As I bring in more weapons for my characters, I’m starting to have to deal with an enormous list of animations that I have to search through.
Each weapon has its own “set” of animations that all use the same 3p and 1p skeletons for the character. I’m assuming I’m not the only one that has it set up this way as even the animation starter pack has them all clustered into one giant list.
Right now as I import the animations onto that skeleton, I’m getting them ALL showing up on the same master list of animations and it’s really going to get very very bad, very very soon, trying to find all of these. I’m only on my second weapon and the list is already +50 animations.
In UDK, we have animsets. In my project on that platform, we have all of the animations for every single weapon all named exactly the same thing…1p_Idle, 3p_Idle…3p_Fire…etc. The code merely calls the same animation names no matter what you’re holding. Upon weapon swap, we tell the character to use a completely different animset, but run the rest of his code exactly the same. This works flawless and causes absolutely no confusion or organization issues in importing new weapons and even whole new animations.
I don’t see this kind of ability inside of UE4 and it means that I have to do two very horrible things.
- I have to rename all my animations (like 1000 in total)
- I have to have code to specifically call the animations and now I have to do it per animation, not per “weapon group”.
I’ve thought about duplicating the skeleton just so that I can differentiate the animations between them. However, this seems unnecessary and will cause overhead as every time I swap a weapon in the game, I’m going to have to completely swap my character mesh also? If the character has any customizations, all of that will have to be reinitialized too won’t it? Or can we swap skeletons on the fly without affecting the mesh?
Either way, the whole thing feels totally unorganized without some way of grouping animations into sets that we can reference. Is there any plan to address this?