Unreal - First Post!!! and Creating an animation workflow in engine

Howdy! In the last week I started a new project where I wanted to build an fps combat system. I want to recreate my own version of of a particular Game I am fond of. PRAISE SIGMAR!!!

But in all seriousness, I love the characters, the environment, and most importantly - the COMBAT!!! Warhammer Vermintide proves that you can have rewarding and strategic combat without it being super complex. 

I want to re-create this game because I want to have the same combat but hopefully with my own characters, and try to switch the focus from being horde killing to being driven by more individual enemy combat, and maybe even more story driven. we'll see how far I get. 

Before I could get to implementing the combat specifics, I needed to simply SEE the attacks - meaning, building the animations of attacking. How would this work? and how would these animations play into our Game Mechanic?

I need to be strategic; in order for me to build up a game with a lot of novel weapons, I need to make a framework that with a little setup can adapt many new weapons. I needed a workflow.

To start, I need a way to make animations that is convenient. efficient, and caters to my lack of artistic ability. Fortunately the Unreal, king of Steam New Releases, has this lack of talent element covered!

I will simply use the Sequencer and Unreal's control rig to animate and then bake my result to an animation sequence asset. No hassle animating somewhere else when I can do it in one place. If I do make novel characters, all I have to do is make sure they can be auto-rigged to the Unreal format. There's a plugin for that - probably.

Right clicking on assets in the sequencer give us this option.
It will back the entire sequence - that's a good thing we can delete frames later.

Now that we have animations, we need to store them in a set for every weapon, most likely with a data struct to be used in a data table:

Here all animation sets can be stored. There are sub-structs used to store extra data about the animation for montages (which will be a second post)

Also the second post will be explaining important to format the animations for usage. For our attacks, defense, and other actions, we will convert the animations into montages and apply sections and Notifies. This is important for combat.

Here we add Sections (top arrow), notifies under that , and far right we set the order these will be played.

 

Now that we have prepped animations, we can just need to create a data table and set the values. We'll build a system that will then use these values and passes them into the respective spots.

So our animation workflow ends up like this:

1. get a character model skinned to the Unreal Manny Skeleton
2. Attach the character model to the Unreal control rig. Animate Combos in the sequencer.
3. Export the animation, cut up into desired pieces.
4. Turn Attack/Action animations into montages with Sections and Notifies.
5. Put into Data table.