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(Wes Bunn) Greetings everyone and welcome back. In the previous video, we imported all
of our assets and we took a moment to talk a little bit about Skeletons and how they
are used inside Unreal Engine 4. In this video before we start working with our assets, I
wanted to kind of give you a quick crash course introduction to Persona, which is Unreal's
animation editor. It is actually much more than that, so let's take a moment to kind
of run through the bells and whistles of Persona. There are a couple of different ways that
you can access Persona. Probably the most common is just by opening up specific assets
inside the Content Browser. So if I go over to the Filters tab here really quickly, and click
on it. Under Animation, opening up any of these types of assets inside the Content Browser
will open the Persona editor. So we have our Skeleton and Skeletal Mesh that we created.
We have any kind of animation sequences, which are our animations here in the Content Browser.
Opening up any of these will open up Persona. So let's actually open up Persona. I am going
to double-click and open the ThirdPersonIdle, but you can open any animation you want for
this video. So when I double-click and open that up, we are now looking at Persona and
more specifically, we are looking at the Animation tab of Persona. As you can see, there are
3 tabs. Currently we are on the Animation tab of Persona; this is where we are going
to be doing all of our modifications to any animations. If I click the Mesh tab, the Mesh
tab is where we can define any kind of Mesh details, where we can assign Materials and
change LOD Settings, apply cloth settings or any kind of other settings that we want to apply
to our Mesh. (Laughter) Looking at our Mesh, it looks like he has a dislocated left arm
here. I just noticed that, but we will fix that in a later video if you are seeing that
as well. You can also adjust Morph Targets, which our Character doesn't have any, but
if you had some you would do that in the Mesh tab of the Persona editor. Then finally, we
have the Skeleton tab. This lists our Skeleton and it has all of our bone names in hierarchy
data, so you can see that here. This is also where you could be doing any of your retargeting
is in the Skeleton tab as well, as I mentioned in the previous video. So let's take a second
really quickly to run through each of the windows on each of these tabs and kind of
give you an example of what they do. So along the top here, we have the Toolbar which is
pretty standard. It is probably not going to come into effect too much until we get
into Animation Blueprints. Before I forget, I should mention that there will actually
be a fourth tab up here and that only comes into play when you open an Animation Blueprint.
So you will see that in a later video, so I just wanted to mention that really quickly.
Back to the Skeleton tab here inside Persona. The Skeleton Tree is very useful. Probably
adding sockets is the most common thing you will do inside the Skeleton Tree here. So
for example if I go to the right hand here and I click on it (hand_r), you can see it
highlighted it in the viewport now. I can actually Right-click on this and I can
Add Socket. What that would allow me to do is I can now place something inside this socket
through Blueprint script. So a weapon, or sword, or anything I want the Character to
carry I can put inside this socket. You can see the Details panel has now been
populated with information about that socket such as the Name that I would need to reference,
the Location, etc. But inside the viewport here, I am currently in Rotation mode. If
I hit W, I can actually move this socket anywhere I want. So if I wanted to get it really precise
inside his hand, I can put it inside his hand there like so. Now in the viewport, I am actually
using WASD to fly around. It is very similar to the Level Editor viewport. I can press
F to frame-up on my selected object. I am currently selected to the socket here instead
of selecting the Skeleton. If I choose the Skeleton and I press F, I am framing up on the Skeleton.
I can also hold Alt and left drag to kind of rotate around. Let me actually delete that socket
because it is getting in my way and we are not going to use that. Let me delete that
really quickly. So if I hold F, I can frame-up on our Character here. Hold Alt to kind of
rotate around him now to get kind of a 360° view of him. As I mentioned, I can also use WASD
to kind of fly around as well. There are some other things inside the viewport here that
I am going to cover really quickly. We have the Timeline here at the bottom; it is going
to be on all of the tabs I believe. Yeah, it is. All of the tabs have that Timeline.
It is currently playing just looping our animation that we have selected; the idle (ThirdPersonIdle)
animation that is selected. We could pause that, reverse it, fast forward to the end,
etc. We can set it to looping or not looping; it is pretty straightforward. Along the top
here, we have some options. Starting in the upper left here if we click this drop down,
we have the Preview mode and we can, as the tooltip says, preview what is active on the current
window, lock current window, Camera Follow, follow the bound of the Mesh. Some of these settings,
to be honest, you may not be using. (Laughter) But depending on your situation, you can come
in here and change the background if you wanted to. There is also the Perspective, which is
similar to the Level Editor. You can change to a Top view, or a Front view, etc. Most of the
time you are going to be in Perspective mode. Then we have the view mode. Set it to Lit by
default, or Unlit, or we can go into Wireframe, and a bunch of different options here as well.
The Show option has a bunch of different options for information purposes, probably.
You could view any sockets that you have. Probably bones, if you want to see the bones of your Character.
You can see the bone names as well because that is kind of useful. Currently, we are displaying
some information. We could actually turn that off if we want under Display Info here. So
if I go down to Display Info, it is currently showing Basic information. You can turn that
off because we don't need that. There are settings for LODs and so forth, playback speed
of animation; a lot of this stuff we are just going to leave as default because we are not
going to be touching it. Then along the right, we have the same options that are presented
in the Level Viewport, which are the tools for switching between Translation, Rotation,
and Scale, Grid Snapping, Rotation Snapping, Camera Speed, etc. So it is all pretty straightforward.
Let's actually hop over to the Mesh tab really quickly and talk about it. As I mentioned,
this is where you do any kind of modifications to the Skeletal Mesh itself like defining
the Materials for it, the LOD Settings, applying APEX clothing, or any additional information
for the Skeletal Mesh. For the most part, we are going to be leaving this all as default.
But in a future video, we will update the Material so that he has a little bit better
Material than this. Then, we also have the Morph Target. I don't know if I mentioned
this or not in the quick overview, but I will do it again really quickly. (Laughter) This
is where you are going to be adjusting any kind of Morph Targets if your Character has
them; our Character does not. We are not going to be doing any of that in this video series,
but this is where you would come to do it is inside the Mesh tab of Persona. Then finally, we
have the Animation tab. This one is a little bit heftier. There is the Skeleton Tree again,
if you want to reference that. There is the Details panel. It is currently not populated,
but it will be populated once you start selecting different assets. Along the left here, we
have the Anim Asset Details. This is specific to the currently selected animation,
which brings us to the Asset Browser here. Currently we are looking at the ThirdPersonIdle animation,
but we can double-click any animation and it will start to play in the viewport.
You can see the run, you can see the walk, etc. Then in the center here, we are going
to get to this a little bit later in the video series as well. We can add some Notifies,
Curves, or Tracks. Now we are not going to be working with Curves or Tracks, but they
are used elsewhere inside different editors inside Unreal. They are very similar to the
other implementations of those in other editors. For Notifies, however, we are going to do that
a little bit later. In the intro video, we showed how our Character was running and as
he was running, he was creating a particle effect. So that is done with a notify. So we will go through
it really quickly, and again this will have its own separate video. Essentially what we could
do is say at this point in the animation, we can Right-click in here and Add Notify.
So we could play a footstep sound, if we wanted to PlaySound. We could PlayParticleEffect,
which we are doing later in this video series. You can add New Notify, which will give us
the Blueprint Event we can call off if we wanted to have some specific script fire off
at any point in an animation by assigning that Notify as well. So with that, I think
that is where we are going to pause. We are about 9 minutes in; that gave us a quick introduction
to Persona. In the next video, we are going to actually start working with our assets
I believe. No, actually in the next video we are going to set up our inputs; that will
be the first thing that we do. So that is pretty easy. So we will go ahead and do that;
we will set up our inputs that we are going to be using. So that is going to wrap up this video.
Again, this was just a quick introduction to Persona and the Animation tab, the Mesh tab,
and the Skeleton tab. Hopefully, we will see you in the next video and we will start setting
up our inputs. Thank you guys for tuning in.
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