Link Project
June 2022
For this project, I wanted to create a set of animations so a character could walk around in Unreal like a standard video game character. I wanted to implement standard movement, as well as an alternate movement setup for when he had his weapons drawn, and a few attacks. I decided to use the Link Breath of the Wild rig from Christoph Schoch, as I really like his work and his rigs are great for animating on.
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To do this, I needed to create animations for walking, jogging, and running, as well as the same animations for when he has his weapons drawn. Then I needed a Draw animation and a Sheathe animation, as well as Jumps, and of course, the Attack animations. Lastly, I needed some idle poses so that the character would have something to do while the player went to get a drink.
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I first created my Animations in Maya, starting with the idles, and moving on to the walk, jog, and run. I decided to start implementing them in Unreal once I had these basics done, then added on the weapon animations as I continued. Implementing simple movement in Unreal gave me an Animation Graph that looked like this:
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You can see that the Weapons sheathed and Weapons drawn setups are essentially mirrors of each other, with the attacks added on only when the weapons are drawn. I also found out later that I needed to have a path for Link to move directly to a weapon_idle posture, as I decided to use Montages for the attacks later and he needed to be able to come back to this graph and immediately return to the weapon idle.
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One of the benefits of using Montages for the attacks is that it let me implement Root Motion for them. I wanted Link to leap forward with each attack, as from my small amount of experience with HEMA, its common for each of your strikes to be accompanied by a forward or side step of some kind. With the simplicity of this movement system, that wouldn't look very good, as Link would slide freely while attacking. Alternatively, I could use blending to allow Links legs to move with the jog animation, while only his upper body followed the attack animation. However, I felt that this technique would make the strikes look weak and disjointed, so I went for Root motion with this project.
To switch between jogging and sprinting, I implemented a simple 1D blend graph between the two animations, then created walk speed limit that would adjust when the player hit the Shift key. This allows the character to speed up and "sprint" while telling the animation to change as the player character increases in speed.
You can also see here the simple boolean switch used to control the Weapons Out Boolean, which tells the character whether to pull out his weapons or not.
Lastly I created a setup to allow link to "chain" attacks together, so that each attack could be different from the last. This was also important for the animations, as I created the 3 attacks with the intention of them leading one into the other, so the second and third attacks require Link to be near the end of the previous attack to look correct.
This setup keeps a count going each time Link attacks, so that when the Left mouse button is pressed a second time before the end of the previous one, Link will play the second attack animation instead of the first, and so on.
For my next project I intend to implement a much more complex movement system similar to the advanced Unreal guy. I will definitely post that up on the site once I am finished. Thank you for reading!
