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Customisation - Creating a New Base Pose
One of the most important parts of getting a custom weapon looking good with FPS Animation Blueprint is a tailor-made Base Pose. These are simple to create, and most of the system will adapt to it cleanly, with just a few exceptions (Such as reloads, or other animations that involve both hands handling the weapon like a bolt pull).
It’s recommended to create a pose in a program such as Blender or Maya as these give you much better tools and the greatest level of control, however there is a way to create a pose from within Unreal Engine with a little work if you prefer that.
A tutorial section for Blender is coming soon.
Creating a Pose In Engine
First, if you don’t have any animations yet for your weapon, then get another base pose that’s closest to what you want and duplicate it. You can skip ahead to ___
Otherwise, if you do have animations such as If your weapon is part of a pack that contains animations already, then follow the next section.
Creating a base Pose From an Animation Sequence
Find an animation that has a frame that’s closest to what you want for your base pose. This will typically be an Idle animation. Duplicate it and name it something appropriate. Note that this will not be the final pose file.
Now open your new animation sequence and remove all but that one frame. You can do this by right clicking on the timeline and selecting Remove from frame x to frame y. The spacing is off, so if you need to get more space on the timeline, you can drag the handles on the ends of the horizontal scroll bar to extend the visible area.
Posing Your Character Mesh
Now you can start posing your mesh. Move your camera to a convenient location. You can also adjust your camera speed using the slider in the top right of the viewport.
Now you can start posing your mesh. Move your camera to a convenient location. You can also adjust your camera speed using the slider in the top right of the viewport.
You may also want to show the full skeleton if you want to click on them directly in the viewport.
Time to start posing. Start by moving the hands into place. Remember that in this mode, all movement is done in FK, or Forward Kinematics, so moving the hand directly will not work. Instead, you will have to rotate the bones in the arm, just as UpperArm and lowerarm. (This may be different in UE5 if you have Full Body IK enabled on your mesh.)
It can be tricky to move the hands into just the right position, which is why it’s important to start from a pose or animation that is already close to what you want.
You can switch between local space and world space transform using the button between the transform tools and snapping options. I recommend rotating the fingers in local space only.
Ik_hand_gun must have a world rotation of 0,0,0 to ensure the gun is pointing straight ahead. You may move its position to where you want, however, then place the hands around it as needed.
Once you are happy with your pose, it’s time to fix the ik bones. These bones are necessary for the animation blueprint to function, so their positions are important. The ik_hand_gun bone should already be in place, you should only have to fix the ik_hand_l and ik_hand_r bones.
To do this, switch those and the hand_r and hand_l bone to world space transforms in the Details panel.
Copy the World location and Rotation of hand_r and paste it to ik_hand_r so they are perfectly matching, and do the same from hand_l to ik_hand_l.
There is an issue I’ve found, particularly with ik_hand_l, where the rotation doesn’t end up matching hand_l’s rotation perfectly. I’m unsure why this is the case, but if this happens to you, you will have to manually rotate the ik_hand bones until they match. You can more easily compare them with the translate tool gizmo visible.
(I’ve even seen a situation where repeatedly pasting the same rotation resulted in wildly different orientations every time. There seem to be some auto “correction” of the rotation value taking place, likely something to do with gimbal axes. I’m investigating this.)
Once you are done with that, select Create Asset > Create Animation > Current Pose from the menu bar. Choose an appropriate location and sequence name and click OK.
Check to make sure that your new Pose’s additive settings are set to No Additive in the Asset Details panel, just In case. You can now use this as your Base Pose in your weapon’s Data Asset.