V.0.0.2 Devlog - LH

"Motion Matching / Blend Spaces and State Machines"

Author: Liam Hans

Posted on: 06/21/24

THE PROBLEM

One of the main problems I faced this week was tackling the animation system that we set up for our player. Because our game is a melee combat-focused game, animations and the overall feel of character movement is rather important. That being said, I wanted to make our animation system feel as smooth and responsive as I could. With this hope in mind, I thought that Unreal's recently released Motion Matching system would be just the tool I needed. So, I embarked on the mission of animating our character using the Motion Matching system. This was a major headache, as there is little to no advice on how to create a proper animation system using this new tool (not surprising as it was a rather new tool, but I was hopeful). All I could find was tutorials for setting up simple locomotion animations, which was easy, but when it came to action animations that are triggered by input, I had no such luck. Thus, I had a big problem. Below you can see an example of how our character looked animating via Motion Matching. Note that not all directions of movement have an animation mapped to them in this case as it was unfinished, so certain directions look worse than others. The animations feel smooth enough, but to me there was always something off about it. So, with the combination of action animations being a problem, and our character not exactly animating the way I wanted him to, I had to make a tough call.

THE SOLUTION

The tough call: scrap all the progress I made during week 1 of our game regarding animation, and rebuild our animation system from scratch. At first, I dreaded this decision, but in hindsight I absolutely think it was the right call. The thing about Motion Matching is that it's incredibly impressive, but lacks the modularity and manual control that the old animation system (via blend spaces, state machines, slots, etc.) has. I could not find any solutions online to combine both Motion Matching and Unreal's old animation practices, so, being an inexperienced Unreal developer and game developer in general, I had to revert to what I knew, or at least what I knew better. That's not to say that there is no solution to combine Motion Matching and action animations, because I'm almost certain that there is. I just unfortunately could not find any, and had to make the decision that was best for my team's timeline. In the end, I am happy that I did, as I learned a lot about Unreal's old animation system (I say old, but really it's still very much in practice), and am able to customize much more than I could in the past. I still have tons to learn about creating an entire animation system for a character that actually "feels good", but I think I am getting much closer. Below you can watch a video of how our character looks now with all of his locomotion animations and action animations. Although the transition from one animation to another is a touch more "snappy" than it is for Motion Matching, I'm quite happy with where we're at for now.