Last updated: 15th Jan, 2024
Contents:
An introduction to adding Core Animations to your already existing Actor.
Supports Unreal Engine Versions: 5.2, 5.3
Time to complete: 10 -15 minutes.
This is a follow on from previous User Guides, and assumes that you have already introduced and retargeted your Actor (Retargeting to an Actor (Quick Rigs approach)) OR Retargeting to an Actor (W/Face Tracking)). This is because we will use a duplicate of this Actor Blueprint to feature playback for the animations.
You can download your Core animation from https://radicalmotion.com/dashboard/projects/my-work, OR, for demo purposes you can use content from our Explore tab: https://radicalmotion.com/dashboard/explore.
Important!
It’s important to know that this is just ONE way to enable and have playback of Core animations on your Actors. Because in essence, you are taking a fbx animation, and retargeting it to play through an Actor.
You are free to explore, and encouraged to find your own creative solutions.
Import your Animation, and store it in a working Animations folder.
When selecting a Skeleton within the interface, it’s important to know if you are planning to have Face Tracking involved, or not.
For Face Tracking:
Set the Skeleton as RadicalCharacter_with_Face, and set the X rotation as 90.* This will ensure correct playback, and correct formatting.
It’s important to not check import Meshes during the import stages, as you will get a bounding box error.
Without Face Tracking:
Set the Skeleton as RadicalDefaultChar_S, and set the X rotation as 90.* This will ensure correct playback, and correct formatting.
Having lots of Animations?
If you are planning on having multiple animations, and cycling them out, you should create subfolders named after each Animation.
Make a duplicate of your Actor you wish to playback your animations, and bring them into your animations folder.
Presently, the animations DON’T play, nor can the Actor play the .fbx directly. Instead, we need to Bake the animation to the Actor’s Skeleton.