Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial - Ways to Edit Animations

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey hey hey everybody james here from ortiz media and we are back again today with another unreal engine tutorial and in today's tutorial we are going to be looking at how to edit animations now this is editing pre-existing animations within unreal engine however you can also use these processes to create your own animation assets as well so without further ado let's go ahead and jump in so as you can see here we are in unreal engine 5 the third person template right where we left off in the previous video the only thing i've added is a few animations for the purposes of this particular demonstration so what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you first how to be able to edit animations by utilizing a keyframe option within unreal engine so we're going to open up this idle animation here that i have now one thing i just do want to note as well is that if you're unfamiliar with what keyframing is it's essentially the process of creating points in space time uh you know in space-time reference to the animation um for when to do things so if i go ahead and i play this animation let's go ahead and click you'll see that he's got some kind of like nice breathing idols and kind of like a nice motion to his arms and shoulders all of these are being keyframed so like from this point to this point when they go back up this is where the keyframes are being set so what we're going to do is edit how these are set up so this one's a really good animation because as you can see here this hand and this hand are both clipping into the thighs so how we're going to change that is very very easy we're going to go ahead and search for the root bone for the arms now when i say root bone i don't mean the bone that's literally enabled named root what i mean by this is the bone that is associated to the rest of the structure for that particular part of your character so for example if i search up the clavicle you'll see the clavicle l clavicle art okay but if i search on the arm so mainly what i'm looking for is the arm structure that i'm trying to move you'll see that clavicle before spine and all these other options is the root of everything else the lower arm upper arm the twist everything is associated to the clavicle so this is the root for the arm so we're gonna do is we're going to highlight on the clavicle and we're also going to want to make sure so this is how your snapping grid is going to look like by default what we're going to do is click on the middle one here for disabling rotation snapping and we're going to disable that we're not going to be scaling or uh moving anything so we don't need to mess with those we just need to make sure that we turn the rotation scaling or snapping off and then we can go ahead and start rotating some things so we're going to do is highlight on the clavicle and make sure we are in press e to be able to get into rotation mode and then we're just gonna start kind of moving it out just a slight bit just like that then we'll go to the upper arm and it will move it out just a little bit more actually we'll move this in a little bit just like so but i know it looks like i'm moving the arm back in but what's cool is watch this so now that i've straightened out the lower arm you'll see his hand is no longer tied in to the rest of the skeleton or tied in like uh clipping into the mesh but i can also make some other adjustments here as well so i go to the upper arm again you just move it out just a little bit perfect then we're going to do the same thing on the other side so we're going to grab the clavicle r rotate it out just a smidge grab the upper arm rotate it out just a smidge and the lower arm and do the exact same thing now the upper arm's a little out too much so i'm gonna bring it in just a tad right about to there i like that that looks good so now what i can do is i can go ahead and i can play my animation and you'll see there's some minor clipping on the fingertips but it's a lot better than what it originally was it just looks a little bit more natural and like he's actually a physical character within the world versus just something that you know his hands can go into himself normal people can't do that if you can do that though i'll be very very impressed um at least without like actually screwing up your entire leg so what we're gonna do now though just getting back on track here uh we're gonna look at how to be able to save all this now that we've created the points where we want it to stay because if we play the animation again we have all of these points staying right where they should but if i close this they're not going to stay so this is how we save it we select any bone it doesn't even have to be one that you've edited and then we're going to click this button up here that says key so you can click this or you can also press s on your keyboard so we're going to click this button and as you can see it added the lower arms the upper arms the clavicles all of our tracks that we changed are now right here if you're familiar with animation at all this is amazing because normally you have to add these individually they won't add all at once so this is a great feature that i personally like within unreal engine so now we have the entire sequence keyed in so we don't have to do anything else we can just click on save close this down and now if i open this back up again you'll see his hands are no longer clipping into his side very very very nice so but let's say we wanted to do some more drastic animations to that is that possible well absolutely so we're going to go ahead and just duplicate this idle really quickly we're going to go idle underscore copy and then from the copy we're going to go ahead and open this up really quickly and as you can see we have all of our tracks that we had added previously however we're going to make um one small change so we're going to look for the arm and we're going to look for the lower arm and the upper arm and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to make some small changes to this so i'm going to kind of move the arm up move the arm out take the lower arm kind of move it in a little bit go back to the upper arm and move it back something like this and i'll just move the arm in a little bit more and just a little bit there and a little bit more on the yeah kind of like right there like you know like he's thinking so now if i play the animation you'll see his arm just stays in position it's not going to do anything but if i let's say scrub to frame 30 okay keep the the tracker for the timeline on frame 30 and then i go in just like before select on a bone and click on key so what's going to happen is that now his arm from frame 0 to frame 30 will go into that position like so so now he's kind of thinking and boom so this is where it gets really really cool at being able to edit animations and you can edit the forearms the spine the head rotation the legs whatever you want to change all the bones within the hierarchy of the skeleton are available for messing around with so really really really cool so we're going to go ahead and save that and close this down and now we're going to look at another way to be able to edit animations and this is by adding two animations together and turning them into a new animation sequence so how we do that is we're going to right click on an empty space go to animation and then click on animation montage it's going to bring up the skeletal selection window here and we're going to look for our main character skeleton which for me is the twin blast if i can type there we go all right so now we're going to name this flippy whoop we're going to name this one flippy boy one okay and then we're going to go ahead and open that up so now by default you can see we have all of our hierarchy for the skeleton and we have the character in a t-pose but we don't have any animations in there so this is how we can change that really quickly as we just go to our asset browser search for the animation that you're looking for in this case we are going to use the backhand spring we're going to drag this so we're going to click and drag and pull it right over to the default group default slot uh channel here i'm just going to drop that right into there now as you can see if i play the animation he has a little black you know kind of backhand spring kind of motion there which is really really really nice but now let's say we want to add a secondary animation to that we want to make him do a bit of a kind of a backflip at the end of it sort of like a gymnast move so now i'm gonna just like before we click drag so i'll delete this and show you guys again so we click on it drag we're dragging it right on top of our original sequence so just like this it adds another track and it puts it right after the animation so if i click play he'll do the back handspring and i put the backhand spring in there twice my apologies we're going to go ahead and just do the same thing put the roll back in there or the back flip i mean so you can see now he goes from a backhand spring to a back flip but there's a little bit of a lag here you know it's kind of we wanted to go more smoothly to the back flip transition and how we do that is very easy we're going to delete both of these tracks out and we're going to minimize this and now we're going to go to our back hand spring animation and this is another way that you can edit animations within unreal engine so we're going to look for the point in which he kind of does this little kip up does this land like right there right around frame 43. now from the animation sequence under the curves tab you can right click on this and we're going to delete um a frame section so we see that frame 43 is right about when we want it so we're going to put this right around frame 43 just to make sure we're at the right point and then we're going to remove frame 44 to 51. so you can remove anything at a certain point whether it be from frame and then after or from a previous frame and then to zero so you can remove the starting point or any point after it really really really nice but now since i removed that section that little end piece if i do the backhand spring he's gonna do his little kip up and then it's gonna kind of go right back into it there's that little kind of end bit is gone now so he doesn't have quite the full reset that he would normally have so all right so now that we've done that we don't need to do anything as far as keyframing we just need to click on save and now we go back to our flippy boy one animation montage and we search for that animation again and i go to and drag it on in over the default slot group and then put the uh backflip right after it you'll see it's a little bit more fluid you know there's a lot more there's a little bit more tweaking that could probably happen to this like maybe make it so that way he kind of gets right into the flip motion maybe kind of blend some sort of up you know some upright so he goes from this to this a little bit more fluidly you know there's a lot of different ways because you can add more than one i mean you can add tons of animations i mean i can't i can just literally have to do so many different things that are just completely out of character so he does that and then a back flip and he gets knocked backwards knocked back and then he just does a backhand spring again so you can add as many as you want for this one we're just going to go ahead and take these out really quickly so we just have the back flip and the backhand spring all right so now that we have it in a montage we want to turn it into an animation sequence this way it's usable within the amp graph and how you would do that is that down here there's a little bit of uh some options here is a play button you know skip all that good stuff but we want the record button so from the record button we're going to click that and we're going to search to our folder which is the playable character folder we're going to change the animation name to flippy boy 2. we're going to keep the sample rate for 30 sps because all of my animations are set to 30 fps if you have 60 fps animations you can change this if you would like i'm going to keep this at 30. as far as the end after duration point you can select this if you would like you just want to make sure to scrub through your montage to see exactly what the time duration is and then set it to that and it'll stop at that point we're not going to use the end after duration though because i'm going to show you what you know the way you can do it without even having to use that so now that we have our animation name our sample rate set to 30fps we're going to click ok and as you can see here we've got a little recording flippy boy and then it's recording so now if i just go ahead and click on play let's do the whole sequence stop it and then stop the recording so i paused it with play and i just stopped the recording as you can see it's been successfully recorded so now i'm going to go ahead and open it up and just by clicking on the open button now if i go through and scrub you'll see there's a lot of dead space but then eventually he's going to do his animation and then he's going to try and go into like the start of the next sequence because i didn't stop it right away this is where that end after duration can really come into play because you normally then won't have to do this part but that's totally fine even if you don't so we're looking at 270 so we're gonna take off of 271 to whatever the end frame is so we're going to go 275 273 269 273 there we go all right so now we have that now we also just need to see where the animation starts at so we're going to scrub through and look for where that position starts it looks like that's right around we'll say frame 180 so we're going to look for frame 180 182 here we go so we're gonna click on this one remove frame 0 to 180 and now full animation start from the back hand spring to the back flip and no dead space so now we can just click on save minimize this and now we have the flippy boy sequence which should be let's see where did that go there we go flippy boy to animation sequence so how that didn't go into my playable character folders i'm just going to move that there really quickly so that way it's in the proper folder there we go all right so flippy boy 2 and you can see it's an animation sequence um it doesn't have any root motion in it but i'm sure you could enable room yeah motion if you wanted to as you can see these are all in place animation so i don't have to enable her emotion um but so this is how you would be able to sequence animations together and make something really really really cool utilizing multiple animations and turn it all into one now one last thing that i do want to just show you really quickly is some things you can do with the removing of frames within the animations so i'm going to look up the paragon twin blast i'm gonna go to characters heroes twin blast and go to animations i'm gonna search up a specific one i'm gonna search dab for the emotes so i'm gonna go ahead and open this up really quickly if it wants to open there we go all right so this one's pretty cool i'm actually currently messing around with this one in a game that i'm working on um so if you look at here you'll see he his arms kind of extend out and then his guns disappear and then he kind of goes back to a motion and then it come back up see the full motion here so this is the emote for some reason it's only playing a portion of the animation um but as you can see here if you wanted to take just this section of it and you can make it so that way let's see maybe this is an edited one that i messed around with we'll just look at emotes in general here we'll look at the gut toss all right so as you can see here let's say you just wanted this side right you wanted the the right side well what you could do is from where it's guns down by his hips maybe like right about right about there so we'll go to the curves track we'll move 23. uh looks like it won't let me remove 23 so we'll have to remove everything after so we'll see where he flips the gun catches it and then puts it away right around 61. so we'll say 60 so we'll just go here remove 60 to 226 all right and then we'll go to the curves track and when we're gonna remove 0 to 51. let's see 0-55 53 50. that should be fine so now it's just that section of the animation track if you wanted just that you can use that as like a cool way to be able to like you know draw or holster your weapon so there's really some really cool ways that you can do this now also keep in mind with the rate scale if i set this to negative one it'll play in reverse it looks like he's kind of shooting the gun up and then he kind of comes back so i mean it does look a little weird because of the way that it's you know playing backwards and stuff but it's just something to keep in mind that you can do some really cool stuff by using the rate scale removing some frames and then you know adding it into an animation montage section but i hope this was informative for you guys uh if you have any questions comments or any concerns issues or whatever feel free to reach out to me through comments or you can message me on the uh directly through youtube always happy to discuss any problems or any you know other ideas that somebody might have but again i hope that you guys enjoyed and as always stay animated

Channel: Artofficial Entertainment

Views: 18,017

Keywords: Unreal Engine, Unreal, Engine, Game Design, Animation, Making Games, Game Making, Game Character Creation, Game Development, Creating Animations, Editing Animations, Animation Montage, Animation Montages

Id: K_mG97HLrk0

Length: 18min 13sec (1093 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2022