Introduction
I finally started making animations! First of all, I want to analyze the animation sequence that can be run in unreal engine4, so that I know how many animations I want to do.
Process
Open the ParagonSunWukong project, run and view the Sun Wukong animation in AnimationTestMap directly.
We can find that at the beginning of running the map, an animation montage is running, and the player can click any button to interrupt it. Then, I started walking around and found that on one hand, the camera can be moved to any angle, including facing Sun Wukong. On the other hand, Sun Wukong does not have an animation of retreating, but the animation of walking to the left is different from that of walking to the front left.
In addition, Sun Wukong can also jump, and there are four fighting animation montages, which are connected to each other.
So I checked Sun Wukong’s AnimBP and blend, space. To be honest, I don’t understand blueprints at all, and I don’t understand state machines at all. So I can only check blend space and learn about the animation I need to make.
It can be seen that except for the second one that uses blend space1D to control Sun Wukong’s walking animation, the other four are forward, backward, left, and right to set the offset of the upper body. So I checked the information
Strafing
Strafe systems, common in shooting games that require the character to move in multiple directions while facing forward, differ from regular ground movement in that, rather than rotating the character to face the direction they are heading in, they continuously blend between different directional walk and run cycles depending on the angle of the player relative to the camera direction. Beyond matching foot-fall timing, the biggest hurdle to overcome is always when the body must twist at some point as the leg motion changes from a forward action to backward.
Cycling animations can only successfully blend between similar synchronized motions. The forward run can blend with a “forward” run at 90 degrees, and the backward run can only do so with a “backward” version of the same angle.
Because a forward and backward motion cannot blend (essentially canceling each other out), at some point there must be a switch.
While there have been a variety of solutions over the years with varying degrees of success and complexity, games typically overcome this issue by covering more than just the eight directions at every 45 degrees. Instead, they use additional animations to provide overlapping coverage for the problem areas to afford time to blend.
The point at which the hips must switch will vary depending on the actual twist of the character when running forward. Many games featuring two- handed guns, for example, have the character already twisted to hold the weapon, so the problem area will be offset from the image above.
Starts, Stops, and Other Transitions
Directional starts, stops, and 180-degree turns will add an extra layer of polish to a ground movement system beyond creating the basic walk and run cycles. Simply blending from an idle to a run can look cheap without the expected lean forward and push off to show effort and acceleration.
For even better results, instead of blending directly to a run, instead first go to a looping acceleration animation (hunkered down, arms pumping—giving the appearance of constantly accelerating, but must loop at run speed), then blend across from that into the regular run. That will give the character an extra level of believability, as we need the character to hit top speed in a matter of frames for gameplay purposes but can’t put the full acceleration in the start animation due to its brevity. Just giving the visual impression the character is still ramping up to full speed despite already being there is how we achieve both gameplay response and fluidity.
Starts also improve greatly when displaying a variety of versions to cover pushing off in all directions, with blends between them. Similar to strafing, two different 180 degrees of coverage will be able to blend seamlessly, as pushing right will start with the right leg and vice versa.
To solve the overlapping angles, as with strafing crossovers, it is important to still rotate the character underneath the animation to avoid locking the start animation into an angle for its duration—something that will adversely affect the feel. Rotating the character underneath directional coverage animations is a great way to cover all angles without the player noticing.
Starts and stops in particular go a long way to giving characters a feeling of inertia as they lean into the start and back from the stop. Making these animations overlong, however, can really encumber the feel of the character, and worse, become infuriating if the player is required to quickly avoid obstacles or may fall to their death off a cliff without precise stops. As such, starts should almost immediately get to full speed, only giving the visual impression of acceleration. Stops must similarly involve the visual reaction of stopping, albeit stopping almost on a dime. Ultimately, the distance allowed by start and stop animations will be dictated by the needs of your project and must be balanced between that and the visual results.
While characters can be made to simply rotate, 180-degree-turn transitions are another visual nicety to show the shift of weight as a character plants their feet to turn backward when the player changes direction. Here again, overlong animations or those that cannot be rotated underneath will punish the player and cause them to choose to instead carve out an arc rather than trigger a punitive animation.
A common problem with starts and stops is when the player nudges the stick briefly to reposition the character. If the movement system requires these transitions to play in full, then a simple nudge can take the character several meters. This is especially an issue when turning 180 degrees on-the-spot back and forth quickly. The solution is to make starts, stops, and 180-degrees turns easily interruptible by one another, by way of event tags or cutting the animations into even smaller transitions—the smaller the better for more response.
It can be seen that Sun Wukong has been made with eight angles, and the four blend spaces correspond to the second point raised by Jonathan. But I haven’t seen any difference from the game yet.
So I asked Karl and Zhu. Zhu said that this animation may use an animation mask, or it may not (now it seems that there is no).
Karl said that I can go to YouTube to search for 8 Way Directional Movement and make my walking animation and running animation based on this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSWX3vEgRcE
I watched this animation, and it seems to be worthy of reference, especially the picture 09 below, which shows what angles of walking and running animations I should make!
In addition, I found that after making so many angles, in a third-person game, no matter which direction the character goes, his upper body always faces forward except for walking backwards. But in Breath of The Wild, Link’s direction is toward the direction chosen by the player, but the transition is natural. This may be another approach.
Next, I watched a video, which teaches how to set up jumping animation, squatting animation, and hitting animation.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ly4y1q7UG?p=1
Then the animation I need to do is considered:
I have to do 10 animations in total, including beginning animation, idle, walk (8 angles), run (6 angles), jump, squat, attack 1, attack 2, attack 3, attack 4. If there is still time at that time, I Just do another beginning animation and render with Arnold.
Conclusion
A good plan will never take more time. I have a preliminary understanding of game animation. I have studied the project in unreal engine4 and asked my classmates, and confirmed the animation I want to make! This is a good start, and I also hope that the animation process will go smoothly!