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(Wes Bunn) Hello once again everyone; welcome back. So in the previous video, we set up
our Blend Space which allows our Character to blend between our idle, our walk, and our
run animations. In this video, we are actually going to take a quick look at Animation Blueprints
before we start actually working with them. I promise this video will be really short.
So let's continue and get a quick overview of Animation Blueprints and we shall continue
with our project. So the first thing we are going to do is let's go ahead and close the
Blend Space if you still have it up. I realized that we did not save it yet in the previous
video, so go ahead and make sure that you save all your assets inside the Content Browser
here. So click Save All and click Save Selected. If you have any other things that you need
to save too, go ahead and save those. To create our Animation Blueprint, we are actually going
to hop over to the Character folder. So inside the Character folder, I am going to Right-click
and scroll up to Animation. Go ahead and select the third one down, Animation Blueprint. That
is going to give us a new dialogue box here. Now, it is going to ask us for a Parent Class
to use for the purposes of this Animation Blueprint. There are a few different options
here. 99.9% of the time, you are going to want to use the AnimInstance unless you are
working with vehicles, or tutorials, etc. But for us, AnimInstance is fine. Then, it
is asking us to choose a Skeleton. We only have the one, so we are going to go ahead
and select that. Then, we are going to hit OK. Now this is going to create the asset
for us inside the Content Browser and we are going to rename it actually. Let's rename
it to "CharacterAnimBP", like so. Let's quickly just Save All again to get rid of that asterisk.
Okay. Let's go ahead and Double-click on it to open it up. That will open the Animation
Blueprint inside Persona and it will also give us that fourth tab that we talked about
earlier on in the series, the Graph tab. So now we have the Graph tab inside Persona,
which is for Animation Blueprints. We have our Animation tab, we have our Mesh tab, and
our Skeleton tab. So let's hop back to the Graph tab really quickly. I will give you
a quick introduction to the various windows and components of Animation Blueprints. Probably
first and foremost is this large area here for the graph. If you are familiar with Blueprints
at all or if you have worked with Blueprints, this should look vaguely similar to you because
the systems are very much married together. So if you have worked with Blueprints, you
should feel right at home in here. There are some subtle changes that we will talk about
as we get deeper into the system. But I do want to mention that we have two tabs inside
the graph here: we have the Anim Graph and the Event Graph. Now notice we don't have a
Construction Script like we do in Blueprints; we only have the Event Graph and the Anim Graph.
That is probably the biggest difference between this and Blueprints is that third tab for
the Construction Script doesn't apply here. We will talk about what these do in a moment
here. Let me get through the rest of the interface here.
In the upper left here, we have a Viewport which kind of gives us an idea of what our
Character is doing, the animations that they are playing as we start to make updates inside
the graph here. Below that, we have the Anim Preview Editor.
What this will allow us to do is for any variables that we have in here, for instance we are
going to have a speed setting in here which determines how fast our Character is moving
and whether he is walking, running, or idling, we can adjust that value here and kind of
see how it plays out on our Character in the viewport up here. There are some other settings
that you can toggle on and off such as jumping, or crouching, or reloading if you had that
in your game, but we will get to those a little bit later.
In the center bottom down here we have the My Blueprint tab, which is very similar to
the My Blueprint tab inside of the regular Blueprint Editor. But then we also have the
Asset Browser tab and that contains all of our animations, which we can just drag and
drop into our Anim Graph here to populate it with animations for our Character to use.
On the bottom on the far right here, we have the Details panel. The tab is actually hidden,
but I can click this little check mark here to expose the tab. You can also hide it by
Right-clicking on it and choosing Hide Tab. The Details panel allows us to change some
of the properties and settings of some of our variables or nodes that we place inside of our graph
here. So hopping back up to the Anim Graph, I wanted
to explain the two differences for this really quickly before we close out this video.
First of all, let's talk about the Event Graph and what it does. Now you see there are already
some nodes here that are kind of grayed out; these are probably two of the more common
nodes that you will use in this graph, so they are here by default to help get you started.
Then, we can Right-click to create new nodes. Now, the Event Graph is where most of our updating
is going to be occurring. Essentially what the Event Graph does is it processes incoming
data. So that Speed variable we talked about, this is where the updating of that variable
would occur is inside this graph. We would get information from the PlayerCharacter to
determine how they are moving, if they are standing still, etc. and then take that into
the Event Graph and update another variable, which we will call Speed for the sake of
clarity, that will drive the animations that our Character is going to be using. Those
animations are actually going to be handled on the Anim Graph. The Anim Graph is basically
used for poses. When I say pose, I mean the actual pose that your Character is doing from
moment to moment, frame to frame during gameplay. That is all handled inside the Anim Graph.
This is actually giving me a good opportunity to set up the next video because this is where
you do your State Machines is inside the Anim Graph. With that, let's actually pause here because
I want to separate those two topics out. In the next video, we are going to dive into
State Machines and give you an overview of what State Machines are if you are not familiar
with them before we start editing our State Machine. That will make things easier for
us once we start to do so. So we are about 6.5 minutes in; let's go ahead and wrap this
video up. This was an introduction to Animation Blueprints. In the next video, we will start
talking about State Machines and how we will put together our own State Machine.
Thank you for watching and we will see you in the next video.
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