Animation

Work with Animation Blueprints, blend spaces, IK, retargeting and montages.

What it’s for

Ask your assistant to build or wire up skeletal animation: Animation Blueprints, Blend Spaces, AnimSequences and AnimMontages, IK rigs, retargeting between skeletons, and montage playback during play.

Typical requests: create an Animation Blueprint for a skeleton, set up a 1D or 2D Blend Space, make a Control Rig set up as an IK rig, retarget a batch of clips from one skeleton to another, or play a montage on an actor while the game runs in the editor. It can also read a clip’s length, frame rate, notifies and curves and tell you what it found.

It also handles the finer details: bone tracks, montage sections and timing, blend space samples, anim graph values, transition rules, IK chains and retarget chain mappings. For editing an Animation Blueprint’s graphs as readable text, see Animation Blueprint graphs. Most of this work needs the skeleton to exist already, so create or import it first.

Things you can ask

Create an Animation Blueprint for a skeleton

The new Animation Blueprint shows up in the Content Browser, ready to work on.

You: Make an Animation Blueprint called ABP_Mannequin for the SK_Mannequin skeleton.

Created ABP_Mannequin in /Game/Animations, set to SK_Mannequin_Skeleton.

Build a 2D locomotion Blend Space

Your assistant creates the Blend Space and sets up both axes for you.

You: Create a 2D blend space BS_Locomotion for that skeleton, speed 0-600 on X, direction -180-180 on Y.

Created BS_Locomotion with speed 0 to 600 on X and direction -180 to 180 on Y.

Play a montage on an actor during play

While the game runs in the editor, the actor plays the montage at the speed you ask for.

You: Play the Wave montage on Hero_1 at half speed.

Hero_1 is playing AM_Wave at half speed.