery blend blend needs to be the really cool thing about this let me see if I can get this just playing I've seen animators not use this but for those of you that have it might want to see it let's see you can edit a montage while you're while you're playing so if I'm trying to get the feel of this this melee system working real well and I want that blend to be punchy I can just go over here and keep messing with with the blend in time one and the same thing with these notifies that I added four you know when I want my combo to reset or the save attack maybe one of the attacks the rhythm of it doesn't feel right I can just slide this around and just keep just keep trying it out so this is definitely one of the an iteration speed thing a lot of people don't know about all right so let's go ahead and save this montage and now this is the big thing this is the animation blueprint so this is where all the logic is to move our character around and I'm gonna back up a second I'm gonna move this off-screen let's load up crunches blueprint I want to explain to those that are new to this exactly what's happening in in a game so right now you're actually moving around a pond and what the analogy I like to make is you're actually moving at a round of birdcage and the character is just riding along in that birdcage and all the animations that character is doing is like a mime trying to make you believe the character is actually animating and not the birdcage if that makes sense so let me show you an actual birdcage so I'm going to go ahead and let's remove crunch from this blueprint and play the level again so we still have a character that we're playing here there's just not a skeletal mesh applied to it and this has all the in-game physics it turns when I move my mouse it jumps when I jump and behind the scenes is what we have see so hopefully this can come through on this on the stream but you can see there's like a capsule here is this coming through on this dream you know I mean in some points when you're looking down a little bit alright so basically this is your birdcage and it's moving around if I jump the birdcage jumps up and so as animators we're trying to get rid of this this we're trying to create an illusion that there's actually a character that's pushing off the ground and their feet are contacted to the ground but behind the scenes this is this is pretty simple stuff but it turns with your mouse it jumps now if we add a character to that so let's go back and add crunch again and let's add him without his blueprint his animation blueprint so if I add crunch here okay and let's play again all right hold on let me stop this it went ahead and knew I wanted his animation blueprint so it loaded that let's go ahead and delete animation blueprint again okay and now you know we have an attached skeletal mesh so the reason I'm telling you this is an animation blueprint works by taking all the information from this this bird get the capsule moving around we're taking information from that and we're using that to inform what's going to happen in the animation blueprint so your bird cage is still there it's just visually our bird cage is actually still there and you can show it so if I do show collision it's in there it's it's tinier than he is but it's still all there and he's actually just attached he's actually moving the bird cage around ultimately with and so what we want now is that Berk if that bird cage goes 300 units forward we want a run cycle to play that looks like as he's running at 300 units forward so let's start there we'll start with a run blendspace and let me get back to his character let's go ahead and plug in his his animation blueprint again blueprint and let's save this so when we come back he will work all right so let's get back to the animation blueprint open this up and for any of you animators out there sometimes when you look at these graphs with all this of all these points especially if you like look at something like an event graph it looks super intimidating it looks like an animator should not understand this or be expected to but really you know what I'd say ignore it all and just focus on one thing at a time because these things build up in complexity over time you just don't build the stuff in the first 30 minutes you start at one at a time so for instance this is the event graph and I'm gonna pop up a note that says once you begin playing the game I'm going to play a level start montage and it's as simple as that and all these makes sense when you just kind of break it down into very simple units and that's all this is is just a bunch of different moments where the animator had to set up some of some logic so let's get to the animation graph and I'm gonna I'm going to disassemble this a little bit the the main thing in an animation blueprint is that you have this final animation pose and everything feeds into this is going to be the ultimate display of whatever animation you have so let's say I'm just going to if I plug in let me find an idle here's an idle combat and all I'm going to do is plug in this idle combat into the final animation pose and now when I play the game all he is going to do is play the idol that's it even if I run even if I jump because the only thing I have feeding into that end pose is the idle and so to start off let's go ahead and move this guy up to my runs fact I only have one run because he only runs forward and let's go ahead and just plug this and result ok so right here's what we call a state machine and a state machine is a series of rules that will play different animations so when we first play an animation blueprint is going to start off right in the idle and that's his idle combat and the way you set these up you can just drag and drop an animation into it and then plug it in to that final animation pose just as simple as that for things like idles you want to make sure you have like loop turned on and other animations that you don't want to loop you want to make sure you turn that off and here we have a jog start animation so it's his first step from the idle state yet and this is the transition you can see him let me scale this up a little bit and many questions are great let's zoom in a little more alright so yeah here we just have idle transitioning into a run and so let's go back to the blueprint so here Idol and then we're playing that jog start and right here we have basically just a rule set that says is his speed greater than zero and is he not in the air and is he accelerating and if all those are true then it'll go on to the next step otherwise it will never get there so jog start is going to play the only rule we have for that is this automatic rule based on sequence or play and state so I'm gonna pull that out so you guys could read the whole thing automatic role based on sequence player in state that essentially just means let this animation play once this animation is done playing you can move on to the next next one this is where we could put a blend value so under blend settings I have a duration of 0.8 that was just to smooth out any of the steps then of course we have his Run which is normally I could just put in a run animation right here but in this case I use well let's call one a blintz pace and this is how we're getting our leans right now let me turn it this way so basically based on his angle that you're turning the mouse that will kick up how much he's going to lean either way a lot of times you can use blend spaces for the run so you're like uphill downhill you could have like a slow run fast run walk idle you basically put a lot of different blends into this but just for our particular set up and just to get it to work with our future Paragon animation notes we're keeping this blend space here and let's see and so right now I have just his blend space feeding into the into the game and so you can see his start and stop is being triggered his leans are working but you know he's now he's not jumping because I have not hooked up to jump logic yet he's not punching and this is you typically how we build these up we usually start off with maybe just the idle just get the idle working an animation blueprint then just get the run working and we start building on top of that and see and right here guys don't know if this is this is a cache pose so cache pose is good to use I mean I could just take this and I could feed it into my next node but what you want is this kind of lets you know visually just like everything going on here is going to spit out in this cache pose and you can call that cache pose at any point you want so say down here I believe I have a okay so right here I set up a cache called ground underscore loco ground locomotion and then when I get to this state I can just load up a cache pose instead of like hooking all these these nodes up it's a clean way to do it it's just a way to continuously draw from the pose that you have cached might not have explained that purely enough but definitely try messing around with these these are these are great let you pull it into the next blueprint so you don't have to recreate exactly well yeah it just cuts down on the spaghetti lets you kind of have a good comment lets you break out what your animations are doing you have a good concept of like hey my ground locomotion that's all I care about here grant that that's my in pose for that so here we have locomotion in am offsets so then let's go ahead and [Music] pull off this I'm gonna go over what we have set up here so let's go ahead and do a offset first I touched on this a little bit when we're fixing it up so we have a lot of animation assets here that you see idle aor be cccd so basically CC means center center see you would be like center up LLC would be left center and you just drop these in over here on let me drag this over on your aim offset you wanted to define your limits of your aim so in this case we wanted him to look all the way around him to negative 180 and positive 180 and then we want him on the vertical axis to look up 90 degrees and down 90 degrees and that's where you just you can drag and drop your aim offset positions so if I let's just take a mop set CC I'm going to drop it here in the center CD I would drop it down here and see you up here and then at this point you can hold down shift to move your basically the blend around just a preview what it looks like this is just for previewing they're not gonna mess up any animation and so you can see your character looking around what feeds this is we're drawing basically we're getting a Delta between where your reticle is aiming and where your character is aiming and that value feeds into the blend space and so you can see here we have y'all and pitch feeding in so let me use this as a moment to get to the event graph so you know I'm using pitch to to control the aim offset so let's go ahead and find references to this and see where we set it and we'll just kind of walk backwards through the logic again what I would do the best way to learn this kind of stuff is usually to backwards engineer if you're an animator it's kind of like what we've done what others have done there's a ton of you know videos out there people doing it but basically we got the base aim rotation from our character and we got the actor rotation we got the Delta values so Delta is just a difference between the two numbers and then we broke that rotator out into roll pitch and yaw and so pitch becomes a pitch yaw yaw and then we set their roll and then this is the pitch can define the pitch in your aim offset and that's always giving you the difference between what your character is doing and what your mouth radical is doing and this is how we control leans this way this is how we control aim offsets and if you're doing like a strafe run that's how we would control that as well in the length awesome excuse me so let's get to the lean since we're here looking into that let's lean into the leans because I actually I skipped over the leans let's get back to the animation graph and like I said the read the leans we had put here in the blend space for the jog there are lots of ways to do leans in this case we actually motion-captured someone running in a circle or we use that as reference but you can seriously just have an animation offset that leans the character side-to-side we are controlling the horizontal access with a lean angle so let's go ahead and go to the event graph I'll show you how we set up the lean angle because all I'm doing is I'm getting a lean angle value and feeding it into a blend space simple as that so let's get to the event graph and if you're ever curious as to how things are set up you can go over here to the variables and let's do I believe I had y'all don't so real fast let me let me go back to the I want to make sure I'm looking at the right variable so let's go back to the locomotion okay I'm using Y Delta to drive the lean angle so yeah let's go to the Alta and I'm going to look for the part where I set the all Delta okay so this is a little more complicated again what I would recommend is you can look at shin be set up and kind of backwards engineer it but what I'm doing is I'm getting the pawn owner which is the pawn and I'm getting the actor rotation and then I'm setting a rotation last tick which is basically I'm comparing where the rotation was the tick before the last so I'm kind of getting a difference between overtime where the the rotation was to where the next tick is if that makes sense and that gives me a delta between the two so for instance let's say I'm turning the mouse pretty pretty hard and over one tick it's giving me a value of like say 10 degrees difference I'm using that 10 degrees to then drive the lien so I'm feeding that into a yaw that doing it last tick can give you a real jittery motion because based on your mouse and your feedback you're then feeding that blendspace really harshly with a bunch of values and so what it is I put it in F in turf which allows it kind of smoothes out the the interpolation and I gave it an and so let's see so basically it's that I'm essentially just testing the rotation elastic and getting a delta using an F Terp to smoothly blend that out I would recommend go ahead and try this without f & Turf to see you know what's happening and then the lean intensity scaling that was just for whatever reason sometimes if you do the mouse you might jolt them too hard like you might see that shinbe jolts too far to the left or right when you barely move the mouse and this is just dividing of value so you can kind of smooth that out and these are all numbers you can just adjust like this 7 / 7 / 7 on the lean intensity scaling the interp speed you can mess with that value but at the end of all this logic you're setting your yaw Delta and then that y'all deltas a final number between the two ticks and that feeds your liens and I hope that made sense but like I said it it's good to backwards engineer this stuff and just tinker like unhook stuff and hook it back and see what's happening change numbers and change numbers and a lot of rotation things like there's a lot of math and you don't have to be really good at math at all but especially when it comes to rotations you're you're gonna use this Delta rotator a lot just to kind of get values and you can see it set pitch in y'all you're always going to be comparing two two numbers especially between the pond and the the camera angle it's often I mean it's yeah I think when you first see it it's like this is this is a lot but I think when you break it down into the to the finer bits that gives you the ability to it yeah really kind of and one other no this is just kind of housekeeping stuff but you can forget what you did when it comes to these blueprints two weeks goes by you could absolutely forget what you had set up and so always just comment your stuff even if it's just a comment to yourself just always group it and comment what you're doing and that helps too I know programmers know this stuff but sometimes we animators just one get to the final result so yeah let's go let's see what I have time probably to do one more concept in here and let's go back to the the animation blueprint or the animgraph let's go ahead move to the next step so I went over blend spaces blend spaces and liens actually work very in a very similar way let's do actually a blend / let's do actually the montage I covered montages so I actually want to cover what montages do and how they interact with the animation blueprint so in all the montages I set it to a upper-body slot under the default group basically what this means if you think visually of this graph just imagine someone is piping in that montage animation and this is the point in my graph where it's being inserted think of it this way and if it's just a regular full-body animation it's not additive this is gonna Trump everything behind it it's gonna totally stomp on anything past it and then if it's additive it'll apply additive to anything that's feeding into it it's pretty simple concept just treat it like it's you could essentially treat it like it's an animation asset it's just being it's pulling in animation from montage and then layer blend per bone is another concept we're using in shin-bi's blueprint so blend per bone we have here we have the locomotion post like the running and jumping that cache pose I've talked about earlier and here we have cache pose upper body which we're setting that right after this upper body slot and the thing and after the slot we're setting up a cache upper body so what we want to do here is let's say the montage is playing full body here we're setting it upper body cache because what we want we want that montage like the upper body melee to play on top of a run so this is a layer blend per bone the base pose is gonna be my locomotion that's my run that's my jump and upper body is going to be my the melee motion it goes on top so when you're running the attack motion yeah bro you're doing this I'm granulated and so basically there are two animations but how do they blend that's actually controlled right here on the blend per bone so this is a layer setup and this is it's a little bit different than how animators think of blending but it's a it's a really simple concept so what I'm doing now if you guys can see this I'm basically going to start my blend at the pelvis and my blend depth is four so what that means is I'm starting to play my animation on the pelvis the the mêlée and it's going to blend up to spine one spine two and spine three by the time I get to spine three it's going to be playing the full 100% blend of that melee motion the hips are going to play only 25% of that blend you know spine 1 will be 50 each time you go up a bone it's going to go up basically it's going to normalize 100 so if I do a blend depth of 2 it's going to put 50% on the pelvis 50% on spine 1 now this is not intelligent it doesn't know how a human body hierarchy is made so it's also going to start blending down the legs so here I went ahead and added thigh right thigh left and I put a negative 1 this basically it tells the blend - don't don't blend past this so I'm only blending from pelvis all the way up to spine 3 so if you use something with a different bone structure yeah if you use for instance if you have 5 spine bones you're gonna want that deeper or if you want more control so for instance remember when we played when we played crunch and you saw basically his hips doing nothing let's do this I need to hook up his animation blueprint let me let me get this hooked up real fast was shinbe when she's swinging it's gonna come from her hips where as a robot may just be the arms or it's true yeah each character is different and this is actually something as we're making these here we are setting this blue this blend differently per per character so right here let's go ahead and play him and see what we had by default so a lot of people have been asking about you know like turns in place with 90 degrees left and right so your body turns and then plays a lower body animation is this kind of the pretense to setting that system yeah that that's gonna be around to is turn in place again our turn in place system was part of Paragons code but like I said there is a weighted vanilla way to do it I'm here and I'll cover that on on a part two okay so here we go you know you could see his hips are barely they're kind of moving when he swings but not much at all so if I go back to that blend per bone let's go ahead and set that up too let's just do a blend depth of two so what this means is his hips are gonna take 50% of that blend and the spine one's gonna take 50% and this is gonna go crazy it is hips are gonna have a lot of that motion in it and it's actually probably a little subtle for people to see I don't see you can see it seems a little bigger his hips are definitely moving a lot more let's just really go extreme to get this concept across let's do a blend depth of just one and sobei essentially everything should be on his hips now his hips and beyond Wow so his hips are moving just like they were or animated but as you can see it doesn't work well with the legs you know it's having none of that animation with it so like I said what usually what we do is when we're setting this up we actually just kind of go between three and four depending on the character and like I said I'll cover in an extreme how to get what we call a melee twist put in alright and I think I am running out of time but let's do how we controlled the logic of upper and lower body so let's see so on that blend blend pose Bible so basically this is saying that I'm going to play either two animations two different animation options based on what kind of things are happening so if this character is accelerating that's the active value which means it's true so if he's accelerating that means he is moving I want to play upper body so I'm gonna go ahead and play this the end result of this blend per bone which has upper and lower body happening on it now if he's standing still I want to play full body which means this active value is false so I have a false pose and that is going to be the cache pose before we did the blend per bone it's just going to be it's going to be full body essentially because it's going to be the full montage feeding into the in pose so that's that impose this is gonna be the same so this would be the same as me just feeding that into here and then that's my in full body pose and then down here we just have to bone leg I K on the legs and we'll use that later for slope matching and stuff but this is very simple you have your leg definition and you just essentially set up this one note can be used for both legs so basically just define your foot i ka own what your FK bone is you want to follow number of bones in your limb and you're ready to go makes it easy if you have four legs yeah if you have four legs you put it in here you it this is a little bit of a misnomer we call it leg iCade cuz that's what it was used for and paragon but this is actually just it's just a nice to bone I K you could put your arms in this definition if you're I can anything else you can put it in one one note and I think we'll probably name this node once we get all the Paragon stuff in well so I'm gonna leave it here I know it was simple for some of you pros out there we are definitely gonna keep pushing on this we'll add things like turn in place Mele twist just some better like additive options I didn't really go over additive animation that much and we'll cover that in the future please give me your feedback so I would love to hear what you guys would like to see and we'll take it from there alright so we'll do some questions all right obviously miss related did any of the items you just mentioned will bring Jay back for another stream or we can dive a little more in depth yes good so let's see they're wondering if you could use these models with any third person mannequin actions and other marketplace items yes I did not cover actual animation retargeting we definitely have some videos and documentation out there of how to retarget you can retarget mannequin or anything you buy off the marketplace to any of these characters excellent just for general practices they were wondering do we typically use an animation blueprint per character or sort of like one threw them all so for Paragon that's a great question and there's no right answer it depends on how you want to categorize your assets how many are sharing a skeleton how much kind of babysitting you want to do of of an animation blueprint we chose to have a unique animation blueprint per hero because we were generally doing a new hero after the other one and we kind of didn't we didn't want legacy issues with past heroes to keep building up on our animation blueprint but you absolutely can you just need the characters to share a skeleton asset and that does not mean they need to share the same skeleton it does mean they need to share the same hierarchy but they could have different proportions but yeah either or hit okay I don't feel like we saw a lot of it but do we use a lot of curved animations yes we use so our Paragon our Paragon assets have a lot of curve data and the animations that we absolutely use for distance matching and mail a twist Wow since let's see since crunch didn't have any like upper-body spins shinbe does and she actually has some curves that let me load up real fast to show you what we're doing with her curves should just take a second so if we load up and be and let's look at her melee so her melee has her spinning and jumping in the air so we don't want upper body the whole time when even though she's running so what we did is actually I did it in her animation asset so right here on her curve graph I have a full body and basically when I want her to play a full body animation I take this curve value to 1 and that way she will play full body even though I'm using the upper body only logic when she's moving she'll go ahead and play full body here so this is an instance where we are using curves here to control float values on the animation blueprint and there's a there's a follow up to you know we created you're talking about creating like a single blueprint or atom that you could share how do you normally transfer that functionality between the different characters so if you were to create a simple shared so if you were to create a shared animation blueprint you all you have to do is plug it into their character that if you have a shared animation blueprint you just plug it into their specific character blueprint so right now you'll have crunches character blueprint feeding into his animation blueprint shin-bi's character blueprint will feed into her animation blueprint in this case they can just share you're just pointing to a different skeletal mesh [Music] they're wondering if you could talk a bit about the naming and nomenclature that we use around animation service yeah I you know there's no right way to name something what I found when coming up with naming convinces is don't overdo it you don't have to have every single description in the name because that gets confusing you want to keep it as simple as possible and sometimes you just divide that between the directories you're in you know sometimes the directories themselves can give your names information sometimes the name itself what we decided on Paragon was to keep all names hero agnostic so an idol was an idol and that the heroes directory structure told you what hero it was but the the name itself is the same we kept it very basic and it worked for us everyone got it you know our deaths were death underscore ABCD the only thing I think sometimes we went back and forth on was our ability system because let's say we had a Q ability map to the Q key sometimes designers will change the Q to like an e and then that just kind of ruined our name sometimes code names would change and so that's kind of still you'll see on here that's sometimes a little bit all over the place especially with like primary or melee or attacks everything else is generally pretty close okay there's some questions about distance meant matching uh-huh and how to actually play like for dragwon running and how where is that speed applied in so distance matching is let me find it animation with start so right now this animation blueprint has no as no way to read these curves and do anything with it we will do this in the future so let's do a jog do a jog let's load up a jog backwards stop um the concept of this is it's colic reverse route motion so she's actually animating in place but let's say in Maya we had to offset her in Maya to keep her at zero zero zero and that offset curve value is right here on the distance curve so basically we applied that curve as a custom attribute curve on here and what happens is we query where the capsule is in relation to win it when it started moving and let's say it's five units from where it started we just look at the animation and we say hey we're gonna play the frame where you're five units off so the capsule think of the capsule as a scrubber it's going to the capsule depending on where it is it's scrubbing to the point in the animation you need to be so kind of speed up and slow down the animation and this is what keeps the feet locked down that's the general concept of it but like I said with that node won't be coming until later this year okay would you be willing to talk about some of the few things that we're gonna be seeing with the new like Paragon animation system that you mentioned some of those changes yeah so if you guys haven't seen it we have an older video I'll post on my Twitter account a link to it's a laurent de león who set up all these systems and Ray Arnett who was a first animator to plow the path through it they go through these concepts and show exactly what's happening but basically what these things allow you to do is do start and stops that keep the feet locked on the ground you do turn pivots turn in place it does a lot of hip fixing but yeah I highly recommend watching those videos and we you'll see what kind of systems are on their way sorry uh could you briefly show how you solve the like start and stop animations like yeah so solve by how like with solve by plugging them in see so you show how you did this so you solve the starting stop most likely the movement wrapping part movement so fit repeating again you show how you solved how did you solve the start and stop animations most likely the movement wrapping bird sometimes all hardened from out of context probably distant distant matching yes start stops with our new system is coming was controlled that way this way that I'm doing now I didn't cover this earlier the especially the jog stop we have our old system we have a lot of kind of synched animations and we're we have a lot of like leeway when you stop so right now if you were to play this stop in the current project once you stopped you actually see her taking several steps before she actually stops so right now what I did is I chose a part in the animation where her feet are generally getting close to stop so let's say it's right here and the current time is like 0.7 I think that says 0.75 so in the blueprint what you can do is you can go to the start position and change the start position so at least these that the current setup will blend right into it but I think what they intend if their question was actually the starting stops being precise and perfect and matching the ground yes that is going to be our distance matching okay whole set they're wondering if we could talk to or speak about any facial animation features in these assets so these assets should not have facial features we have I can get into that probably down the road we do have tools for facial the the characters do have face bones in them sadly we're not I mean we're not going to release the the my rigs with the face because that's proprietary setup stuff we have but there are ways for people to get facial in and that would be a good thing for me to cover is there's there's like a pose node we just added where you can drive poses in a face so think of it like the aim offset blend space however it's just a list of poses and you could have a bunch of custom float curves that you export out of my that control those poses okay they're sort of an aside but did paragon use a single collision capsule or multiple collision polymers we used a single collision capsule for Paragon because we didn't do any bone data replication at all just capsule those are the questions great questions don't really do what we're gonna cover in part two so so yeah I will we'll work out exactly what we're gonna cover in part two but I what I would like to cover is actually the the strafe system first and probably turn in place I would love to go over those yeah that's a lot of questions around translate yeah I think that'd be a really great one we have a couple people asking when they'll be releasing more characters we don't have a set date on that but we're targeting summer for I think a few more and then think so we are working on them now but it's it's gonna take a little bit you know takes a little time but it takes a little time I'm I'll give you a couple moments there's any last-minute questions and then quick can we say I think I think we can say we are now we could say this we we are going to release at least a shinbe level of animation blueprint for the 20 heroes that are out now those will be coming don't know when but we're working on them now just so you guys can have those where would you suggest so somebody who never never touched animation before where would you suggest they start so that's a great question I ask that question all the if well if you've never touched animation I would say just start with just learning animation and my don't even worry about the the Unreal Engine yet just yet but let's say you're an animator and you want to get into games and you're trying to figure it out the tutorial that I give new animators when they start here is our third person tutorial and I believe West bun came up with a new newer version of it but if you're an animator and you've done that tutorial you are gonna know all this stuff by the end of it and you'll be--you'll will be set up for success so there's a ton of resources available for really any discipline that you're trying to get into yes there's a ton of resources and I actually want to thank Jackson at 210 ik games don't know if you're listening at all but I definitely referenced you for the combo attacks so thank you like said there is a ton of I know here there's there's there's a ton of stuff out there there's a lot of times we go out and look at other people's videos of how they do something and there's more than one way to skin a cat everything I setup here is not the way to do it it's a it's a way to do it yes poor cat it's a way to do it and programmers always tell you the most optimized way to do it at the end work yes this just tinker and have fun and try things doing that you're not going to break things too terribly you can always revert right you can always refer yeah thank you so much we do often times if you if there are questions that we didn't address in the stream please go ahead and toss them in the forums and I'll fake Jay and the others we absolutely want you guys to have fun with this and learn and so yeah we're here to help get this this rolling with the paragon assets we're so happy you can play with them and see all the stuff we've done and we want to see you guys do some really amazing stuff yeah it's I think it's really cool for the team to actually see we mentioned that a brawler earlier that I showed it really magical doser to see oh it it's not there it's magical just know every Paragon developer probably nan Paragon developer epic when we see this stuff our hearts grow three times as big we might shed tears I mean we are so happy about this stuff so please keep it coming yeah there's one question and I don't know that we have that yet but where people are asking when when is part 2 going to be for this stream and I think that's something we have to figure out a schedule for every time going to Disney World next week so I can't do it next week so that you know my hope is my hope is at very least I'm doing this at least once a month starting off with these guys are awesome we have no grounds for understanding if I'm awesome or not you're awesome and thank you you know I'm just gonna assume awesome it's only me but yeah well as soon as possible honestly I just want to go through and give a good presentation of how to do it so awesome okay thank you thank you thank you awesome alright as always if you have feedback feedback or certain topics you'd like to cover other than the part 2 we know that one but I've dropped a live stream survey into the chat please fill that out it really makes us know what you want from us and how we can help you in your projects as always check for your local ue4 meetup groups meetup.com / / / Unreal Engine there's a lot of really great developers in your area hopefully that you can go hang out with and if not you can always start your own just let us know and submit your projects to the NVIDIA edge program I love handing out you need a graphics card to you also if you're making something rad tag I saw on social and we'll check out your products so thanks again and have a good week [Music]

Channel: Unreal Engine

Views: 103,089

Keywords: Game Development, jay hosfelt, shinbi, animbp, crunch, unreal engine, ue4, paragon, marketplace, free assets

Id: ffuq5k-j0AY

Length: 84min 19sec (5059 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 02 2018