Root Motion Basics | Adv. Anim Application [UE4/UE5]

hello welcome back to another episode of advanced animation application today we're going to be learning how to animate a root motion animation so some sort of montage maybe it's an attack animation or something like that that is going to propel the character forwards with the animation so i've started a new blender session firstly we're going to destroy basically everything in the session including the default cube rest in peace we're gonna go shift a to add a new mr mannequin template then we're going to select this armature and we're going to go over here we're going to just enable the ik bones and then we're going to go to the animation tab at the top we're going to move this off to the side so we're going to go to our action editor and we're going to click new action this one's called tutorial root motion you can call it whatever you want so to begin what we're going to do we're going to press a to select everything we're going to press i and we're going to set location rotation so now we have a keyframe now the thing that separates this kind of animation a root motion animation from a regular in place animation is that there is motion in the root bone so if i press t to get my tools up or transforms i don't know what t means um you can see this yellow bone here is the root bone and this root bone is the root of the skeleton it's the first bone it's the top bone in the hierarchy of the the skeleton that we're animating so you can see if we were to move it forward um because our ik targets haven't moved along with it you can see that everything's moved except the ik you know is pointing back that direction so i guess what we could do in that case is you know select everything and move everything forward so what i'm going to do i'm going to set auto keyframe on i'm going to go to frame 30 and i'm just going to move this whole character forward like this and then i'm going to set location rotation for all of the bones um so you can see our animation now is this let's just do let's just make him do something other than that just for a bit of just for a bit of clarity about what we're what we're doing so let's just make this guy chuck a dab easy all right so now we've got he chucks a dab while he floats forward we'll now go to object mode we'll just select this we're going to go file export mr mannequin fbx actions export action sample rate 1 not start end keyframes i'm just going to smash this out to my desktop i'm going to click ok so first thing to do we're going to grab our animation we're just going to chuck it in here we're going to assign it we're going to assign it to the skeleton that we're using which is the unreal engine mannequin skeleton so you can see that our animation is working correctly these ones over here are just ik roots they're not really necessary for most cases so we know that this is working we're going to right click it we're going to go create any montage we're just going to leave that as it's called tutorial root motion montage and we're going to go into our old player character here and just somewhere we're going to go on press play montage and we're going to select our tutorial root motion montage play rate of one starting position at zero starting section doesn't matter and the skeletal mesh component we're gonna play it on is the mesh of the character so we're gonna hit play uh we're gonna press o and he does the thing but you can see he ends up back at the position that he you know was at so if we were to show the capsule of the player during play during that animation you can see that it doesn't actually move the character isn't actually moving so what we need to do is in the animation file we need to go enable root motion bam and you can see when we play it now it looks like it's in place animation but it's actually moving forwards so now you can see if we do it we press o that our character actually moves along with the root motion of the animation so that's kind of the extreme basics of how root motion works how you animate the motion into the animation now we're going to actually look at how to make it not look like complete garbage right well i just spent 15 minutes uh and made a fatal error uh basically long story short don't move the hand and ik root target bits these ones don't touch them for what we're doing just don't touch these so what i've got set up here now is a little extrapolation of what we did earlier and that is we're moving from here to here but we've got a fat dab in the middle um so we've got this we've got this and then halfway in between we've got this and so you can see the root is just moving that whole time so from here what we're going to do we're going to look at a little technique that i call foot locking which essentially is going to kind of lock our feet in place and make it look like our character is stepping so he dabs like that and then he's going to get up and do that so i think what we need to do first is make this foot step so this foot here we're going to copy its pose ctrl c and about maybe frame 15 we're going to keep it where it is by pasting it in and then here we're going to do the opposite we're going to get frame 30 where we want it to be as well as this bit here and we're going to put that at frame 15 so that it is where it needs to be also i'm going to actually put that down like that so essentially what we've created now is a step you can see this one goes to its target location first and then the other one starts moving this is this is how stepping kind of works just by copying and pasting the location and rotation obviously of the ik targets we can create steps so i guess the next step from this is instead of making it slide along the floor we go to frame eight or something we move this up a bit rotate it this way and then a few frames later usually like the frame before the actual contact with the floor or maybe two front uh now we'll go we'll go the frame before contact with the floor we're going to tilt it up so that it hits the heel first and then it kind of snaps down although that looks scuffed as uh so we're gonna actually move that back a frame like this so yeah maybe move it up a tiny bit there we go okay next thing is this foot here obviously at frame 30 this foot needs to be right here and then we'll do the same thing we'll go to frame 45 and we'll keep it there whereas this one needs to be here so we're gonna copy it and paste it at frame 45 so you can see we've blocked out these these steps just by locking the ik in place there you go so this is how we do stepping when we're animating root motion uh so i guess what else we could do is do the same thing to this foot where in the middle we'll go uh about here this should be up a bit we tilt it down and then just before it hits the floor we can lift it up a tiny bit and tilt it backwards bam uh now for this finish off we might actually not want it to like fully lift up off the ground we might just like kind of i guess like tilt it forward and kind of drag it along the ground a bit you know like that so i guess what's next is the pelvic movement uh we might actually at this point want the pelvis to go up a little bit because he's like you know he's he's moving forward so we move up i think what we want to do here is select everything and we actually want the recovery to be a little bit longer we might even grab this and copy this pose and paste it about five frames later so essentially we get this freeze point uh we'll make that not look stupid in a bit okay so next up these hands we don't want them to do that so gradually kind of looks janky we'll actually just put these back down here kind of by his side getting ready for the fat dab all right now to give this dab a bit more impact we're actually going to so the dab happens at frame 30 but i think what we're going to do at frame 20 we're going to actually move them over here there's a little bit of anticipation a bit of counter motion uh we're actually going to like counter kind of this as well slightly so it's like a really vicious dab and then because we've done a double frame here we're actually going to just do this and just make sure this has a bit of movement okay and then i think what we need to do is just i'm just going to hurry this along i've spent way too much time doing this so we're just going to go you know just uh so about here the pelvis should be you know here um these hands should definitely be moving along with the pelvis uh so as you can see the pelvis can move independently from the root but if you move the root it moves the pelvis cool all right final touches let's just grab the head look at we'll grab the spine targets grab this we'll just select all of them and chuck them on unclamped so automatic there we go that looks uh terrifying there we go all right so the next thing to do is to export this thing so i'm gonna go object mode we're gonna grab this thing we're going to make sure that our yo mega dab is selected file export so we're going to export that to desktop we're going to go back to our session and we're going to import you mega dab into here we're going to select the appropriate skeleton we're going to go into the animation and we're going to go to the root motion section i'm going to click enable root motion hit save and then we're going to right click the mega dab we're going to create an animontage i'm just going to leave it the same name and then in our player character we are going to play that montage when we press o right okay so here's our fella he's running around he's doing his thing whatever whatever now if i press o you can see he just chucks a fat dab and if we show the capsule of the of the character and we do this you can see the capsule moves along with the animation so that's root motion animation kind of you know how to the main thing is really just the footstep method of you know copying and pasting the location depending on you know each action and that kind of stuff i hope that kind of gave you some ideas of you know how you could do attack animations and that kind of thing by blocking out the really big you know motion first and then filling in the gaps with you know the footsteps and that kind of stuff if you have any questions at all you can join our discord server in the links below it's full of very lovely helpful people and if you want to go one step further in supporting this channel and all these tutorials and stuff there is a link to a patreon in the description of the video and you can subscribe to that patreon for as little as one dollar per month so with that i say goodbye [Music] goodbye [Music] you

Channel: PrismaticaDev

Views: 35,253

Keywords: root motion ue4, root motion blender, ue4 root motion tutorial, ue4 root motion locomotion, ue4 root motion animation, ue4 montage tutorial, ue4 root motion montage, ue4 root motion mode, ue4 root motion movement, ue4 attack animation, ue4 attack tutorial, ue4 climbing animation, ue5 animation, ue5 root motion, ue4 animation blueprint, ue4 animation montage, ue4 animation tutorial, blender for ue4, blender rig for ue4, mr mannequin tools, mr mannequin tools tutorial

Id: eUeHhh4ZuEw

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021