วีดีโอ

I have seen some oddities lately but wasn't sure what was causing that, it's possible that they caused that when trying to add support for Motion Matching. Make sure though that there is nothing on the character or that the character isn't holding something that is blocking the visibility channel though, because I believe by default that is what the Foot Placement uses for finding the ground and it will cause the foot to hop around while running.

Yeah, I started working on an AI Template for the system. But I've only got it about 60% complete and haven't touched it in over a month now because I've been addressing people's requests and complaints which has prevented me from finding the time to finish it. To answer your question though, yeah I've gotten it working and I even did a video on the proper way of setting up Ai for a Motion Matching System.

@@unrealdevop OH I SAW IT!! Its really easy to solve the problem with just tick the "Use Acceleration for Paths"!!! Thanks so much!!!!

@@rasaidtsang4456 Yeah, rather simple fix. It was brought to my attention by an Epic Games Employee on X.

Lol glad to hear people still find this useful.

Yeah I do have a perpetual license to a previous version, but not the latest. I had to drop my subscription because it was too expensive and I wasn't using it enough to justify maintaining it.

Why do you say that? Everybody seems to be insanely scared of Live Retargeting......I profiled it and the hit didn't even register a blip on the graph. Not sure why everyone thinks Live Retargeting is so heavy because it actually isn't. As far as Listen Server, that's not even true. You don't Replicate Animation Systems. You replicate the Values that they require. For Live Retargeting you are not replicating anything at all.....it has no more of a hit during Multiplayer despite Dedicated or Listen Server.....then it has during Stand-Alone Single Player.

As far as retargeting this to another skeleton......my project is actually a Testament to the very fact that Retargeting absolutely fixes NOTHING. If you don't us Live Retargeting......every single character with a differing anatomy will need their own dedicated animations anyway.....so you may save a 0.1 ms hit with around 20 character's in the scene, but your ram consumption is now 20x higher........

@@unrealdevop It's basic math. Your doubling the number of joints. And for the host player, Yes your only replicating the values, But it also has all the skeletons playing as well. And the average player doe Not always have the best hardware. This why the makers of GASP set it up for Retargeting..

@@eddiej.l.christian6754 Well I'll be doing a video tomorrow to debunk this Fallacy people have reached. According to Unreal Insights Live Retargeting specifically is actually only causing a 6 microseconds hit which is about 0.000006 seconds. (Also my computer tech is about to be 3 generations behind, so I'm not really running on modern hardware) When benchmarking the worst case scenario showed only a 7fps improvement for a Non-Live Retargeting Approach in an actual map where the camera was fixed in a specific position and they could only move in a very small area in view below the camera. The only difference between the two maps was that I selected all the Character's and did a Replace With Blueprint on them so they would all be in the exact same location on each map and the camera would be in the exact same location. With 25 character's the performance improvement varied between 2-5 frames. With 100 characters the difference was about 2-5 frames. So....yeah, not sure why people think it's insanely expensive. The benefits you get within your workflow from using Live Retargeting, and the workload that is reduced (Which is by about a factor of 10x and scale exponentially with characters and weapons.....) far outweigh a minor dip in fps. The reason the FPS dip is so low is because in reality AnimGraphs get executed on a Worker-Thread.....not the Game-Thread which normal Game Logic runs on.....which means that your more likely to have your Game-Thread be the bottleneck on your CPU and much less likely to have your Worker-Threads become the bottleneck. Most people make the false assumption that when they have a lot of character's in the scene that it's their Animation System, in reality it's almost always Draw Calls that are bottlenecking performance (These actually take place on the Render Thread, which is what they call that CPU Thread where Draw Calls are handled).

@@unrealdevop I look forward to the video. Coming from the Unity engine, I always welcome additional information. With that being said, My crew spends weeks reducing any slowdowns, even ones that are just 2-5 FPS. But I would like any method that improves production.

idk I haven't really messed with that, I believe they said the mantle system was a pretty basic example and I don't believe it was ever meant to meet everybody's needs, it was only there to serve as an example. I'm assuming that they expect people to build their own mantle systems based off the example they provided. That was only meant to show-case how you could setup a mantle system with motion matching.

I'll have to get around to something like that. I keep getting requests in regards to Melee stuff, Melee Stuff can't be Cheated though. This layering technique will reduce the amount of animations you need by only so much, but beyond that your actually going to need to create your animations in very informed ways. If you don't design your animations in very specific ways then they will not blend properly. You can refer back to my other comment on your previous post for further information on this. I am sure I will eventually do stuff like this, but it won't be a 5 minute video and it will involve modifying animations pretty heavily. I will likely use some animations from Mixamo or some other source since making animations from scratch is fairly time consuming and most people will feel overwhelmed by the idea of that entirely.

Thanks

@ would be cool to learn how users can add new custom animations like sword attacks, frisbee throws, and bow/arrow to your awesome blueprint project. Thank you for making this project.

@@hotsauce7124 Yeah that's a pretty big request. The reason why is because I would actually have to teach you how to be an Animator first. Animation in games have to be made very very specific ways. If you see these games where movement is real fluid, it's because each animation they blend out of was hand made so that it's literally coming out of the pose your character is currently in. There is no way to CHEAT that, you just need to make your Animations so that they Come out of the Pose that your Character is currently in, that's the Secret to AAA animation. It's easy to fall into that trap though where you assume there are really sophisticated techniques for making animations blend between each other, there really isn't though. The secret is that all these movements you see characters in AAA games making, every one of those movements are Key Framed. There is blending happening, but the gaps those blends are having to fill are so small that the player normally never notices them. The larger the gap, the more awkward it will look. And if there is a gap on the Lower Body it may cause foot sliding.

It's not a system specific fix. That's why the video says Motion Matching AI, and not Gasp AI. Should work with any motion matching setup.

@@unrealdevop I tried it with a relativily simple setup with locotmotion but my character is not moving. I think theres some extra steps i would need to take to get it similar to gasp.

@@ThrillDaWill Nah I think I know why. Just taking a wild guess here but 99.99% of everybody that has had trouble with this tried duplicating the Character Blueprint and doing it on a duplicate. The problem is that the Animation Blueprint is casting to CBP_SandboxCharacter not CBP_YourCharacter......so it's not receiving any data and therefore doesn't know the Ai is moving, so no animation is playing.

​@@ThrillDaWill yeah idk to be honest man, I don't know what your trying to do over there. I can promise you this though..... It is no more my opinion in this video that this is the "Proper Way", then it is my opinion that the Sky is Blue. It simply is, I'm not stating an opinion, I'm actually trying to help you guys understand how it works. If it's not moving on your end, then it's likely due to something else entirely at fault. So you may want to make sure that your Animation System works at all.....before you try to test it with Ai. That's what I normally do, I normally set it up with a player controller, and double check that it's working. Make sure that when your playing the little guy in your Animation Blueprint for this instance of the character.....is actually moving....if it's not, then something is wrong with your animation system, and it likely has nothing to do what-so-ever with the MoveTo Ai function.

@@unrealdevop Yeah thats a good method, ill give it a shot. thanks for the help! as far as gasp goes this is great and I will be using it in the future!

I believe there are quite a few video guides on how to do it if you don't mind doing things yourself.

What I mean is that there are actually video's specifically on setting GASP up with FPS Camera Mode.

@unrealdevop still no one fixed tge animation that make the camera collide with the walls , its un fixable if you dont fix the animation , else you need splitted body fps mode

@@TrippyPa Well i have basically no experience setting up FP Camera's so if everyone else is having trouble with it I doubt I would do any better.

Yeah to get more fluid/realistic animation you have to sacrifice reaction time.

Yeah I'll release it over the weekend. All I should have left now is just the template characters to setup.

Yeah it's all blueprints, c++ obscures things from people and while some may prefer it in C++ it's better for a public project to be in blueprints otherwise your cutting about 90% of everybody out of your project.

@ is it possible to add sword abilities, fighting abilities and climbing abilities?

@@hotsauce7124 Some things actually do require an Animator believe it or not. A lot of the stuff you see that looks janky is what you get when you don't have one. That's what happens when you try to force animations to work for your system, that were not hand made for your system. Most everyone when getting started in game development approach it with a really naive perspective, thinking that there are plenty of free and paid animation sets and that you can simply use those and if they look good you will have a AAA animation system as long as you know how to force them to work. It simply doesn't work like that. I may add some stuff later on but it won't be anytime soon. I first have to find the time to get back to making Animations like I was starting to do a while back.

@@unrealdevop I can help you create the animations you need free of charge and yours to keep. I'm looking to learn how to integrate animations into GASP. If you would like some help with that I can do the animations for you if you can help me learn how to integrate new animations to create game play abilities through Blueprints, not C++. This might be a silly question, but is GASP different from ALS?

@@hotsauce7124 GASP uses motion matching and only includes locomotion animations such as walking/jogging/sprinting and crouch movement as well as jumping and some traversals. That's all GASP includes, as far as ALS it does not use Motion Matching, and all the animations were hand crafted by Caleb Longmire, the one that made the animation system. He made all animations in a very very very specific way so that they would be optimal for the Additive Layering Technique he used. As far as The Gameplay Ability System (GAS) that system 100% requires C++ it's not something you can build from Blueprints. There is one plugin that supposedly exposes a lot of it and tried to bring it to blueprints but it's a paid plugin that I wouldn't be able to include in my project and I am very unfamiliar with that plugin. To top it off I have next to no experience assembling GAS systems in C++, I have only worked with Lyra Based Projects and I have only had to work on those kind of projects a few times.

I may look into it at some point. I haven't really had the time to even try it really.

Well for posture you simply don't Align the Retarget Pose. It's destructive, other then that you have no control over the posture outside of what it was in the character's default pose. You also don't have any control over the motion or posture issues related to the animations themselves without making your own. You can change the posture though for the poses and I may demonstrate that at some point. The are limits though as to what you can do without actually changing the animation itself.

Thanks

Thanks

Thanks man. I'm glad I didn't rush it out last weekend. Ended up having a lot of problems I kept thinking I fixed but would then end up breaking again later lol.

Thanks appreciate it

Thanks.

Thanks for the feedback

It is and the new update won't be released until it's polished enough that it will literally blind people. It takes longer to release the updates this way but at least people will let up on me a bit.

Yeah it's a bit tricky and pretty heavy....but with some effects it's the only way to pull them off.

Yeah there is a setting under Trace Settings called Max Ground Penetration. By Default it's set to 20 centimeters which gives it a good bit of overlap causing it to look like your sinking into the ground.

@@unrealdevop Thanks. But i check all values in Max Ground Penetration its not change anything for me. I change Base translation delta - its make foot up, but it make fly effect, forward part of foot still try move to under floor. P.S.: i have some bad solution, but its works: I add ConrolRig node after FootPlacement, and in ControlRig just add foot height with modify transforms.

@@DimitryArsenev Yeah idk what you could be doing wrong, I've never had any issue's setting it up except when they broke it in an update. They have made some changes to it so maybe that has something to do with this.... You should know that this is not meant for climbing ladders. I keep getting people that want to use it for climbing ladders and it's not designed for that. It's designed for Landscapes and solid surfaces, but it should work fine on concrete steps too. If your trying to use this on CUSTOM stairs then it could be that it's not blocking a channel that is required for the Foot Placement to see the stair.

@@DimitryArsenev might check your surfaces COLLISION Settings. Foot Placement is running a Line Trace......if your Collision DOES NOT BLOCK that Trace Channel.....the Foot Placement WILL NOT SEE YOUR SURFACE. Just trying to make that clear lol...

@@unrealdevop Oki i check collisions later. But foot placement works fine - its up legs if need or down, usually make good angles, but foot a little bit under floor on typical landscape. I check on another map with another character, Max Ground Penetration and others values not increase foot height. With logic from Manny by ControlRig its too make foot under floor with my custom character (with UE manny its okay), but with ControlRig i can add some constant fix value for foot Z axis.

Lol yeah you can add constraints now in Unreal as well but you have to bake them to get the same result and if you don't do it right it doesn't come out as good.

Thanks

I'm aiming for this weekend. I want to keep testing it for bugs and things I may have missed, replicate it and make sure it's working for IK Retargeted characters.

Yeah discussing these things is difficult which is one of the reasons you don't see many videos on it.

Well see, more likely it will be Ai though

It would be better to make it a child, I was doing it the hard way....for any other character I would say do it this way....but for MetaHumans as you saw it causes a lot of crashes.

I'll redo this video soon actually using the Child Method instead.

@@unrealdevop great thanks!

Yeah merging it with combat fury would be possible but it would be a bit of a task. I may add an example at some point in regards to how you could handle Melee weapons, but Layering only really works well for the upper-body. Good Melee Stances normally require positioning of the entire body and altering the lower body without adverse side-effects will not be possible do to the nature of Additives and how they work. It would require custom Locomotion Animations to properly bring you out of Stops into the Idle you desire and out of Idle into the Starts you desire.

It's usable in a game, some of the changes were things I had to add support for crouch. Some of the changes were to make it more easily scalable for large projects.

You can, I do that in my videos but you could just re-parent it, that's actually what I did with those. I may do another video where I just show how to do that since this approach doesn't work well for them due to the problems that Leader Pose Logic Creates, which is one of the reasons I crashed twice while trying to make that video on setting them up.

You can but there is no easily formula for Animation. Layering will only get you so far and will only reduce the number of animations. You can bring in new animations, but it won't be Plug-N-Play. It will require some understanding of how animations need to be designed for games. With Cinematics you don't need to worry about technical design requirements for animations, you can just play them as they were made from specific angles and just cut the camera away to avoid showing the blend between animations in case they look bad. With games you can't do that though, the animations need to be made for the purpose in which your using them and they must be designed for the underlying animation system in which you intent to use them with. That's why Animation is one of the hardest things for Indie Developers, you can't simply solve the problem using Logic or sophisticated blending techniques, at some point you will actually need to either have custom animations made, or you will need to modify them. Modifying animations can sometimes be rather difficult to do well.

@@unrealdevop Thanks for the reply. I'm experienced on the animation and 3D side, I'm not a programmer though, and am trying to figure out how to customize the blueprint with my assets and animation.

@@unrealdevop Are there general points or guidelines for authoring animations for Motion Matching style of workflow? To be honest, I am kinda surprised that Epic didn't cover this at all when they released GASP. Seeing that they said they moved all characters in Fortnite to use MM. Another point: do you think it is possible to backward engineer animations looking at the 500+ anims they provided to us or without advanced knowledge of animations this won't be possible?

@@michaelvaughan2986 Well, mostly you'll be playing action based animations as montages. In some situations it may make sense to simply play them as an Additive, this will generally give smoother blending but will require the animation to be made for that pose. For Example, you could use layering to have him holding the weapon, and then you could have an Additive Montage play that has him coming out of that idle pose where he is holding the weapon, for the most part this should give decent results, I have the reloads setup so that the Montage is playing on the Upperbody, but it's first being applied to the lower body Additively.

@@RomanTimm As far as general guidelines I haven't had a chance to really dig deep into that to figure out a good workflow but during their Live Stream they did briefly discuss how they handled the authoring of those animations and it basically involved matching the root motion to the capsule movement settings they chose ahead of time, at least from my understanding. As far as how they extracted that into a curve I'm not sure. They showed them bringing the curve into Maya though and transferring it to the root bone (I believe they actually constrained it to the curve or something like that). They then (I am assuming) corrected the motion of the animation so that it fit that motion and felt grounded. It may be possible to record that motion to a curve via TakeRecorder.....Idk how they actually did it though.....that part is a mystery. It's important to note though that despite popular belief, they didn't just make animations and then they just magically worked with Motion Matching lol.....Motion Matching is not Sentient yet, so It can't just figure things out.