I’m building a game where the characters need to look traditionally drawn and animated (at 12-15 frames per second like in cel-animation). Is there a way to limit the frame rate of actors at the very end of the animation chain, i.e, after physics, in-game IK systems, and baked animation from skeletons?
For example, a character with a skeletal animation keyed at 30FPS and wearing a dynamicly blowing cape, would have both animations limited at 12FPS as if they were animated with cels.
We’ve experimented with baking skeletal animations before .fbx import to 15FPS, and used stepping to try and force no interpolation on UE4’s part. However, UE4 still attempts to smooth out the frames between frames which change their value (the blue arrows in the attached image) which results in an undesirable smooth-stutter-smooth-stutter effect as opposed to the intended cel-style effect. (Our .fbx was exported correctly, and the animation is played as-intended in all software packages but UE4)
For this reason, we’ve come to the conclusion that the effect would be best achieved if there was a “frame rate limiter” at the end of the animation chain as described above, for example if behind the scenes, animation was calculated as usual, but only allowed to update visually every once every X times a second.
Does anything like this exist in UE4 already, or is there any alternative method that can currently be used to get close to something like this?