Unreal Engine 4 - Blending Animations

[Music] what's up guys in this video i'll be showing you what i believe to be the easiest and simplest way of merging multiple animations before we start this video i want to quickly announce that i've created a patreon my patreon is a way you can support me so i can carry on producing tutorials like this one i've also added a few exclusive rewards like early access patreon shout outs and poll voting for upcoming tutorials so if you want to check it out i'll leave a link in the description but now let's get into this tutorial for the purpose of this tutorial i've downloaded the free mannequin animation pack you can get this from the epic games marketplace so before you start this tutorial you will need two animations that you want to blend a character blueprint and a character anim graph which transitions between idling walking running and jumping check out my previous tutorials if you're missing any of these things i'll leave a link in the description so the first thing we're going to do is turn the animation we want to merge into an anime montage i'm going to be using the pistol reload animation for this example so we're going to right click our animation create then montage a montage is used for combining animations but in our case we're just using it to give the animation a slot that we can call on later you can think of slots as just a way of categorizing animations upper body lower body for example so we want to give our montage a slot and as you can see it's already been assigned now we can call upon this animation in the animation blueprint via the default slot so save and close this back on our content browser open up the animation blueprint so if you followed my animation blueprint tutorial or if you're using the default third person mannequin you should have an animation blueprint which looks like this now we're going to store some animations into a cache you can think of caches as variables where we're simply storing the animation into a callable variable so we're going to right click type in cache and bring that in then click on it and in the details panel rename this lower body then we're going to plug in our idle walking running jumping group of animations into the cache so now we can call upon these animations using the lower body cache we just made next we want to bring in our lower body cache by right clicking and typing in lower body then we're going to right click and bring in our default slot group which our animation is linked to then we're going to create a new cache called upper body and connect these nodes up now we can call upon our upper body cache which contains the movement animations plus any animation we have linked to the default slot now we can merge these two animations by using a layered blend per bone node this layered blend mode will basically merge animations based on the skeleton but i'll explain more about this in a minute so bring in the lower body and upper body caches we made plug the lower body into the base pose and the upper body into the blend pose now click on the layer blend node add array element in the detail section click the drop down and type in whatever bone you want the animations to merge at in my case i'm going to put pelvis but let me explain this a bit better with the layered blend node the two animations will merge at the bone specified in the node so if we look at our skeleton if we put pelvis as our bone in the layered blend node we're telling the program to stop running the bass pose and run the blend pose at the bone pelvis so the bass pose will control half the body and the blend pose will control the other half as our upper body cache has an upper body animation attached to it through the default slot the default slot animation will be played from the pelvis upwards back on our animation blueprint click on the layer blend mode and put in a blend depth of four this blend depth controls how much of each animation will be blended at a value of 0 the blend posed animation will play on its own without any blending at a higher value like 10 for example the bass pose animation will play on its own without any blending so a value of 4 is a good value to blend both animations together now we're done in the animation blueprint now all we need to do is call the default slot animation to play when we want it to play so back on the content browser open up the character blueprint bring in an event i'm going to use the r key then bring in the play animation montage node and select your animation and we're done all right let's do a quick recap we turned our animation into an animation montage and gave it the default slot in our animation blueprint we created two caches one with the movement animations called lower body and one with the movement animations plus any animation with the default slot tag called upper body we then merged these caches together using the layer blend per bone node and we told them to merge at the pelvis after the animation blueprint was all set up we then called our animation montage to play in the character blueprint and because it had the default slot linked to it it was merged in with the lower body cache and that's everything if you liked this video it'd be awesome if you could support me on patreon i hope to build up my patreon team so i can dedicate more time to tutorials and produce even better content like subscribe and join my discord to keep updated with new video releases thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Beardgames

Views: 22,269

Keywords: Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial, Game Development Tutorial, ue4 tutorial, learn unreal engine, ue4, blender, game development, indie game development, Combining Animations, Merging Animations, Animation Blueprint, Epic Games, Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine 5, Tutorial, UE5, UE4, unreal engine, Beard games, Beardgames, unreal engine 4, unreal engine 5, epic games, ue5, gamedev, unreal engine 2020, game dev, unreal engine tutorial, unreal, game developer, indie gamedev

Id: QkEifTeetUc

Length: 5min 26sec (326 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020