Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial - Animation Montages / Slot Groups

[@proletarianx_art]

Finally a clear and detailed explanation of animation slots. Much appreciated!

[@davidkopnicky6741]

This is the only tutorial I found properly explaining multiple slots, everyone else just uses one slot. Well done man, thank you!

[@bartercreative]

I have been trying to add a dash to my character on and off for about a month now, and have like.. 15 tutorials saved regarding animation montages / slot groups / anim graph, everything. this is the first tutorial I have watched that I feel like was actually clear on how to go from start to finish. Thank you!

[@AKA_LIRIX]

I been looking for a long time to a tutorial that explains all of that, it suddenly become a lot easier to use those, thanks a lot.

[@Micro230]

Thank you for this. Animations for my game have been a huge pain to learn, your explanation is extremely helpful, will definitely be looking back at this video in the future

[@Quiet.string]

this is the best anim montage tutorial in youtube. thanks a lot!

[@LuciousKage]

Just wanted to say, GREAT tutor! You explain very well!!! compared to others, Please keep making tutorials about Anim BP. cant wait for more.

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

Thank you so much!! Will be starting a section on animation work in unreal soon as a standalone series - covering ABP, blending, procedural animation and control rigs :)

[@LuciousKage]

@@ArtofficialEntertainment well ill be here subscribed waiting

[@TheTimeDome]

Somehow this helped me solve "playing montage problem" as it reminded me that I need to have a Default Slot in my Anim Blueprint in Charater Blueprint/ Mesh Conmponent for Montages to work XD. Thanks!

[@darabjakab]

Really good stuff, best explanation I have come to across so far!

[@gregfrllo]

This is so good and easy to understand, thank you!

[@BloakoxD]

That's extremely helpful! Thank you, good sir.

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

Glad it helped!

[@GeneralNovais]

I had been looking for an understanding on this subject for a long time. You did very well in your explanations. Congratulations on the video. Do you have any videos about Additive Animations?

[@zimmyjim]

In the montage, just drag the animation out, then back into the slot to get rid of the "a" pose. Good informative video..

[@1___________________1-n6i]

One of my anim blueprints didn't need the DefaultSlot for Montage to work, but after swapping the character for the one I wanted I had to use it. Strange.

[@MrBontA-cs1ue]

lovely tutorial, thankyou

[@MalachiDraven]

Great video! How can I cancel/interrupt a montage with movement? For example, reloading a gun requires the player to stand still, so if they move during that Reload montage it will cancel the reloading and return to the Locomotion.

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

That would be through notifies. They are basically event triggers you can place inside of an animation to call back to code. In short you would use one (there are tons of different ways you could go about it so I'll let you look into these and decide what works best for your game), to call back to an execution that checks movement and if moving calls to a reload cancel.

[@anthonygrosso1385]

This was super helpful. Thank you!

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

You're so welcome!

[@MrMeat570]

For me when i click compile it says the anim montage node needs a target what do i do?

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

If you are using the node "play montage" you need to hook a reference to your mesh into the part that says "In Skeletal Component". Using the simple "Play Anim Montage" does not require this but also does not have the extra outputs for smooth control.

[@MrMeat570]

@@ArtofficialEntertainment OK, thx, it worked

[@MonopolyisCool]

Is there a way to keep lets say an attack animation as its original self when your character has no movement but when you run/jump it blends? The reason I ask is because this method seems to keep my idle leg movement, but I want it to keep the animation's original movement while standing still then when my character moves it blends while running/jumping.

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

There's a couple of ways to achieve this. The first way is just to branch out with 2 montage nodes for true and false. Make the condition if the characters velocity - vector XY is greater than some smallish value. Then one montage with upper body movement, and one with default slot movement. This way if moving will play the blended animation. If standing still plays the whole animation. Now this works if the animations line up with things like foot / spine rotation. If not then you would want to look into "Additive Animations" which most of of the time you would use both depending on the animation type. Jumping you would want to use additive, attack just separate out into 2 montages and choose which based off the velocity.

[@MonopolyisCool]

@@ArtofficialEntertainment Awesome! I'll go give this a try thank you for the Help! Really appreciate it!

[@Restart-Gaming]

Hey you might know I am making a survival game will have inventory and hot bar but what the character to use a bow a shotgun a axe a fishing pole etc do i add the montage to the item like axe etc or do i need many of what you are showing? hope its not to confusing no other way to say it.

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

If I'm understanding correctly you just want to have an array of items that the character can use? If so then then no you don't need a montage for each item. Montages are used as Tigger based event animations but the driving force of most static objects comes from the character. Now if you have animations for those items (slide animation on a pistol for example) you only need to have it added to the character (via character BP or pick up system) and use a play animation node and link the target point to a reference of the mesh you want to animate . E.G. on a pistol firing event, if it's a pickup able item, use get actor of class, select the pistol BP, then add a play animation node and connec the output of the get actor of class to the target source of play animation. If it's on the BP you can just drag in an instance vs casting or use a custom event inside of the pistol BP and cast to that from the get actor of class. Hope all that makes sense if not feel free to message me directly :)

[@Darkss2]

Thanks!

[@ndiritu_nyakiago]

saved me, thanks so much!

[@guillermo3dcode]

hi ! Nice video, i was wondering, you know if I can Attach an object to a socket just using the notifys? Im trying to pull a arrow from the quiver but it dosent work using the notifys in the montage

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

Hey thanks for your comment!! So to draw an arrow from a quiver the easiest way is to have a quiver as a static mesh and an arrow thats seperate but of the same style. Then add the seperate arrow to the character using a socket on the hand, set up a the character draw and the bow draw animations chain, and when the character pulls the arrow add the notify then and use a custom event to call back to the BP and just set visability instead of trying to attach each time to the character. Using visiability toggles are generally a nice but cheap way to create certain visiual looks without increasing preformance as adding a new version of a mesh each time you draw an arrow would be more costly than just changing the meshs visability during and after the draw. As then you can just set a projectile to fire after the visability toggles off creating two seperate actions that blend to make the arrow come from the quiver, draw on the bow, and then fire. Hope this helps. If not i will be actually going over different weapons and how to apply them to your game very soon (Within the next week) so ill make sure to add the archery one to the earlier videos :)

[@guillermo3dcode]

@@ArtofficialEntertainment Wow !! Thanks a lot for your help !! I will follow your work :D

[@PaleHorseMediaWA]

I thought the blend depth is how many bones in the chain are affected (starting with the named bone). So if the named bone is Neck01 and the blend depth is 0, then only the Neck01 bone is affected by the blend weight and the rest of the bones react normally as part of the chain, driven by Neck01's animation (weighted blend). If the named bone is Neck01 and you set the blend depth to 1, then the Neck01 bone and the next bone in the chain are both affected at the blend weight, with the rest of the bones in the chain are driven as normal, but without the blending. I could be wrong since I'm fairly new to Unreal (coming from 10 years in Unity). Anyway, nice tutorial - much more useful than the average tutorials out there. Subbed :)

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

So what you are referring to is chain length. Something very common in animation as im sure youre aware. However the blend depth doesnt operate as simply as a chain length setting would in something like an IK set up. The blend depth seems to operate how the two animations blend and not necessarily on what bones are being driven. This is why i create slot groups to control the sections. When you set up the bone section for the layered blend all you are telling the program is where to start and stop the blending of the two. a blend depth of 5 is making so the two animation blend equally while a lower or higher value will blend one animation more than the other.

[@trapsinceo6511]

I'm trying to do this but in sequencer to make videos, is it possible?

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

Absolutely is possible! Sadly I don't have any videos coming out soon about sequencer but the gist is this - in sequencer you can set up Tigger keyframes to call custom events, these custom events can then be made to run a montage from the character blueprint. Bearded games has a wonderful tutorial I pulled up that might give you better understanding. Fast-forward to about 8mins into the video and he goes over adding custom events to your sequencer:) kzbin.info/www/bejne/a5urmXyXnZ17bbc

[@trapsinceo6511]

@@ArtofficialEntertainment Thanks a lot man I'll check it out! I'm still new to this, about to get a mocap suit so I wont have to worry about alot of this stuff

[@dangerousmindgames]

So slots are for isolating a body part to play an anim montage? Is that all they're for?

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

Primarily yeah. Allows for blending montages / animation states (upper and lower, using a single arm, removing / extracting head motions ECT)

[@gendalfgray7889]

Really good tutorial, i wish i find it earlier.

[@loudd]

So how do you make an animation montage? How do I get my character to look like they are jumping? In order to make that happen I need a montage but I still don't know how to make a montage. It looked like you just had a montage just up and loaded ready to go. How do I make that? It seems like everyone just has assets they import and it all works perfectly. I must be missing something.

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

To make a montage its as simple as right-clicking on the anim sequence you want to use in the content browser - The go to create in the pop up window > Create Anim Montage. But theres a visual example at 1:53 in this video - I only had animation sequences at the start of this video and turned them into montages. As far as jumping sequences thats usually made in the anim graph - The reason is that you can use separated animation sections (start, loop, end) that usually come with most animation packs that have jump sequences, for falling as well as jumping and can smooth out how the animations transition using blending. Not a must but just a recommendation.

[@3n19m]

hi, how to add the locomotion node? thank you

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

That's just a statemachine named locomotion. If you are unfamiliar with the creation of animation blueprints and state machines I have a video here that will give you the basics kzbin.info/www/bejne/lanHc62Fg61ri7M

[@lesha1955]

Thanks

[@timlindberg3833]

Return value returns lenght of montage if success and 0f if it failed to play.

[@HoracioSchvemler]

Muy bueno!!

[@恥ずかしさをお届け]

thank you!!! I solve problem.

[@noname_2108]

So you just didn’t explain anything and how it works in depth you just did some simple logic like “do like this and you will be ok”. That’s not enough. Why does the default slot uses input pose? What is the output pose? Is this feature is created just for like sorting things?

[@ArtofficialEntertainment]

Everything uses an input and output pose in the ABP.... There are other connectors you can use but these are not only advanced they are unique to specific systems inside ABP and have nothing to do with slot groups. What I explained and demonstrated is that they can be used for separating areas on a character rig in which a montage plays.... I am sorry if you feel I didn't explain certain things but the subject matter in which the video was made for has all the pertaining info about it. You use slot groups and slot groups selection to choose how a montage plays. If you have a request for a video that's fine. I am always open to requests however please bare in mind that these videos I make for free out of my own time, and try to keep the information to the subject matter to ensure concise videos as well as ensuring I don't overdo my own time limits.