An early look at custom animation trees

To get our game to look and feel correct, we need to create custom animations for our characters. We also don't want to be constrained to the default UDK skeleton for our characters as this would mean that they couldn't look the way we want them to.

We have a fair understanding of how to import custom animations and how to make an animation set but the section I knew I needed to learn how to do was a custom animation tree which would allow us to use our own skeleton and animations.

I studied the 'AT_CH_Human' animation tree and played around with the sliders until I was happy that I understood how the node system worked.

I then went on to create a custom animation tree using a default skeletal mesh and default animations just to prove if my understanding was correct.

My custom anim tree with an idle animation and four movement animations

This now gives me a good understanding of how to plug in our own custom animations once we get to that stage, and is a major worry dealt with.