How do I take over player character and animate it for cutscenes

sephquartz · July 16, 2019, 4:52pm

Hi

I’m attempting to create a type of “cutscene” that are seen in old school JRPG or in platformers like Ori and the Blind Forest. Basically, when the player walks to a trigger volume that will trigger the cutscene, the player will no longer be able to control the character and the character will then be animated to continue the story point or whatever the character is suppose to do at that point. There won’t be a “cut” in the camera at all as the camera will be seamlessly transitioned using “Set View Target with Blend” in BP.

Here’s an example of what i meant

In this clip, the player is able to move forward until an event is triggered and the “cutscene” took over and animated Ori placing the rock on the altar, so on and so forth. And to progress in the cutscene, player needs to press X when the dialogue box appears and it continues the cutscene and eventually gives the player the control again. The possessed player’s character is always in the scene and always seen.

I’m wondering whats the best way to achieve this effect. Currently, I only need the player character to move forward a couple of steps and then turn right to look at an altar behind the player (its a platformer also) and a dialogue will pop up. I’ve used sequence recorder to record my player character doing all that but I am not sure how to blend the current player into the recorded sequence.

I’ve googled this and the only solution I found is creating separate clips of animation and then blending it using Anim BP. It seems a bit impractical to create 1000 different clips of him walking forward and doing slightly various things, when I could’ve just easily animated the player translating forward, or record the player’s “gameplay”.

Will sequencer or blueprint be able to achieve this? Is there a way that I can create a blueprint that temporary possesses the player to perform the cutscene and then give the player control again?

Any suggestions or help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

sephquartz · July 19, 2019, 8:59pm

Hello !

Thanks for your reply!

Your blueprint example has given me an idea to try to control the player character by taking over the character movement node.

I did some test and manage to do this:
Disable character input > get player reference > get character movement reference > add movement input (so it moves left or right)

then I can use timer/overlap to have the character do other types of action using other nodes like rotation or playing animation clips.

I’m doing this in conjunction with sequencer that will control other things in the cutscene

So this has solved my issue!

Thank you so much!!

anonymous_user_b131d547 · July 16, 2019, 7:17pm

Hello sephquartz,

I don’t know how you set up your pawn, but if you have your “input functions” are called directly from the input you could use a level sequence to call functions that would manipulate your character. To solve this specific scene you could make your character move right as long as a bool is true. That way you could time other events in the same place.

Alternatively, you could use trigger volumes to do the same thing if it is a simple case of walking to the right and stopping when you hit another volume. This would be more time intensive for complex scenes though.

As for the dialogue it would work in both situations and you would have to block player inputs (could also use a bool check as well).

From,