Additive Animations | Adv. Anim Application [UE4]
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 เม.ย. 2021
- Welcome to my new series, Advanced Animation Application [for UE4]. This fine evening we're exploring the use of Additive Animations - whether it is for purely aesthetic reasons or even for gameplay. The 3 examples I cover today are acceleration leaning, landing compression and breathing animations. Additive animations can be used for absolutely anything you can imagine and are quite easy to implement. They can be used in the form of a singular animation, or a blendspace too.
If you come up with any ingenious ways to use Additive animations, please leave a comment below!
Here are the animations that I used in this video:
www.dropbox.com/sh/j9desancug...
(Some of these are from the free ALS session on the marketplace)
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Discord: / discord
TH-cam: / prismaticadev
Twitch: / prismaticadev
Patreon: / prismaticadev
Twitter: / prismaticadev
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Computer Specs:
Ryzen 3900x 12-core CPU
MSI Geforce RTX 2080 Super
64GB Corsair RAM
One of those fancy nvme m.2 SSD's
Programs of choice:
Unreal Engine 4 - (Game Dev)
Blender 2.8 - (Animation and Modelling)
OBS - (Video/screen capture)
Davinci Resolve - (Video editing)
Adobe Photoshop - (Graphics and Texturing)
Quixel Mixer - (Texturing)
ProTools 11 - (Compositions and mixing)
OldSchool Runescape - (Chillax time)
Filmed using:
Sony A7s2 body
Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM lens
Yonguo YN360 LED's for colour
Yongnuo YN760 chip LED w/ Godox softbox for key
My lovely cats names are Boycat, Girlcat and Ladycat :)
![Animation for Beginners | Adv. Anim Application [UE4]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/TdQBbdiwrdQ/mqdefault.jpg)
![Animation for Beginners | Adv. Anim Application [UE4]](/img/tr.png)
![Introducing: the Blendspace | Adv. Anim Application [UE4]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/6qVwfo0ITdk/mqdefault.jpg)
![The Animation Blueprint | Adv. Anim Application [UE4]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/WWL4711lI60/mqdefault.jpg)
Man, your killing it...this kind of content is in such short supply.
Insane that I hadn't known about additive animation until today. Thank you so much for making this video, I've achieved far better results than through other methods I'd built in ignorance of additives.
Wow! Never thought there was this much to animations and those animations really are super smooth and brushed. Thank you for this insightful tutorial!
Oh we've only just scratched the surface here! Haha I'm glad you're enjoying the series so far :)
Never heard of additive animation before this thumbnail, but it seems way easier than procedural animation. Can probably use both together for some beautiful results.
Reminds me a bit of procedural music, where different parts of the track changed based on different zones and microzones, and what's happening. Could probably connect the two for an immersive experience, or it might just get annoying, idk.
Hey, another beautiful and perfect video, I really like this series because animations are my weakest point but it's much easier for me to understand and to use them after your tutorials.
Thanks again :)
Cheers Marage :) You're on your way to becoming an animation master!
ey it's the frenchman
@@rabbit-istudios5444 Ahahah, hi 👋
@@MarageDev Hello frenchman
@@rabbit-istudios5444 Hello Bustzee
Excellent channel
love how you go more in depth but everything is organized and not spaghetti
taking a week to go through your vids
well thanks for this video i think ama go watch the whole series now this is very useful tbh thanks man i appreciate it so much
Thanks. I was looking into additive animations and I got your tutorial explaining in a very good way thanks again
Thanks man, I've never seen anyone do an additive animation tutorial before.
Your channel is a gold mine brother
Thank you so much for this content! You solved a lot of frustration :)
Still super useful nowadays, thanks a lot!
Oohhh very useful, thanks a lot!
As far as I understand, the additives also rotate the legs up, down, left, and right. Like at 5:08, the character looks like it is running on a sloped hill. To prevent that, should we use foot IK? Or maybe play the additives only to the upper body with a layered blend node? Thanks for the great video.
hey great tutorial. Thanks
there is an option to add additive section in the sequencer, can we use that as an additive layer like we do in maya ?
Thank you for this! Weighty Animations here we go!
Anim BP -> Get owner pawn -> get character movement -> acceleration.
Hey man just found your channel, awesome videos and I'm learning a lot! Would love to see some videos on Foot/hand IK and head LookAt through animation!
awesome, very helpful
Wow this is quite useful. Thanks
This is really a very good tutorial, but only until you start trying to repeat it in your project.
Yeah 7 hours late, because the bell did nothing, and I found this miraculously, but amazing video, I did something similar for a leaning, but calculating direction and I use that on the BS, it work with rootmotion but then it didn't without it also it didn't trigger very smoothly, I'm goin to rewatch this a few times, thank you so much, maybe combo attacks next times 😁
Haha there is always a million different ways to do things - you've just gotta find the one that works for you! Glad you're finding this useful :)
You sir are a gentleman and a scholar.
And you sir are... well, you're quite cool I guess. Thanks for the support as always :)
AWESOME!
is there a way to change the additive animtype of a montage depeding in which is state is my player? like for example play a reload while walking and play another reload but sprinting
Absolute legend!!!!!!
Nothing compared to you my dude
this is very cool, ty )
Oddly had an issue implementing this where my Lean X was somehow inverted. I manually inverted it when feeding into the blendspace and it seemed to fix it but I can't help wonder what is off.
are your run animations using root motion?
First of all thx for the video. Good job. It's works perfekt. I have a question. How do you made the Stylized landscape? Has you maybe a tutorial? :)
Really good and nice examples! But I don't really understand the difference between additive and blend per bone. They both blend animations together, so when should I use what? For example you have a run Animation and a Rifle aim Animation, the most projects would blend the aim Animation with the run Animation to the uppper body, which looks very stiff sometimes. Would it be better to use additive in this case? Would this even work? Because the legs are not moving on the aim Animation?
Great stuff! Any chance you could make a video on procedural animation? Like aiming down sights, recoil, and weapon sway when turning?
I'll be covering a few procedural animation techniques in the future :)
very lovely tutorial!
Cheers Davin! Hope you're excited for the next ones :)
Wow awesome content, I've been looking for a tutorial on additive animations everywhere and haven't found one so precise and useful until now! Thank you :) I assume you could also use this technique for displaying character wounded animations too? For example, if the player runs out of health their movement gets more labored.
You could definitely do an additive, although I would be more inclined to do a Pose Blend between Healthy and Wounded state.
@@PrismaticaDev Cool good to know, thanks for the info :)
can you make a video on how to make smooth turn based movements like prismatica? Thank you
So are bones that aren't animated (keyed) ignored in the additive transforms?
Great stuff! Planning to make one on montages?
Oh hey I didn’t know Brackeys uploaded TH-cam videos again
Hahahaha I wish
Could additive animation be used to change the position of the eye bones? What I'm trying to do is customize a Metahuman with larger and wider-set eyes. I can do the customization, and all of the facial animations work except the eyes, which continue to rotate on the original bone position...so when my character looks around, his eyes bulge out of his head. There has to be a way to offset either the eye bones, or offset the rotation center of the eye mesh. This is for an animated film, not a game, so the change would be permanent once implemented. Thanks! Great tutorial.
about additive animations with metahuman control rig , i see the face post animation blueprint is the last step , before that ,all joints are locked and cant move them with blend animations or whatever , after control rig can plug a transform bone and can move bones freely but only can do that one by one , so using same skeleton, i did animation moving all joints to different location and i want use this animation as offset or additive to the joints after the control rig .... i tried plug the contrl rig to additive node plus the manual joints animation , but very weird result.... i wonder if you know what could happen or should try add animation as offset bones in other ways?
Unfortunately I don't have much experience with Control Rig yet, nor Metahuman. So if I understand correctly you've created an animation inside Unreal and you then want to use it as an Additive? I think the only thing you'd need to find out is if you can Bake the animation you've created and then it should work exactly like in this video
Very good video!
I just applyed the lean to the animations and it works perfectly! But I still got questions, is it possible to make the charecter always face the velocity vector direction? For example, if you go forwards then backwards, the character still moves forward but facing backward, doesn't look realistic.
Do you mean they look like they're moonwalking? Or you want them to turn around instead? For the first, you'll want to use a Blendspace between all the walking animations (forward, right, left, backwards) and for the second you'll want to change the "orient towards velocity" settings in the CharacterMovement component
“Orient rotation to movement”? Was already turned on. It happens when I do an abrupt change in velocity and direction. This blend space I intend to create later but only for fighting mode. My other doubt would be about the slope walking, ideally the character should walk different, maybe slower, I even tried the warping plugin but it didn’t seem to work
I found out how to get the slope breaking the character movement. I added front slope to my main blendspace and aplied an additive for the side slope, also made him a bit slower when uphill, it’s working fine in my opinion. The other problem was because I’ve set a lower turn speed when sprinting trying to make it more realistic, but it only affects the animation, not the capsule, which doesn’t make sense. I changed back the turning speed until I find a better option. Any advice please let me know, thank you for the reply!
Looking forward to seeing what those "Dragon Solvers" are about 👀👀👀
Haha it's just the name of the plugin, DragonIK. Super awesome! And it CAN actually work for dragons... hahaha
Would you be covering start and stop movement states using say curves or root motion. Preferably using curves since I think most people wouldn’t have root motion animations and also I feel that root motion is a fixed track if you follow me. Where as in place with curves could be more controllable as a player. Feel more reactive
I'll be covering a few methods for start and stop animations, mostly procedural ways that I've used before. I also won't be covering much root motion locomotion since I've only ever used capsule-based movement myself
Extremely useful video, I have a question, why dividing the acceleration vector by the delta time?For the lean vector, why not use 2dVector instead? This system with the blends and stuff I'm sure I could add it to VR player bodies too, I should test that when I get some time but yea this is really cool thanks :D
Haha you're right, 2DVector would be much more appropriate and cheaper! Some operations require a 3vec though, so you'd have to find which ones can do a 2D version (like Vector Clamp Max Size 2D) the reason they're 3vec to begin with is because the standard Character Velocity value comes as a 3vec. As for the Delta World Seconds, it's so that it's independent from the framerate of the game. It will return the same result whether you're at 30fps or 120fps. Glad you're enjoying the series!!
@@PrismaticaDev epic! about the 2d vector, its not a big deal but trying to always use what you need will help a lot in the long run when you have 389742398432 vectors that could be 2d vectors xD, I didnt know that diving by delta time also serves that purpose of syncing with framerate, I always multiply by delta time for that kind of thing
@@Fokkusu If you are wanting a constant speed to be seen at different framerates then you need to multiply by the deltatime (or else faster machine means faster movement). But, if you are wanting to calculate speed from the observed movement then that is distance/time or, in ue engine it is Unrealunits/Deltatime. Similarly for acceleration which is distance/time/time.
Careful when doing this with Bulk Edit, I assigned the base pose twice and both times it assigned a different one then I had selected...not sure why either. I ended up having to set them individually.
nice tut!
Liked + Subscribed for being really helpful with additive animations (also cat).
at 10:04 you are saying you exported the A pose into blender. Any way to explain how to do this in two or three sentence? I use the Mrmannequin tool 1.4 without any issue but can not figure out how to export existing animations from unreal to blender so i can tweak them.
The Mr Mannequin’s default pose is the A-pose so you shouldn’t need to export/import it :) however if you do want to import animations, there’s a short guide inside the Mr Mannequin discord server in the Guides section that explains it a bit. It’s not perfect yet but it’s enough for tweaking :)
Thank you, very much! Tell us about foot locking system from ALS, please?
Sure will! At least, my watered down version of it haha
Thank yyyyyyooooouuuuuu...🥰🥰🥰
Hope it helped! :)
Hey, amazing video! would you be able to make a video going through all the steps to make a locomotion systen like you did? It would help so much since there are no real good locomotion system videos on unreal engine right now.e steps to make a locomotion systen like you did? It would help so much since there are no real goo
what i want to achieve is walking and running leaning by using a blendspace and blending between them based on speed but when i try to do this the blending is not working it's not switching between walking lean and running lean !!!
Wow super nice video! Are the animations that you have used CC0?
All of the animations I've linked in the description were made by me and you're free to use them in whatever projects without giving credit :) I believe any of the ALS animations are also free to use with no restrictions as it's a free marketplace project
@@PrismaticaDev Thank you : )
just one question, how do you deal with the IKs? to avoid additive animation screwing hands/legs positions
Just make sure you apply the IK’s after the additives. The order of operation in the graph actually matters a lot haha
@@PrismaticaDev thank you! I've actually tried it, but it seems the virtual bones positions which drives the IKs are calculated with taking into account the additive anims, so it didn't work for me. I guess then some different extra joints have to be used for IK, or values "before additive" have to be stored in the Ctrl rig or something
@@borovikmotion Ah yep gotcha gotcha. Yeah you'd probably need to cache the pose before the additives and then use the bones from that pose to drive the IK.
anway to do an additive that would work on any pose/animation? since i couldnt getting additives like that working for me, i tried doing a transform bone in the animbp using a sinwave to rotate the spine a few degrees...that didnt pan out either...
It depends how you set it up and which bones you want to affect. You could combine it with the Blend Per Bone so that it doesn't make the arms/hands do funky things
@@PrismaticaDev that was my first try :'( the arms did go crazy do with blend depth 1 or 0
How do you do the start walking or stop walking animations? like taking the impulse to walk or to stop walking
If you're doing start/stop animations, you can do it in a State Machine and have Idle -> Start Walking based on if the Movement Speed is greater than ~10, and then go from Start Walking -> Walking using Time Until Animation Ends > 0.1
@@PrismaticaDev i thought about that but i'm using 2d blendspaces, that would only work with 1d blendpace or not using them, or not? Don't you have a video on that?
One more question At 07:30 its a bit confusing. If the caracter is not moving, it basicly subtracts previous velocity (0) from tha actual velocity (also 0), which off course is 0. So it than devides 0 by the delta seconds. This gives me the UE log output "LogScript: Warning: Script Msg: Divide by zero: Divide_VectorFloat". Any way to fix that? or just dont care?
0 / DeltaSec shouldnt be a divide by zero, right? Would check those pins are in order.
@@stephenmontague6930 The default velocity is 0.
@@3dApe Sorry was talking about this a year ago - have no idea what it's about now, but thanks much anyway.
Where did all the Blueprints at 5:38 come from?? I can't find it anywhere.
Not 100% but think this is ALS (advanced locomotion system) from free Marketplace BP and/or his own modded setup.
hello, thank you for this tutorials, I see you are using Dragon IK, can you make a tutorial for that too?
How do i create on land event and set falling impact velocity in character blueprint?
I realize this is a month old, but incase you're still struggling, On Landed is a built in event that you can call just by right clicking the blueprint and typing on landed. To get the velocity, drag the character movement component into the blueprint, from it, Get Last Update Velocity, split that pin struct and promote the Z value to a variable
I struggled for a solid hour to get this right. I thought it was the LeanXY calculation that was wrong... turns out I hadn't set my animation blueprint in my CharacterBP. (I made a new one instead of using the default UE4 AnimBlueprint.)
is there a way to make different bones affected more or less with the additive animation?
You can set multiple branches an blends in the node, and also set Weights for each of them (the blend weights show up as a pin on the node)
@@PrismaticaDev allright thanks!
with the landing one I keep having the problem of my character's feet crossing and sinking into the ground... Anyone else had this?
Couldn't you use the "GetCurrentAcceleration" function from the CharacterMovementComponent instead?
Unfortunately the GetCurrentAcceleration doesn't return the actual acceleration of the Character but rather the acceleration force (so essentially the player's input) so you won't be able to get any Deceleration from it. They may have updated this in newer versions but I doubt it haha
@@PrismaticaDev good to know thanks!
huge
h o o o g e
Hope you found it useful :)
cool,
can you make a video on use cases of the control rig and power ik plugins
especially for humanoid characters ?
no spiders please ! :)
Hey Issam! I'll be covering Control Rig at some point when I get around to using it myself a bit more. As for PowerIK, I use a different plugin called DragonIK so I wouldn't be able to cover it in much depth. I'm sure there are some great videos in their documentation :)
@@PrismaticaDev thanks for considering doing it :)
I can't find any fix for this, but for some reason when I set my animation to additive, mesh space or local space, my character disappears and I have no clue how to fix:/
Hey hey! Make sure that the Reference pose that the additives are using isn’t an additive animation itself. Let me know if that helps :)
@@PrismaticaDev Yeah that seemed to work, but unfortunately now when I add the animations to the Ao blendspace the character becomes huge :/
i have a problem where different animations (with different montage slots) cancel each other, isnt they supposed to play on top of each other?
They have to be in a different Group, not just Slot. It's usually a good idea to have a Default group and an Additive group at least :)
@@PrismaticaDev so if i have montages that are actually transitions from a state to another, they need to play in a different group for them to play on top of my actions?
@@realsufferingisnotknown4052 I believe so, if they're explicitly Montages and not just Animations in a state machine etc
Awesome tutorial! How did you fix "those goddamn Access none errors"? They are so annoying...
Ah which ones in particular? I'm sure it can be figured out haha
@@PrismaticaDev Well, I'm trying to set Character variable (your is called "HumanBeing", as I can see) inside AnimBP, using CastToThirdPersonCharacter on BeginPlay, and it starts to generate a ton of errors like: "Error Blueprint Runtime Error: Accessed None trying to read property Character from function: 'ExecuteUbergraph_BP_Player' from node: Set Velocity in graph: EventGraph in object: BP_Player with description: Accessed None trying to read property Character". Actualy I already fixed that with calling CastToThirdperson by EventUpdateAnimation, but it's not looks like good decision for optimisation. I saw in the video that you have a whole branch in the blueprint called "Stops those goddamn Access None Errors", so maybe your solution is better?)))
@@dmitryshibanov9761 Ahhhh yep yep! So instead of on Begin Play, try it on Initialize. The Begin Play event gets called in a weird order etc
@@PrismaticaDev That's it! Thank you, man!)))
How the hell do I get the ALS session stuff for my project?! Great tutorial until that part.
how do i actually get that falling impact velocity? i can only get z velocity
It is the Z velocity, but you’ll want to Set a separate variable during the OnLanded event
@@PrismaticaDev what i did was save the z velocity while is falling
it works but break legs animation, iam not using ik
Im going to need help with the acceleration section. I their another video I need to see because all I'm getting is 0.00 0.00 0.00 in the print
Hmmm it should be working - it would be handy to see some screenshots so jump in our Discord and I'll be able to help troubleshoot it :)
@@PrismaticaDev I took a second attempt and found a workaround on my own by changing a few variables but thanks for offering some help
@@maxdashen How did you fix it?
@@zytron615 Had the same issue, for anyone still intrested I set the Character Velocity Vector before calculating the acceleration:
Player Referance -> Get Velocity -> Set Character Velocity Vector
The part of the logic to get the acceleration works perfect, if i connect a print screen to the final vector node it does exactly as the video, the blend space set up is ok too, but the apply additive node doesn´t work, i just double checked 1000 times and it´s like you showed and does nothing, it doesn´t matter if i connect the apply additive node at the start or at the end of the chain on the anim graph.
That's quite odd! Are the leaning Poses themselves set up to be additive?
@@PrismaticaDev It was the blend space, for some reason the one with 4 axis wasn´t working for me, i changed to a blend space 1D and finally worked, now the problem is the legs of the character move really weird, i think i don´t quite understad how to make the poses, but at least worked now. Thank you for the video, great work with the acceleration part.
@@newsonomamashine interesting. Did you set up a neutral pose correctly? ie. have a duplicate of the base pose but set it to additive. You're welcome to use the poses I used (link the the description)
@@PrismaticaDev I think yes, but made it in 3ds max, maybe thats the issue, and it has to be done inside unreal? I´ll keep experimenting, at the moment i repuposed the acceleration part, and set a rotation variable at the end and used it to rotate the root bone and spine when the character accelerates and looks very nice. Thanks again for your time.
The blend spaces says that i can't add additive animations, why?? :(
It might be that some of the animations are additive while others aren't? I'll investigate a bit further tomorrow :)
@@PrismaticaDev yes! That was it, you can't add some beign additives while others are not, thanks for these videos i love them!!
@@turomatulic Yes! Awesome to hear haha
@@PrismaticaDev i'm having serious trouble to understand the code to get the acceleration tho :(
3:40 how game know we do not want to move down arms here
Just so future viewers know: if you're packaging using this code, it'll fail because it has multiple spots where you divide by zero. (The default velocity is 0.)
If you have just copied everything from the Video you run into the issue of only getting Zero's when printing "Lean XY" variable, this is cause you haven't set the "Character Velocity Vector" variable. Just "Get Velocity" and connect it with "set Character Velocity Vector" to fix this.
Thanks!
Is it a rare content about animations. Your anim BP looks like Paragons animations :) No, it is better then Paragon. Ty
Haha thank you :) I hope you're enjoying the series!
I can't see anything, the text on your screen can't even be read
you look like outlander james freser
OkayI knew something was wrong in this video.
Now that I'm watching it second time I know why it felt like that....
YOur hair....WHy is your hair not on your shoulder...🤔🤔🤔
Hahahaha you're right! Maybe one day I'll cut my hair short and not say anything about it :P
@@PrismaticaDev Whhaaaat...?????
Noooooo...Plzzz don't.
your content is top notch but probably you need to settle for some proper editing setup. 25% of Bottom screen is literally taken away by that annoying tree scene.
There were a few videos where I was using my streaming setup by accident (I use an ultra wide monitor)
god, the UE animation tools are remarkably unintuitive
how about triming your nails
I’m a guitarist, so no thank you