I decided to animate an object for a new game concept that I am currently working on. A chest. I created a simple box shape, from a for my chest, added some divisions and extruded the central part downward to give it a hollow. I then repeated the process for the lid. After this was complete I selected both, added divisions, and smoothed the mesh to give it a final shape.
For the ankh’s I used a cube, flattened it and resized the top. Then smoothed it, duplicated and resized the duplicate. Rotating it ninety degrees I positioned it at the apex of the first and duplicated it. Next I rotated the duplicate one hundred and eighty degrees and positioned that opposite the first. For the head I took a polygon pipe, flattened it to the same width of the first( achieved in the layer editor, y scale box). Selecting vertexes I selected the lower half of the circle and used the move tool to elongate its shape, resizing its width slightly with the scale tool. I repeated this process, moving downwards through the layers of vertexes until I had the desired shape. Some extra work was involved to achieve a fluid curve throughout, which I did by using the same method as in its creation but to a lesser, more controlled, degree. Once done I added some divisions and smoothed to give it a more manufactured appearance.
I then positioned the pointed end at the apex of the body, selected all four pieces, and combined them into one shape. Finally I duplicated the combined object and positioned them over the top of the lid of the chest.
To make the separate items easier to animate I placed each in a separate layer, base, lid, and ankh’s.
I found the animation process much easier than I had anticipated, it is very similar to Unreal’s. My aim was for the ankh’s to rotate ninety degrees and the lid to slide back after a short pause, I intend to add a particle in this pause later.
I found that I needed to set up the frame-rate to 30 fps( frames per second) as this is the usual speed. This is done in two places within the settings. Both are found in the Windows tab under Settings/Preferences, Preferences. Once there, the first can be found in the settings menu in the Working Units section, labelled Time. The second can be found in the Time Slider menu, in the Playback section, labelled Playback speed. Once this was done I moved onto the animation process itself.
The primary key for a simple animation is the ‘s’ key. This sets the scene in the viewport to a keyframe, found at the bottom of the viewport.
The red bar, playback cursor, at the beginning of the Time Slider is the current key-frame. The grey bar beneath the slider( labelled 1.25 & 70) is the ‘Range Slider and signifies the total length of the animation time.
The animation process is done by moving the playback cursor to the start then press ‘s’, set the scene (by moving the required objects to the desired location) then pressing ‘s’ again, moving the playback cursor to the next key-frame, setting the new scene and pressing ‘s'(*The movement of the playback cursor is the beginning of each scene and must be done before moving the objects or it will capture the prior scene set-up on the button press of ‘s’), with each new scene proceeding after the previous ‘s’ button press and ending with the next, remembering to move the playback cursor and setting the scene in between.
In my case I kept it simple. Choosing an overall play legnth of 70 frames I began by setting the chest to its default pose.
Before the lid opened I chose to turn the two ankh’s on in inward rotation, displaying an unlocking process( I aim to add a sound effect to reinforce this). This was run over a period of thirty frames. This was where I found my first animation problem. I rotated the ankh’s individually through the Layer Editor, y rotation. I inserted the numbers of the rotation I desired until both ankh’s faced the same direction. It was not until I had finished the entire process and played it back that I saw both ankh’s rotated in the same direction, one over two hundred and seventy degrees, the other over ninety. This is not what I wanted. I needed for them both to turn toward each other over the same ninety degrees. The solution was a simple one. I selected each ankh and rotated them individually, using the rotation tool and took note of their rotational axis aswell as the number of degrees rotation. It transpired that the rotation of one of the ankh’s was indeed ninety degrees but the other was its inverse value, – ninety degrees. With this realisation in mind I proceeded to recreate my animation correctly.
The next step was to have a pause, in which I could insert a small particle animation later, simulating a release of gas. This was over ten frames. Lastly I needed to animate the chest opening. To do this I needed to select the lid along with the ankh’s. I then slid the lid back with the Move tool and took the final frame.
Playback proved the correct sequence was achieved.
I will post a full animation as soon as I can.
My Blueprint Factory 