Time to bring the Artifact to life! Good animation can breathe character and vitality into any object. Many beginning animators start with the 12 Basic Principles of Animation originally written by Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas and I highly recommend checking them out. What we will be looking at for the Artifact is basic mechanical animation. Our pistons will move and our gear will rotate. However, I would encourage you to read up on the basics and apply what you've learned later on.
Just like we did earlier when we practiced with the cube, we are going to create some keyframes, but in this case, we will be moving the bones we created and not the pieces of the Artifact itself. The result will be a game asset that we can trigger to open within Unreal:
Manipulate the bones by using the Armature group in the Scene Outliner
Using Pose mode, let's move the Artifact into the closed position:
- To make things easier, select your Armature in the Scene Outliner and click on the little + icon. This will list all the current features tied to your Armature. Check out the Pose option. For each bone that we created, there is a little bone icon that we can click to select and deselect specific bones. This will be very handy as we move forward.
- Using the Scene Outliner, select each bone in turn and move them down until the Artifact is closed. This is best done from the Front view.
- With everything closed, it is time to record our first keyframe. With all the bones selected, press I to open the Insert Keyframe Menu and select the Location option. This will record all of the initial positions of each of the pieces of the Artifact in frame 1. In Unreal, this will be used as our reference pose or starting pose:
Animating the pistons extending
- Now move the time slider in the Timeline at the bottom of the screen to frame
10. Next, deselect the bone that controls the bottom section. Move the other bones up until the bottom section of the piston has reached full extension. Press I and record the new location of the bones:
Extend each section of the piston and then create a keyframe
- Move the time slider to frame
20and deselect the bone that controls the bottom layer of the piston. Move the remaining bones up until the middle layer of the piston is at full extension. Press I and record the new location of the bones:
The pistons at full extension
- Last move! Move the time slider to frame
30and deselect the bone that controls the middle layer of the piston. Move the remaining bones up until the top layer of the piston is at full extension. Press I and record the new location of the bones. - Slide the time slider back and forth across our keyframes and watch as the Artifact opens and closes. Make some monster noises as you do so.
- With our pistons working, let's add some rotation to the gear. Slide the time slider to frame
5and rotate the bone that controls it45degrees by pressing R, typing in45, and pressing Enter. Press I and select the Rotation option from the menu. Slide the time slider to frame10and repeat. Repeat this process until you have recorded new rotation keyframes for the gear bone and five frame intervals. - Slide the time slider back and forth over the whole animation and test how it looks.