I’m writing a document to remember the different steps in each blueprint development and, at the moment, I’m working on montages.
A montage is the way to blend animations; for example, if a character is swinging a sword, it may be standing still, or running, or strafing, whatever. So the lower part of the body may be playing an animation while the upper part of the body, usually from the spine up, has to play another animation, in this case swinging a sword.
Unreal will here use two different animations to render a character, an upper part and a lower part. This can be extended to as many parts as needed for very complex animations/characters.
In NWN, when a character swings its sword, it stops, plays the swing animation and then resumes its former animation.
Not in Unreal, all animations can be blended one with each other.
Yay!
On paper, it’s cool, when you have to program all of that, it’s a bit less cool. It’s the eternal problem of event driven programming: the code is fragmented all over the place.
Just have a loot at what my document looks like for montages – if you don’t understand a thing, it’s ok, I don’t either.
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Assets, Animations |
Select the animation to build a montage upon → Right-click → Create → Create Anim Montage |
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Project Preferences |
Create Inputs |
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Character blueprint Event Graph |
Add Custom Events for the Inputs → Add Play Anim Montage → Select the Anim montage in the blueprint |
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Player Controller |
Add Input Action → Add GetControlled Pawn → Cast to our character → As character, Play Montage → Set montage to our montage |
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Animation Blueprint (from the main character blueprint class) |
Anim Graph → add New Cached Pose blueprint and connect it to the base Anim Graph → add Use Cached Pose → connect to as many Layered blend per bone blueprints as necessary. |