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Hello,
I am still discovering new secrets in HE's animation system and I am pretty sure it can do most of the stuff we require, but those two things are still kept secret before me:

1. Is it possible to start an animation from specified time instead of the beginning? Like starting the playback from 10th frame for example.

2. Is it possible to move bones around proceduraly? I already discovered I can rotate bones via animation sequence's abilities but I found no way to move them around. An example might be given of a bow skinned to two bones - one for the wooden part and second for the string. I'd then attach first one to character's left hand and the second one to his right hand during the pull animation. I did this in UDK and it worked just fine, just can't discover the right way to do it here.

Thanks for clarification!

[HE-BENNETT]

Short answer: Nope.


For your first question, I know it can't be done, but I'm curious as to what you're trying to do that would require that.

For the second, the problem there is that is a lot of calculations to be doing all the time, especially compared to a pre-keyframed-and-exported animation.  Since their target ...mmmm genres, lets say, are so different, it really doesn't make sense to compare HeroEngine and UDK.  The ability to expose inverse kinematics to the engine so that it may adjust them (making feet line up properly with sloped ground) is a rather complex thing.

For the bow example, you could certainly achieve a similar affect with clever blending between different animations.  It's difficult to understand and get working, due to the complexity of authoring the necessary animations, but you might look into Additive animation sequences.

[Legacy]

Short answer: Nope.


For your first question, I know it can't be done, but I'm curious as to what you're trying to do that would require that.

Basically I have some melee fight animation that link nicely one to another when started from specific time. I can extract the latter portion from each of them I just hoped I could save myself the huge amount of work...

For the second, the problem there is that is a lot of calculations to be doing all the time, especially compared to a pre-keyframed-and-exported animation.  Since their target ...mmmm genres, lets say, are so different, it really doesn't make sense to compare HeroEngine and UDK.  The ability to expose inverse kinematics to the engine so that it may adjust them (making feet line up properly with sloped ground) is a rather complex thing.

For the bow example, you could certainly achieve a similar affect with clever blending between different animations.  It's difficult to understand and get working, due to the complexity of authoring the necessary animations, but you might look into Additive animation sequences.

There are really no calculations needed at all since positions of all bones are well known to the engine as one supplies them. It has nothing to do with inverse kinematics. It's the very same thing as the additional rotation already in the engine, just it uses the fourth row of the transformation matrix...

I think we will probably create several skeletons for our bows and animate those then skin the bows on them. Or maybe I'll end up doing the string as two procedural geometric objects scaled around one axis, will have to think about it more deeply.

Thanks for clarification

[HE-BENNETT]

Depends on how you rig it I suppose, exposing inverse kinematics is great for doing foot/ground positioning, allowing the engine to figure out how the knee would be rotated simply by stopping the foot at the right elevation. 

For a bow though, you can certainly have it setup with two bones, one attached to each hand and then export two poses as animations "bow not drawn" and "bow drawn".  Then you can use the blend sequence ability to blend between the two and an animation knob controlled by HSL to do the moving.

For the melee animations, just break them down into smaller parts.  If animation C plays leads well into animation A at frame X, split animation A into animations A and B at frame X.  Makes for a more complicated AAS file, but is simple for the engine to handle.