Okay, the fact that we are busy hasn't changed since last month... But at least now I have some time to write about our latest Unreal 4 adventures.
We had to script a horseman. The horse mesh was given to us, complete with materials and animations. The challenge was putting an already heavily script-based human on top of the horse and syncing up their animations and movements.
The movement part was easy, we attached the human's pelvis to a socket on the horse's saddle. However the animations were a bit more tricky, and we still think the whole system could have been done better, but not sure how.
This was our solution:
This was our solution:
We united the horse and human skeletons in Blender, and animated the human on top of the horse that way. We then exported the unified skeleton, along with the animations, and assigned the horse to that skeleton. An animblueprint was built for the unified skeleton that contains IKs for putting the rein in the human's hands and the stirrup on his feet (If the IKs relied on any variables outside of their respective animblueprint, they lagged behind about one frame).
Now comes the hacky part: we stuck the human on top of the horse, retargeted the riding animations of the merged skeleton onto the human's skeleton, then built the same animblueprint for its skeleton too, sans the IKs. We rigged the whole thing so that the merged skeleton's BP sends signals to the human's BP to change anim states, so the changes occur at the same time and the animations stay in sync. Occasional errors still occur once in a blue moon (oh crap, today's a blue moon!), but we suspect those are framerate-related.
This system feels bloated and makes any later changes risky, however, we couldn't come up with anything more stable at the moment, and under our current pressure. Do you guys have ideas on how to make such a system more stable?
