Exploration into animation and 3d action combat in Unreal

I wanted to make an action game in Unreal, and wanted to use the oppertunity to learn more about animating. In the past, I was intimidated by having to work with 3d models as soon as animation was involved, and didn't think I'd be able to do anything that looked good. To tackle that concern head on, I started this project where I specifically wanted to animate my 3d models and use the animation to drive combat.

This project involved rigging up a 3d model and creating basic animations like walking and running and jumping. Then I tried to animate more involved motions like swinging a sword, blocking with a shield, or throwing punches. In the end, I animated individual strikes and wrote some C++ driving code to allow the strikes to be organized into combos. Blueprints then defined the combos as what strikes made them up, the timing one must press the attack button again to move to the next stage, and how much damage each stage did!

All in all I worked on everything from getting the model rigged to creating the animations to definining animation blueprints in Unreal for motion and defining animation montages for combos. On the programming side, I wrote a combo system that matched with an input system and learned how to write UE4 classes so that they could be extended by blueprints.

This project is not available on GitHub.