Week 10 Day 1 - Guest Lecture + Animation
0Today we had Preacherman (Jeff) who worked at companies like Midway come and talk for a half hour or so, and answered questions about working in the industry.
We then moved on how to how animations work in UE4. We have done basic animations before (either by tying movement to Event Tick or by using a Timeline) but today we covered skeletal animations, which is how you normally will animate a person or a dog or something.
There's four key parts:
1) The skeleton, which describes a set of bones and their parent/child relationships. (The hand is attached to the lower arm attached to the upper arm attached to the clavicle, attached to the spine, etc.) You can (and should) use the same skeleton asset for all related creatures.
2) A skeletal mesh, which applies a mesh (i.e. 3D artwork) to each bone in a skeleton. So you can have one skeletal mesh for one character, and another one for another character, and have them share the same skeleton (and thus sharing animations) without having to repeatedly create new skeletons and animations.
3) An animation, which tells a skeleton (and thus a skeletal mesh) how to move when playing an animation. Animations are all tied to a skeleton, so if you have 50 skeletal meshes for one skeleton, they can all share animation assets.
4) A physics object for the skeleton, which says how much various bones weigh and how they can move. Used for ragdoll animations and such.
We then went through the process of adding a socket to a skeleton (or to a mesh, the process is the same, but you are just choosing if it will appear on one character or on all characters using that skeleton). Right click on a bone, choose add socket, name the socket. Then in the world, create a ****moveable object**, right click, choose "Attach to..." and select the name of the object you want to attach it to, and then the name of the socket, and it will be parented to it. Drag the object over the socket so it lines up nicely.