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‫Hello and welcome.

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‫In this lecture, we're going to be introducing you to animations, how we can use the same animations

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‫on multiple different types of meshes using something called a skeleton.

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‫Let's dive in and see what all that's about.

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‫So as I said at the end of last lecture, this is looking weird without any sort of animation.

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‫So it's time to do a 101 on animations.

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‫The first thing to do is to see if we can find some animations in an asset pack.

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‫An easy way to do this is using the filters in the content browsers, which you've probably come across

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‫before.

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‫You can filter by all sorts of stuff here, and one of them is the all animation assets.

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‫And just going to go ahead and check that is it adds in all of the animation assets and you can see

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‫there is a bunch of stuff in here.

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‫We're particularly looking for the green ones because these are basic animation sequences, as they're

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‫called.

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‫We can go ahead and double click on one of those and you can see it automatically starts playing in

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‫the animation.

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‫Editor There's a lot going on here and the animation editor But the main thing to see is this timeline.

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‫That's the main difference.

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‫We've also got the asset details, which is a details pane.

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‫We've seen that sort of stuff before.

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‫There's also this stuff up at the top, right, which we're going to dive into in just a second.

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‫But the main thing to look out for is the fact it's looping through this timeline, which you can go

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‫ahead and grab pointer.

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‫Any keyframe in this timeline, if you like, you can play it forwards, you can play it backwards as

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‫your heart desires.

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‫You can step through frame by frame.

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‫You can also use this asset browser over in the bottom right, and that asset browser just allows you

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‫to search through all of the animations related to the skeleton.

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‫Now I just used the word you probably don't know a skeleton.

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‫What is it?

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‫Well, we're dealing with a skeletal mesh.

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‫Animations.

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‫What is that?

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‫That's a mesh that has, well, a skeleton.

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‫It's a mesh that you want to manipulate through a bunch of bones.

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‫So if we click up here in the top, right on the skeleton, you can see that this guy is in an A pose.

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‫He is a mesh, but then he's got a bunch of different bones here.

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‫We can select any one of these bones and we could do something like rotate it.

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‫And you can see that that one wasn't a particularly useful one to select.

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‫Maybe if I select with my mouse, the spine and I rotate the spine, you can see how that changes the

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‫rest of the mesh based on changing the spine.

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‫So great.

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‫That's kind of what a skeleton is, but that's not all.

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‫The skeleton kind of exists within the modeling program that was creating this mesh.

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‫But a skeleton Unreal has a slightly different function.

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‫So this skeleton asset here, its main function, is to tie together the meshes and animations.

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‫You can have multiple meshes, which all use the same skeleton asset in Unreal and set multiple animations

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‫that use the same skeleton.

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‫And because of that, we can share those animation assets between different meshes.

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‫The example here is the there are a couple of different Wraith meshes that I've included different skins

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‫on that Wraith mesh, and some of them have extra bits and bobs on the mesh, but they can all use the

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‫same animations because those animations are based on a skeleton that they all share.

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‫So that's why we have this a little UI setup widget in the top, right?

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‫We won't look at the blueprints just now.

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‫That's another asset that depends upon the skeleton, but not one that we're currently interested in.

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‫So the skeleton is what hangs all of this together, brings it all together.

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‫They all depend upon that same skeleton, which means that this dropdown allows us to choose between

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‫different meshes that use this skeleton.

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‫And the dropdown next to animation allows us to choose different animations that rely upon this same

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‫skeleton.

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‫So I can go and swap out to a different animation.

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‫I can swap out to a different mesh if I so choose.

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‫And you can see how that mesh is different.

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‫It's got different spiky bits.

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‫It's got different textures on it.

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‫So let's try out a challenge.

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‫Let's see if we can find a suitable running animation that we can play just on a continuous loop.

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‫At the moment, it'll look a little bit weird in the game.

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‫Less weird than a guy running around in an oppose.

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‫So look through the available animations using either the content browser or that browser.

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‫Inside the animations editor set one for the Wraith character.

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‫So go into our BP character that we've already created.

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‫Go and find the mesh and see if you can find a way of setting the animation.

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‫A little bit of a challenge there.

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‫I haven't shown you how to do it, but see if you can find the right property for setting an animation

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‫and then try swapping the Wraith character for a different mesh that has the same skeleton and see if

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‫that continues to work.

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‫Pause the video and have a go.

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‫Okay.

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‫Welcome back.

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‫So let's see.

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‫First of all, I need to find a run animation, so I'm going to do this via the asset browser.

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‫In this editor, you could do it by either searching it through the asset browser or doing the dropdown

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‫on the animations and searching there.

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‫I'm going to look for run and interestingly enough, doesn't come up with anything automatically there.

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‫So I'm going to search in the asset browser run not coming up.

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‫Let's see, maybe there's a walk.

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‫Let's see ability.

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‫Let's see this one.

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‫Maybe that's with the right mouse button held down.

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‫So he's aiming.

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‫That's probably a good one to start off with.

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‫We want the forward one so we're going to hit play forward.

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‫There's one for backwards left right.

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‫You can see how this stuff is going to start slotting together.

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‫Right now we're just doing a101 on skeletal animation.

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‫So let's use this ability are be walk forward and let's go and find ourselves.

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‫First of all, I'm going to cancel out this filter for animations, going to go and select our shooter

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‫character and open up that blueprint, go to the mesh in the components hierarchy and then select the

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‫in the details pane.

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‫Down in the mesh setting, we've got different skeletal meshes that we could swap out.

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‫And just to clarify, the skeletal meshes are the ones that have skeletons, the ones that are able

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‫to deform themselves with a skeleton, whereas static meshes are the ones that can't deform the cells

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‫usually used for rigid things like cars.

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‫So in the section above this we have animation.

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‫You can see this animation mode and animate class.

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‫So we'd have to do a drop down on the animation mode if you had figured that out.

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‫Don't worry if you didn't, but it was good to have a little look around.

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‫Then you can see we can use animation asset in here and we can swap that animation asset out for what

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‫was it, r, m b and then underscore walk, I believe there we go, walk forward.

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‫And that's going to be on looping.

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‫We're going to play it initially from the initial position of zero.

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‫Let's try that out.

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‫If we go to the viewport, you can see he's already doing that walking animation so I can go ahead and

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‫play and he's going to be walking in my game as well.

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‫And as long as I'm moving forward, that all looks hunky dory.

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‫But as soon as I start moving backwards and sideways, it all falls apart.

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‫We're going to fix that, don't worry.

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‫But for starters, we've figured out how to do this.

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‫The other thing we need to do is try with a different mesh.

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‫So we've done it with the basic Wraith mesh.

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‫There are other meshes in here, but they're not going to work because they're not based off the same

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‫skeleton as the animation.

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‫In fact, you can see it unselected the animation to play.

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‫So if we go back to our mesh and change that out for the Wraith skeletal mesh, then go to our anim

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‫and look for the walk again.

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‫Walk forward, then swap out a mesh for one that has a compatible skeleton such as the Luna ops skeleton.

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‫You can see it hasn't removed the animation because they share a skeleton, so they are compatible with

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‫one another.

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‫Awesome stuff.

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‫So now hopefully you understand a little bit more about what an animation is, how you're able to play

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‫it, and how it relates to skeletons and to skeletal meshes.

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‫Next video will be a brief interlude on how to fix a little collision bug that we you may have seen

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‫just glitching in the background there.

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‫So I'll see you there.