I’m curious as to what the process is for creating animations speeds like walking/running. What’s the best way to match these up with the in-game speeds. As of now I’m just using guess-and-check. It seems to me there must be a better way to figure out the distance and speed in the animation vs the distance and speed in the in-world game.
Thanks,
Hello,
You should check out BlendSpaces if you haven’t already. You setup max/min values for the blendspace to transition from idle->walking->jogging->sprinting for example. In the blend space editor you can set the values so that your animations occur at the desired speed. The Blend Space will then smoothly combine your animations for the given speed.
From there you have to tweak the max speed of your character movement and adjust at what speeds the animations occur in the blend space editor.
In the “Third Person Blueprint game” video series on unreal engine’s youtube channel they cover how to setup a simple blend space.
If you are looking for very accurate foot placement for a special animation, then you can use “Root Motion” which means that it uses the animation from the Root bone of your 3D model’s animation as the character movement in UE4. This way means you would adjust the movement in your animation and not in engine.
Although this sounds pretty cool, I don’t think you can combine this with Blend spaces (AFAIK) so it probably won’t be the best for your normal movement animations. It also requires you to use a AnimMontage so it doesn’t fit as nicely in the animation blueprint system.
Hope that helps. If you have trouble finding anything let me know and I’ll find the links for you.
Hi,
I see your answer and I’ve been wondering.
How do you know the max speed that we need in blend space for our animation? How do we calculate it?
I’m already making a walk cycle and when I put it into game mode, my character is sliding. Also when see the tutorial about Blend Space, they use 375. How can he get that number?
Thank you
I don’t know of a way to ‘calculate’ the movement speed. Maybe some of the unreal guys do though. Without using root motion I think this would be tricky to guess so I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
My current way is to just change the numbers in the blend space until things fit. First I’ll start by using the same full speed animation for all blend space speeds. I’ll walk around at max speed and then adjust the speed in the blend tree as needed until I figure out the max speed. From there you can adjust the other anims in the blend space up/down until they are at the correct location and things look right.
If anyone knows of a nicer way to handle this let me know!
Howdy beasthacker and BatavianShelly,
Have you both seen our Animation examples in our Content examples? This should give you a round about area where to start with lining up you walking, running, etc, animations.
It may take a bit of trial and error, but the character examples provide a great starting place.
Here is a link to the documentation for that Content Example: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/ContentExamples/Animation/index.html
Thanks and have a great day!
To get the correct speed of animation, in your 3D modeling/animation application, when you animated your character, see how many units the feet move from one step to the other, then multiply this value by the length of the animation in seconds, this will give you units per second, and if you modeled your character in Unreal Units, it should be pretty close to m/s.