Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial - Animation Montages

[Music] hello and welcome to the real unreal in this episode we will learn how to use animation montages we will make our character dance and roll when pressing different buttons let's get started animation montages provide a way for you to control an animation asset directly through blueprint or C plus code and allow us to combine different animation Assets in a single file which later we can split into sections to be played together or separately also we can trigger different events like play in a sound or particle effects change player values like stamina at a certain point of the animation and more for this video we will create a project with the third person template there's no need to include the starter content we'll also need three animations that you will find in the description of the video these are maximum animations converted to the unreal Indian 5 mannequin if you want to know more about how to do this check out my other video about mixamo converter where I teach you how to do it let's create a new folder called anim montages and drag the three animations in it's important to select these parameters when importing the animations alright the first thing we'll do is create a new animation Montage to do it let's right click on the animation we want in my case then 0 1 go to create and select create any montage this will create a new file with the same name as our animation but with Montage as a suffix let's open this new file and we'll see that the interface of the Montage is very similar to the one in base animation assets to the left we have the skeleton tree and asset details tabs where we can modify some parameters off or Montage like blend in and blend out time which we'll see in later in the video down in the center of the screen we'll find our Montage section where we'll handle slots timing notifiers curves and sections to the right we'll find the details panel and three more tabs the asset browser tab where we can see other animation assets of the skeleton the anim slot manager tab where we'll handle slots a concept that we will cover later and the Montage sections tab where we can control how our sections are connected to each other this will be covered later too now let's use the Montage we just created let's open the third person character blueprint and go to the event graph there are two common ways to play a montage with the play any Montage note of the character class and with the play Montage node of the skeletal mesh component we can use the one we prefer however play Montage offers more control and functionalities like access to all the default notifies available out of the box in montages and a parameter to set the starting position of the Montage for this tutorial we will use the play any Montage node from the drop down select the Montage you want to play and assign a button to execute it in my case I will use the one key from the keyboard let's press play and then the one key and you'll see that now our character Can Dance before moving forward with other features of Animation montages is important to know about the slots the main purpose of Animation slots is to provide the place in the animation graph to insert animations into the animation blueprint if we open many and queen animation blueprint and go to the anim graph we will see that we are using a slot called default slot this is the default slot available when creating a new montage if we unplug this node and then press play we'll notice that we can dance anymore I want to clarify this because by default the Unreal Engine 5 characters already uses this default slot so in case you create your own animation blueprint it's important to use a slot if you plan to insert animation using montages let's connect default slot again and move on let's talk about Montage sections we can have more than one animation inside a montage and we can divide it into sections this can be useful in many ways in our case we'll use the same Montage to insert different dance animations let's go to our previously created Montage but before I'd like to rename it to something more generic I'll call it Just Dance underscore montage open the file go to asset browser and search for the other dance animation we have which is called Dance 0 2. drag the animation to the Montage section and we'll see both animation playing in sequence now it's great to be able to play animations in sequence with montages but that's not what we need right now because we'll be playing these animations separately to achieve that let's right click above the animations and select new Montage section I'll call this new section then 0 2 like the animation drag and align the new section with the second animation Also let's create another one called dan02 and place it at the beginning where the default section is delete this default section and now our naming corresponds to the animations now go to the Montage section tab to the right here we'll be able to disconnect the animations from plugin in sequence notice that there's a link that goes from then 0 1 to 102. click on it and select remove link with this our sections are now separate open again the third person character blueprint and let's add a new play any Montage note where we'll select the same Montage but this time we will add the name of our second section then 0 2 to the parameter start section name assign another button to execute it in my case I will use the two key press play and now when we press to the second section offer montage is played head back to the blooping and even if we didn't set any value ask start searching name to the Montage being played when pressing one the default behavior is that if not specified the Montage plays from the beginning it's up to you if you want to set it or not I'll leave it empty one last thing I want to show you are the blending and blend out parameters because they are really important to make our animations look more natural or just feel better let's go to our dance montage and in the left panel make sure that you are on the asset details tab here we will find a section called blend option that contains fields to indicate blend in and lend out time 0.25 is the default value let's change both to a huge value to see how it behaves set 1.5 on both fields and press play now see how very slowly we transition from idle to dancing in the labs of 1.5 seconds the same occurs when going out of the animation you can play around with these parameters until you find a value that feels good for you I will set 0.5 on both now let's create a new Montage to make our character roll to achieve this we will use root motion the role animation you downloaded already has it you just have to enable it open the roll animation and in the asset details tab to the left search for root motion check enable root motion and this is all we need to do here the movement of this animation will be transferred to the character when played create a new animation Montage from the role animation and that's it now we just have to add a new play any Montage node making sure to select this new montage and assign a key to execute it in my case I'll use left shift now our character can roll you probably noticed that we can still move when playing the dance animations and that we can jump even when rolling to prevent this from happening we can use anim notify States subscribe to the channel if you want to learn about this I'll be uploading a video about it soon that's it for today's video I hope you liked it if it's the case I invite you to give it a like subscribe to the channel and follow me on social networks I'll be uploading Unreal Engine 5 tutorials frequently and I'm working on a full course for beginners thank you for joining and see you in the next video foreign

Channel: The Real Unreal

Views: 40,143

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Id: 9a1xpCA6maI

Length: 10min 51sec (651 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2022