HTF do I? Adjust Animation in Engine in Unreal Engine 4 ( UE4 )

pom pom pom pom pom pom pom tomatoes hello and welcome to the video for how do I adjust animation in the engine this video is going to cover two simple ways of adjusting the animation once it's already inside of Unreal Engine recording your new animation from existing animations as well as using key framing for existing animations to override them using additive layers so let's a look at the first one recording let's grab an existing animation like our character running this one is a little more difficult to use because it basically records in real time but if you have something you want to play back maybe a montage maybe if your character punching a couple different times and you want to record that two new animation this would work well so we click our record button down here on the bottom right you can ask us where and what to name the animation so we'll call this one animation weird and once we hit OK it's going to immediately start recording whatever is animating you can see it here and you can see our current animation playing back now we can adjust our current animation let's say we want to go ahead and grab one of our arms and we're going to rotate the arm itself while he's running so now while it's recording it's recording all of this exactly like this is and this is non-destructive it's recording to a new animation track it's not going to adjust any of the existing ones we can even jump back and forth between tracks like you can see here if needed and once we're done we can hit stop and our new animation is recorded and we'll go and open our new one and if we look here let's close this stupid pop-up you can see our character running and then the arm adjusting as we adjusted it as you can see here if we were to close this we're gonna see something change you'll notice how the arm is up and then goes up again if we were to close this go to our animation system and open up animation weird well now it looks different our arms down and then up so something to keep in mind when you adjust things inside of here let me go to idle for example let's take this left arm if I can grab the left arm I guess it's his right arm we're going to rotate it out like that and play the animation this animation is going to playback non-destructively inside of our editor with these changes as we can see here the rotation and if I switch to a different animation it's simply going to apply that existing animation with this existing information already done so our arm rotated so as you can see here that arm stays up but once we close this and reopen an animation our character itself our preview is going to reset itself to default so keep that in mind if something looks weird just close down your animation system reopen back a new animation so you can reset your preview model and make sure it's playing back properly now at this point if this isn't exactly we want or it's closed we have the ability to clip you can right click on the timeline you'll show you where you currently are any green move frames before and after as well as inserting frames appending and doing things like that so we could take our weird animation for example clip it right when it went up and then we could play it back and say we want to loop right about here and end it there and then our little animation will play back like this I'm not an artist I'm not an animator so this is gonna look horrible but that's just an example of making a quick little animation using recording in the engine now the second way which is the way I would prefer to do it is using keyframing but this is destructive so we need to take our animation make a copy of it we're gonna go ahead and we're going to grab for example our third-person idle copied over to your animation system here now we have a third person idle copy for you this third-person zombie and we'll open it up and now we have our character in this case I want to take the arms and move them up so that way it looks like a zombie is walking so upper arm left will move it up a tee up where I'm right will move it up a tee and that's what we want our little zombie kind of staggering around none of these are going to save though so if we close it and reopen it well it goes back to default we need to use our key framing system at the top to use additive layer tracks so we'll quickly grab our arm again change it by 80 grab the other arm change it by 80 we're going to go ahead and add a key now when you add the key we scroll down here it's going to add a key for everything that's been changed at that point so we have a transform a rotation and a scale for the left upper arm and the same thing for the right upper arm and you can see they're all keyframe down here you can see the points that they're keyframed and you can see everything it's been going on now here's one issue that I kind of ran into I was here at this point in time frame 60 when I set this animation up so if we were to apply this we'll close this out we'll open them back up and we'll hit play it looks fine but if I want to adjust some further keyframes my initial raising of the arms is down here at 60 frames in out of 80 frames so 75% of the way through if you've never worked with keyframe you for or you have you know it's important to set your keyframe to do your adjustments and continue on so for example if I wanted to raise another arm at this point in time it's going to affect everything else before and after it well you can adjust other things so let's say for example I take his neck I'm gonna rotate the neck to make it look like he's looking so we'll go back to keyframes 0 add a key keep it here I want it at zero to start off with we'll move up a little bit we'll rotate his head over this direction and we'll add a key we'll go over here rotate his head back to here add a key we'll hit apply now if we were to play this back our characters head should look like it's rotating now it stops at this last point here so we'd want to go to the last keyframe add a key and make sure it's set to zero and in theory he should kind of head should wobble back and forth hit apply to apply so it saves it we can close it open it back up and there's a little animation playing like you want it of course since it is key framing you have the ability to edit the keys like any other editor may be our rotation on our neck isn't what we want let's go ahead and hide our pitch and our yaw whoops hi duck lock now here's just our rotation we can grab some keys for example I'm using shift to multi select my four keys I can right-click on it I can set it to auto so that way we get a little bit of curve in and out so it's a little smoother we can of course oh that one's too much rotation on that side whoops I'm all selected so I'll do that let's go back and hide these ones again it's too much rotation here grab this key maybe move it over here for less rotation earlier and of course you can adjust its a keyframe editor it's a normal editor inside the system of keyframes you can do all your stuff but this is a way to get a new animation out of existing animations without going out to a separate program it's useful for like me I'm not an artist but I can make simple little changes using existing animations and not have to open up my or max or mode or anything else now these are just two small ways of doing it editing the original animations there are other ways you can do blendings and bone changes inside of your atom blueprint or you can use the recommended way which is actually getting the original files making your changes to the source and bringing them back in this way you're not doing things like taking and animation and using additive layer tracks which are then adjusting at runtime and have a smaller performance hit try and keep things as pure as possible would give you the best results and that's it that's basically how you can do small animation changes inside of the engine using both the record animation system and the additive layer track system which uses key framing

Channel: Mathew Wadstein

Views: 47,731

Keywords: unreal engine, UE4, HTF, How To, Animation, Keyframe

Id: lWyWeFZuuwE

Length: 8min 43sec (523 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 29 2018