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‫Hello and welcome.

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‫In this lecture, we are going to be learning how to connect up our animations to our gameplay and we're

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‫going to get the speed of our character hooked up to the blend space so that we can get this effect.

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‫Let's dive in and see how it's done.

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‫Okay.

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‫So we have got ourselves a blend space to integrate in to this AVP shooter character.

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‫First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and delete these two blends that we use as an example

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‫of how the animation blueprint anim graph works.

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‫And instead we're going to bring in from the asset browser in the bottom right, the blend space.

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‫So we've just created this BBS underscore locomotion.

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‫If you drag that in to your anim graph, you'll see it brings in this little green node here.

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‫And very much like the other blend nodes and things like that, we've got ourselves and an impose that

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‫we can drag into our output.

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‫And if I hit compile, you can see it's just in our default space and then you can see this little visualization

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‫which is quite handy of the little blend space and we could go ahead and change the values in here statically

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‫or we could input some variables into here.

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‫Well, we're probably going to want to do the latter, so I'm going to go ahead and delete the two variables

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‫we've got the left and the forward, because we know now that what we want is an angle which is going

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‫to be a float.

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‫So let's change that over to float and we're going to need a speed variable as well, which is also

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‫a float.

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‫And we can patch those two in the speed variable into the speed and the angle into the angle.

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‫And we'll go hit compile, look at our animate preview editor and just tweak the values.

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‫So first of all, the speed let's bring the speed up a little bit.

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‫Let's bring the speed up to about 30.

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‫See what happens.

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‫They go.

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‫He starts to walk by, bring it up to 70.

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‫He is getting closer to running.

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‫I bring it to 100.

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‫Well, not ten, 100.

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‫Then he's full on running and then we can change the angle.

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‫So at 90 degrees he's going 90 to the right, -90 is going mind going over to the left.

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‫We can go somewhere in between.

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‫So you can say 45 degrees.

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‫You can see he runs at a 45 degree angle and you can see the blend space where it is trying to pick

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‫in the blend space and what animations.

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‫It's sort of blending between it's blending between that forward animation and that 90 degrees right

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‫animation.

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‫So that's cool.

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‫We've got that going.

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‫But as we know, this needs to be driven by our actual gameplay and why do we do that anyway?

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‫Why don't we just have the animations drive our gameplay saying, you know, we need to be moving forward

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‫at such and such a pace?

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‫Well, the reason for not doing that, the reason for not using the animation to drive gameplay is that

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‫you often want your designer to be able to tweak all sorts of variables about your gameplay.

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‫You want them to be able to say, Okay, well, it doesn't feel right that this character is running

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‫at this speed.

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‫He needs to be running at this speed instead.

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‫And walking should be more at this speed.

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‫So you don't want your animations to constrain the design and game feel.

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‫You want the animations to come off the back of your game feel and make it look good.

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‫So during your design process, you might realize, actually we need a faster running animation and

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‫that's okay, but you want to be able to change up the game first to get there, rather than have to

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‫go and try and record a different running animation or find a different running animation and then realize

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‫that actually that didn't improve the feel of the game.

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‫That's why I want to keep these two things as separate as possible.

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‫There are times when things really must line up with the animations, but this is not one of them.

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‫So there are exceptions to every rule.

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‫So don't take this as a completely set in stone rule.

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‫You'll definitely see instances of games that drive some features from the animation, but generally

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‫speaking, we want to do it the other way around.

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‫We want to say, what's the speed of the character in the game?

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‫Let me go and update the speed of the animation rather than saying, What's the speed of the animation?

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‫Let me update the speed of the character in the game.

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‫Okay.

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‫With that said, how do we do this?

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‫Basically, the mechanics of it are that this blueprint, this animation blueprint, has an event graph

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‫like other blueprints do, which means that it can have things like a TIC event.

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‫If I go over in to the event graph and have a look, we have got a couple of event nodes in here that

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‫we can use to start from.

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‫We've got this blueprint update animation.

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‫If we come off of this every time it wants to update the animation, it's going to give us the execution

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‫node and allow us to go ahead and grab some state.

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‫So what we're going to do is every time this is called, we go and grab some state and notice here it's

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‫got this get spawn owner that's saying go ahead and get the pawn object.

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‫So let's remind ourselves the -- in this case is a character, character being a subclass of --

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‫and it would be this beep shooter character.

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‫Why would it be the beep shooter character?

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‫Well, let's see.

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‫Because this character, if we select the mesh, go to the viewport.

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‫It's currently running just a simple animation, but what we want to do is change the animation mode

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‫over to use animation blueprints and we want to use that app shooter character.

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‫So that is why this is the -- owner.

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‫It's using that animation blueprint.

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‫So the blueprint now has a pawn owner.

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‫And so what we want to do in this update function, just to summarize, is we want to grab the information

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‫from the pawn about its movement.

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‫We want to say, what's your speed?

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‫What's the angle of your movement?

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‫That's what we're going to calculate in this lecture.

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‫We're just going to do the speed because it's the simplest to do.

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‫The angle is going to require a little bit of manipulation with transforms, which we're going to look

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‫at in the next lecture.

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‫So the node that we're going to want here is to get the velocity of our pawn owner that gives us this

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‫vector here.

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‫And then off the back of that vector, we want to find its magnitude or its length so we can drag off

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‫of that vector search for the magnitude.

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‫And notice it's been clever here and I've searched for magnitude, but it's given me the function called

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‫vector length.

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‫So clearly magnitude they've clocked that it's a synonym for vector length.

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‫Why do we want to get the vector length rather than the vector itself?

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‫Because we're looking for a float, which is the speed vectors include the direction as well as the

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‫speed, which we're going to need to calculate the angle.

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‫But it isn't what we need to calculate the speed.

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‫So a little mini challenge for you here.

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‫Go ahead.

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‫There there isn't any other challenge in this lecture.

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‫Go ahead and set the speed using this vector length.

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‫And remember if you need any execution pin.

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‫We're trying to do this on the blueprint update animation.

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‫So pause the video and have a go.

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‫Okay, welcome back.

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‫So the speed is what we want to set.

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‫So if I drag that in to the blueprint and hit set speed, you can see we've got an execution pin that

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‫we need.

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‫We're going to get that from the Blueprint Update animation and we need the data pin, which is going

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‫to be the speed that comes from our vector length of getting our velocity.

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‫So it should be able to go ahead and save and compile that.

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‫You can see that's reset the speed to zero because now it's trying to set it from a pawn owner that

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‫is not really there.

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‫So what we're going to want to do is actually go ahead and play in the world and see what we've got.

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‫Okay, this is much better.

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‫We've got ourselves a pawn that's staying static on the ground, except for when I move, at which point

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‫it is giving me some speed.

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‫And if you use an analog input such as a controller, you can see that by changing the analog input

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‫that sort of changes the speed.

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‫We can change how fast this guy is moving.

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‫Now, obviously, there are two problems here.

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‫The first one being that if I move off an angle, it's just using the absolute speed.

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‫So it's not adjusting that angle in our blend space.

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‫And so the animation looks wrong.

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‫The other problem is that we're getting definitely some foot sliding here because the speed of our animation

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‫is not matching the speed of the character in our game.

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‫That's something that we will look at fixing in a following lecture as well.

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‫Great stuff.

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‫Hopefully you now understand how animations should hook up to gameplay using the animation blueprint

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‫and you should be able to go and apply that to your own game.

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‫See you in the next lecture where we will be hooking up those angles so that this movement looks a bit

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‫more natural.