So, for the past two weeks of work, I've been trying to take what free time I've had to learn the pipeline of porting from Blender to Unreal engine, and while it's gone smooth for the most part, I have run into a few obstacles.
Porting to the engine was as simple as dragging and dropping, and the character was imported as a mesh with the armature fully intact. But the animations obviously werent going to play without some internal logic to dictate when to activate, so I decided to watch a beginner tutorial for a game project, Dev Enabled's _Platformer Mini-Course. This helped me get a grip on the fundamentals of Unreal blueprints, and I ended up getting the model running around eventually!
To start, I assigned WASD to movement, using the vector of the camera direction as the basis for the world axis. This let the character move independent of the camera, giving pretty simple but effective control over walking.
Next, I followed the guide to set up a bunch of check that would update variables on the character's movement vector and whether or not he's falling. These would serve to tell the game when to play which animation.
Then, I set up a state machine with a simple toggle between idle and walking, with the variable of "Move Speed" dictating where on the animation blendspace the animation would be.
And here it is working in a very basic form! Looks pretty alright for such a simple setup, but...
There's a pretty big issue.
The inverse kinematics don't get ported from blender, which is how I animated the hands and feet. I think what I have to do is reparent the hands and feet to the arms and legs and re-create the IK in Unreal, but I feel like I might be missing something...
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to solve this this week, and I'll have to fix it over tuesday and wednesday this upcoming week. That's all for now, but hopefully it won't be a difficult fix!
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