Unreal Gingerbread Man - Player Control

• Unreal
• 3DGraphics

Introduction

Post Series

• Blender Assets
• Player Control
• Throw Projectiles
• Game Play
• HUD and UI

GitHub Source

Now that I have some assets, I’m going to start building a level. I’m starting with the Third Person template and going from there.

Updating the player character

I already imported the assets from Blender and with those came my animations and skeleton. The first thing I did was update the Skeletal Mesh Asset from the BP_ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint. This immediately, gives us control of a static gingerbread man. Now, however, I want the walk animation to work correctly.

Blendspace

To do this, I have to make a new Blendspace. When I started doing this, the standing and walking animations did not blend well. My issue was that the standing animation only had 1 key frame at the start. To make it blend better, I added another key frame at frame 30 so that the walking and standing animations had the same number of frames.
With in the Blendspace, I have the standing animation at 0,0 and the walking animation at 100,0. Since I’m using only the horizontal axis for now, I named the horizontal axis Speed to be used in the Animation Blueprint

Animation Blueprint

After the basic Blendspace, it is time to connect it up in the Animation Blueprint. In the AnimGraph I created a Speed variable and connected that to the standing/walking Blendspace. The result of that goes the output pose.
In the Event Graph, I use the Vector Length of the Pawn’s Velocity to tie into the speed of the animation.

Update the Character Class

I decided to make a copy of the default BP_ThirdPersonCharacter and the BP_ThirdPersonGameMode to customize with our Gingerbread man. I changed the Skeletal Mesh and the Anim Class to our new Gingerbread man versions.

And with that we have a basic animation tied to our player movement! The next thing to do is add some other game play elements.