Adam Clark
Senior Animator II
TIPS & TRICKS
ScoutPilot Gameplay:
The goal of this exercise was to create a Stealth execution animation and get it working in UE5.
Along with the Stealth execution I wanted to be able to have the player move around in the level. So I created a Run
Forward animation and a Crouch Forward animation. From those two animations I was able to create all the other
locomotions needed for the set (Forward, Forward Left, Forward Right, Left, & Right).
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*Tips & Tricks: I ran across this animator on LinkedIn who shared his approach on creating the directional locomotions with
only using the Forward locomotion.
Alexey Medvedev:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWc2cLAry9U
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After completing the locomotion set and stealth execution animations I started working on implementing them into UE5.
I started out with the ThridPerson Character Blueprint that comes along with the UE Third Person Template. From there
I created a new Animation blueprint for the player character, Created new input actions for various inputs, & set up
motion warping for the Player and enemy to sync up during the stealth attack. (and all other logic needed to get
things working)
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*Tips & Tricks: When I started learning Scripting with blueprints I invested into a book to help me understand basic
concepts. It was well worth the investment.
https://www.amazon.com/Blueprints-Visual-Scripting-Unreal-Engine/dp/180181158X
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FPS Test:
I've been playing a lot of Valorant on my free time lately so I decided to do a FPS personal test for fun.
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I found this Gun model on sketchfab by: Ankush Gupta (https://sketchfab.com/Ankush4135). From there I took the model and rigged it in Maya adding a few joints to be able to animate some of the dangling bits and the reload magazine. After I finished the animations I then wanted to try and get the animations working in Unreal Engine.
Using the Unreal FPS template: I replaced the character and weapon skeletal meshes, Created state machines for the animations, Edited the level blueprint by creating an event graph that allowed me to play the animations by the press of a key on the keyboard.
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*Tips and Tricks:
When I started to polish my animation, I found the quickest way to clean up arcs on the tip of the weapon was to use an aim constraint.
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Raph:
Here's an animation I was playing around with on my free time. The animation is pretty simple and straight forward.
My process for something like this is to start out by getting the first pose of the shot and the camera angle I want to start with. After that I work through the main poses while keeping in mind how the camera is moving through out the piece. once I have those main poses in, I'll add at most one breakdown in between those main poses. From there I'll do small sections in a straight ahead layered approach.
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Tips and Tricks:
I wanted to get a little more squash in the hand when he hits the button but the rig didn't have that capability. So I decided to use a Lattice Deform on the hand when he presses the Button on the walkman.
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Skaarj Walk:
Pretty simple test here.
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The main thing that I wanted to play around with for this test, was moving controls into world space and offsetting them in time to create overlaping action in the tail. (something I've been learning from Richard Lico's class at www.animationsherpa.com). I find his approach really useful and really helps get nice results fairly quickly.
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I don't feel comfortable jumping into the fine details of how to use this technique as it something Richard covers in his course. So if you would like to learn more about how this process works, I would suggest taking a look at his website. Though bear in mind it's not a beginner course.
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