Hi,
not sure my title is clear, I’m creating an rpg with a character creation menu where the player can choose a race, gender and a class. The gender would influence the character’s exploration animations like walking/running, while the class would influence the combat animations and the race has no affect on them since they’re all humanoid.
I wonder what would be the best practice? Do I change their anim BP or their Skeleton? Probably better to make enums but I’m not sure which to change. I also wonder if there should be a different skeleton or anim BP for each gender AND class or make an array for the gender inside unique class anim BPs or skeletons according to the players selection.
FYI we actually have 4 races and 4 classes, looking forward to adding 1 or 2 classes before launch and are trying to make this system easy to modify, so we would always have the option of adding races and classes in the future (patch or DLC).
Never having done anything quite that elaborate myself I can only speculate but I would say you probably want some kind of hybrid of the 2.
If they are all humanoid keeping them on the same skeleton will benefit you greatly in animation iteration, so I would definitely only use multiple skeletons if they are vastly different. (If race doesn’t affect the animation, I’m guessing they’re pretty similar)
I would probably do an animation blueprint for each class (these can be derived from a base class so you can save yourself some work and only change what you need). You could then put a gender switch within each class and run only the animation that is relevant to whatever gender the character is.
Again this is fairly speculative as I haven’t done it myself and possibly can’t foresee future pitfalls, but I think it’s probably fairly robust.
This is actually what I think would be the best way to save time. Create a template that I could than duplicate for all the classes and an enum for the gender. Thanks for confirming my thoughts!
