Task 2
Movement
I created a variety of animations in Maya using the same robot skeleton that I rigged. It’s great because I can export these animations into Unreal and it’ll automatically apply them to the same skeleton and mesh.
I then create an animation blueprint which will make use of different blend spaces. Blendspaces make the transition from one animation another smoother and more natural.
At the bottom you can hold shift and preview the animations transition. You can edit the attributes to make the transition sharper or smoother. I’ve left it at the default settings as I’m happy with it’s appearance.
After creating blendspaces for
Idle > Walk, Walk > Sprint, Jump > Double Jump
I used the animation blueprint to call upon them. This makes uses of certain states and checks to see if certain variables are true allowing the robot to perform certain animations.
For example the run animation only begins when movement is detected. Otherwise the Robot will stay in it’s idle animation.
When the robot jumps it changes to the jump animation and only when airborne is it able to perform the double jump animation. It will then stay in the jump animation until it lands back on a walk able surface.
Each of the arrows must have a criteria set so the blueprint knows when to transition to different animations. When compiling the blueprint it’ll alert you if you’ve forgot to set criteria for any of the transitions.
I’m really happy with the animation blueprint so far. It’s been a learning curve as I’ve not dealt with it before and I’m having to do lots of communicating between different blueprints but I’m certain with practice I’ll get the hang of it.
At the moment I have all the basic movement animations created and working in Unreal. Including a float animation which increases the Robot’s movement speed! This will act as a sprint which will expend the characters stamina.
Attacks (Combo)
I’ll be creating melee attacks for my robot. I’ll make a variety of melee swings so the attacks are not repetitive. I’ll also create the special attack which will be a spin.
Whilst creating the melee attacks I had to also think about how the legs, body and non-attacking arm would move with the weight change. It looks a lot more realistic when the whole body is moving in animation rather than just a single limb.
I created 3 Basic melee attacks. One swings with the left, one swings with the right and the final swings with both arms. Later on I’ll make use of particle effects to make the attacks more visually interesting.
After exporting my animations, I created three animation montages. I then used ‘anim notify’ to show in the animation where it would make contact with the enemy.
This also is used to give a small window where the player is able to attack again and begin a combo.
An issue I came across was that it was resetting the combo too quickly. I slowed down the playback of the animation by a small amount and moved the anim notify to give the player a bigger window to combo. This way the attack animations play out a little more whilst still being able to lead into a combo attack.
