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So you can have a branch redirect the flow of execution to another branch (child/sibling) but you have to be in that branch when the event is sent, from my understanding (I haven't touched state trees in a few months). So if I remember correctly, and you need the event to be captured regardless then you should probably capture those events from the root if it's the case that you need them to be handled regardless of where you are at within that state tree. Also, it's probably worth noting that if it's a Parallel State Tree that isn't currently running then it will not handle the event's that are inside of that State Tree.

​@@unrealdevop Well for some weird reason it seemed to be related to my move to task. I switched to using Epic's move to and now it works. The only thing I'm unsure on how is figuring out how to complete the smart object's state tree so it cancels out and unclaims the slot in the smart object. Right now when the event fires it ends up running my task that the event transitions to as well as the smart object state tree

@@SneakyKittyGameDev Yeah Smart Object State Trees should exist on the Items themselves and so they are not tied to the NPC's State Tree and therefore can be ran independent of them. I will warn you that there is a serious bug with State Trees that make them unusable in a final product right now. If they are unloaded for any reason while in use (Level Streaming, World Partition, Exiting To The Main Menu) then they will crash the Game/Engine even in a compiled build.

Virtual bones are effected by additives just like regular bones and additives will offset them in negative ways, but they give us a reference for where things should be. In regards to IK we normally get the Virtual Bone from the pose that is relevant and use that as the Target. If you apply additives to the animation that offset them then you can grab the Virtual Bone from the Aiming Pose to get the location for where the hand would have been before applying the additive.

Yeah I'll do a video at the end explaining how I achieved it and why I did certain things.

UDO has some great content, and u as well ive watched some of your videos before :)

Your videos are great man! I saw you in the live stream chat for the GASP updates.

So I actually ended up solving this by deleting the existing LODSync component and using the one from the metahuman you are copying in.

@ Ah I see thanks for sharing that. I was going to suggest just re-parenting the one it came with, is actually easier that way. There seems to be some serious problems with character's that use that Leader Pose approach....not sure what it does but it can cause all kinds of problems like that. However the problem you seen sounds like it probably wasn't caused by that.

Thanks, appreciate the feedback

I may redo this at some point, but basically you would exclude the arms in such cases where accuracy is important, transferring the motion onto the arms would make them move around too much, the alpha gives you control over the percent that is applied. So in actuality you could have multiple different Layered Blend Per Bones on the arm, one making it stiff and another that introduces a bit of motion back onto them. The thing is with layering, it works best when you can hand-craft all your animations such as Caleb Longmire did with ALS, doing it that way would give you more control over the motion itself and allow you to design those animations in such a way that they would better transfer onto Aiming Poses with the least amount of issues.

In project settings you have a Physics section, under that you have Physical Surfaces. You need to create some Physical Material assets in the Content Draw and assign them to Surfaces. You then need to setup notify events for when the feet hit the ground on your animations, run a trace to see what Physical Surface your walking on and then play the appropriate sound.

@unrealdevop thank u but how can i do this with the gasp animation? i mean they are a lot can i use the notify already in the anims?

@jack-zs4ot Yeah that's part of the reason they are there.

@@unrealdevop i cannot find where the default footsteps are played, its not in the abp i think

Spear throwing and the act of grabbing it from some location are normally treated as separate animations unless it's some kind of God of War style weapon with a chain on the end where you can yank on the chain and it comes back to the user's hand. In the case of a Spear throwing and then going over and grabbing it, those would be two separate animations and there would be no need for animating a bone to fly through the air. Unreal Engine has built in physics that can handle ballistic trajectories just fine without needing it to be an animation. If you did try to make that an animation it would make it significantly more complex then what it needs to be because you would need to use some form of Motion Warping to get it to the desired location since Animations are Static Pre-Baked Motions.

You would just detach the spear from the bone and activate a Thruster component on it to propel it forward.

Oh yeah sorry, when I made this series I made the decision to not include the final version because the setup is so complex that you really need to follow along closely to get the same results. Also I had to hack some things at the time due to bugs that are currently present in 5.4 for State Trees. The Animations should be in the project though.

@unrealdevop thanks for clarifying. I enjoy your work. I went down to see your other videos. Sometimes a bit too fast for me ;) but very informative and inspiring

It's been to long man, but I can tell you that if the State has Child States then normally you don't want it to succeed because otherwise it won't wait for it's children to finish it will immediately finish and they will not get the opportunity to finish their tasks.

I should warn you to though that State Trees were still under heavy development when I made this video and a lot has changed since then and last time I checked there were still some serious bugs they were still working out.

@ totally understandable. ive been struggling to get smart objects to run and yours is one of the few tutorials out there. Im in 5.5 now and youre correct... there were quite a few adjustments to state trees.

@@kale9206 Yeah, well hopefully they start feeling more stable in 5.6 and I would like to see that bug with smart objects get fixed as well. I can't recommend anyone use them until that World Partition/Level Streaming Crashing bug is fixed.

Yeah the topic is a bit more complex then what most people realize.

Yeah but I have a 42" and I probably could fit another monitor on this desk but it would be rather a tight fit.

Yeah so there is no **Quick** way to make a good control rig. Honestly, I don't mess with Control Rigs enough to teach you guys how to make one from scratch. I would suggest filing bug reports on that even though we know they are aware, simply to push them harder towards fixing that Modular Control Rig bug because in my opinion it basically makes them useless and I keep getting told they are going to fix it but I have yet to see them do anything about it.

Yeah just waiting on the guys at Unreal Engine to fix the bug where Smart Objects cause the game to crash when their being used during Level Streaming.

Yeah, feel free to contact me on Discord about that. The reason why the video's come out like that is because I've mostly made video's on things I struggled with or found little information on. I've actually deleted at least 100 video's from my channel since I created it. Mostly video's that just never really got many views from years ago, were outdated, or incorrect.

Because the name Motion Matching is misleading, a lot of people assume that means that it's some intelligent system that makes animations match the motion. It's not like that at all, the Algorithm scores animations. It does this based on how their Root Bone Moves and in which direction it moves in relation to it's starting position, this root motion for every every animation is scored based on how closely it matches the character's currently predicted trajectories direction and their current speed. It also scores based on how closely the poses match between their current pose and the animations pose. The Velocity and Direction of the Root Bone's movement in the animations have the biggest impact on the score. Why does this matter in relation to your question? It means that it's not FORCING the animations to match the movement, it means that if the animations don't match the character's current movement then it will likely not be selected. As the Root Velocity (Speed in a given direction) trends away from the character's current Velocity the score for that becomes Insanely HIGH (Lowest Scores Win) since it does not match the way we are moving in the game. What happens then will be that the Poses end up being the deciding factor between which animations get chosen rather then the Velocity and Direction. When the Poses become the Single deciding factor, perhaps a pose in a Stopping animation may cause the Stopping animation to have the Lowest Score while they are Sprinting Forward.....I hope you can see how this can cause the wrong animations to be selected and therefore cause problems. Not sure why, but it seems that over the past 4 months the only questions I've been asked all require me to write novels to fully explain **Why** lol....but yeah it's not that simple. Motion Matching requires understanding and it has really real limitations as well as Pre-Requisites to setting up, never understood why people thought it was going to be a Plug-N-Play animation system where you could just drop random animations from random sources into a bucket and have the software sort them all out and make them work.

Just in case your confused by my last response. To make it simple, Animations have to exist for that speed in order for Motion Matching to select the correct animation predictably.

@ I see. Thanks. So it sounds like you'd need different mocap data sets for every single increment of speed that the player could possibly walk/run in order to do analog stick locomotion correctly?

@@importon To some extend you can deviate from the intended speed and the Motion Matching system can procedurally speed them up or slow them down but only by a small percent any more or less then 15% and it's going to begin looking noticeably off. That's the least of your concerns though because as I said as you deviate from the intended target velocity the motion matching will begin favoring pose matches over velocity matches.

Yeah for sure, it will be quite a series too put together and it will be good practice for me as well because I really do most of my Animation related stuff outside of Unreal.

Yeah the techniques I'll be teaching in this series will carry over to Motion Matching as well.

Yeah personally I prefer to do this stuff outside of Unreal but given the Paywall I only like to do this stuff in Unreal for Videos since it's freely available and constantly being improved as well.

You could use still use a spring arm with no length if your just looking at taking advantage of Camera Lag. You could possibly accumulate so many locations over time and just have the Camera interpolated to the average of that to reduce the amount of motion it receives from them. I have barely looked at the new Camera system so It's possible some of these features are already integrated into it for handling things like that better. I'll look into it when I have some time, perhaps this weekend, we will have to see. I have my hands pretty full right now.

Sorry, you have a video that tells you how to make a weapon that lies on the ground in white squares? Sorry for the spelling, I'm writing through a translator.

@@TheSheV9 I think the translator may be bad, try using Chat-GPT

@@unrealdevop Do you have a tutorial on your channel about how to create an object lying on the ground (for example, a weapon lying in squares that look like hitboxes on 0:10)? So that I could continue working by following that tutorial. I hope you can understand the meaning here. Thanks in advance!

@@TheSheV9 No, sorry I do not have one like that. It is not difficult to do though because your just attaching it to the hand. In my setup I have it pass a reference of itself to the player and then the player uses that reference to attach it to a bone/socket.

@@unrealdevop Thank you very much for your answer. I don't know anything about blueprints yet, I'll look into it soon

If you choose to retarget to your own character that's fine. The Quick Answer is that it wouldn't benefit you for me to do that.....if you want to know why then just keep reading. The common misconception is that if you have the same skeleton you won't need to do anything but replace the skeletal mesh in the blueprint and BAM!! It looks the same on your character....that's not how it works though due to slight differences in base pose especially where fingers are concerned. Any slight alterations to the posture of your character is a deviation from the UE4/UE5 manny's base pose and will also cause offsets. In the end you get the problem everyone has struggled to figure out since ALS was released, simply put Anatomy Differences and Base Pose offsets will displace the hands leading to an animation system that looks rather bad on your character when hand precision is concerned such as when someone is holding a 2-Handed Weapon. With that said I showcase an IK Retargeting approach to save people the hassle of having to retarget for each and every one of their character's, assuming you are not drawing from an Infinite an unpredictable variation of Anatomies with character's from programs such as Character Creator 4 or DazStudio character's for example. The way Epic made the MetaHumans is an A+ Prime Example of how you should limit the body's of your character's in the game to prevent the need of having 5000 retargeted animation's and animation systems for all 5000 of your character's.

the issue is that the weapon swtiches hands mid animation and it works fine rn but the issue just happens once i integrate gasp, everything works as it should except that handful of animations which are quite frankly very very important

@@unrealdevop thank you for a proper response as well i dont see many dev ytbers do that

@@BlueDream71071 I understand, you should look closely at how Lyra handled their Fire and Reload AnimMontages to see a good approach to that. If you retargeted that animation to the UEFN Manny with their Auto-Retarget option then it will try to fit that for their character and not yours assuming your IK Retargeting at Run-Time for your character. The proper approach for that would be to setup an IK Retargeter that only fixes the footing for the UEFN when retargeting to it and without altering anything else in the settings and then retargeting those animations to it that way, this would preserve the animation such that it will look wrong for the UEFN but will look the same as it did for your character before retargeting it. If however, you are retargeting all of that to your character and it's doing that then it could simply be the way your playing the montage.

@@unrealdevop im not using live retarget, i am using the katana animation pack by 9cg and i cannot get the animations to look good no matter what i do, ive tried everything from creating transform goals for just those bones and still on uefn it looks jank and broken

It could be a number of things, but by default the Offset Root Bone comes after the Slot so that it can absorb and counter rotate the root....if the plugin is manipulating the capsule, that could cause issues that the plugin may be at fault for.

nevermind i got it lol, anybody wondering its in the ‘should turn in place function’ set rotation to desired, delete and node and connect idle to or node.

@@owenb6499 Yeah you can also speed it up further actually and I'll do a video on that as I've had a lot of people asking this. I've significantly sped it up in earlier versions and I'll show you guys how to do this manually as I'm avoiding making any base alterations in the newer versions of the project.

Yeah the Blueprint Debugger is a newer features and when it first came out it had serious problems but they have worked those out now.

So that would mean it's a Root Motion Animation. If this is meant for a User Capsule Movement Animation where you press forward and he walks forward then you need to Enable Root Motion, and Enable Force Root Lock. Enable Root Motion is only needed if your planning on extracting Root Motion Data from the animation for things like Stride Warping and things like that. Force Root Lock treats it as an In-Place Animation where you are driving the animation via user input.

@@unrealdevop ya I found out about the root motion. Now I'm trying to figure out how to get the raptor to use the turn animations as it walks. (This is going to be an NPC that players will have to fight or flee from)

@@gaigelarock3970 Yeah if your referring to Non-Linear Arced Motion Paths if your not playing those as Root Motion Animations then your going to have a difficult time pulling that off. You would likely need to figure out the rotation rate of the animation as it's walking and try to match that while the animation is playing, just like you match the speed using Max Walk Speed, only it's not going to be done for you and will require more technical logic to pull off. The problem is though that you would be expecting that specific arc to align with how it needs to turn as it's chasing the player which is very unlikely since the player will likely not run along that perfect arc. You would be much better off setting it up to use a forward walk/run animation and additively apply a lean pose too it like they do in the Game Animation Sample to add lean to the character when running left or right, they also do this in ALS, and they may do it in Lyra I'm not sure about Lyra though (Don't think they did).

Yeah so you could replace that with a Blend Poses By Bool. I believe they removed that Blend node.

i removed the blend all together and the can look bool full stop. Just run the anim layer into the anim graph as 1 line and worked for me

@@unrealdevop Thanks for the quick reply! I was able to get it working but I've got a new problem. I'm making a tank and line trace to make the base of the tank follow the terrain. However, this makes the top turret (on it's own bone) and gun barrel (on it's own bone as well) to angle down depending on the steepness of the terrain. I would want to decouple the turrent and gun barrel from the main tank body when it traverses the terrain.

@@phlipclip5097 If your meaning to remove those at some point (Not sure if that's what you meant) then you could actually separate the mesh and orient it's pivot to the bone (That can't be done in Blender as far as I know it can only be done in Maya) and then you could attach that mesh to the bone in Unreal Engine.

could you be a bit more specific? What kind of offset are you referring too?

Nah, so after some backlash from the community they apparently have decided to keep MegaScans open. As far as the textures idk why that would be an issue.

As far as the primary it's just a linked anim layer that we manually inject a set of poses into alongside their Dynamic Additive Layering Settings. I've done a few video's on how the linked anim layer's work and the layering. The only thing that has changed is that we no longer store the Poses and the Layering Settings on the Linked Anim Layer. As far as the Secondary, all I'm doing is replacing the layering settings for the left arm with the layering settings for that on the pose being layered. All we are doing is partially blending the torso minus the right arm between the poses, and replacing the left arm with the secondary. I can do a video on that later but I am actually pretty sick right now and haven't been sleeping for 2 days now due to a fever.

Thanks, appreciate the feedback.