Unreal Engine Blueprints

Introduction

In this workshop we will be getting our sprites that we have made on piskel and import them into unreal engine to animate them and create a scene for the character to move, jump and shoot. We will be using blueprints to do this.

I firstly open up Unreal Engine and use the 2D side scroller option and set the scene in the right folder in which I can then import the sprites.

I have previously made the cycles I need for my character in another workshop where I saved out the sprites using a website called piskel.

I then made a new folder for the idle cycle and imported in the frames. I then selected them and turned them into a sprite which is the blue background ones. We then can make a flipbook by right click the selected sprites.

I can now watch the animate cycle with all the frames and is completed quickly.

I then worked on doing the same for the walk cycle and the jump cycle.

To get the character in the scene I selected the basic unreal engine character and went onto the panel on the right which allows you to edit the 2D character and I selected it again and gave me a drop down option to change to my ghost character instead.

Within this option I changed the size of my character as he was smaller than the collision around him. His arms do stick out a little but which means that they may go through walls but im not too bothered about that.

I noticed that when I closed the option tab down and saw the character within the world. the quality isn’t as good as it was when the sprites were on their own. I’m not sure what is causing that but means that its not as high quality.

We next started to work on the blueprints where we realised that when the character is not moving it is set to my ghost character but when it is over the value of 0 speed the character changes to the basic one, For this we just need to change it to our walk cycle and also for the none movement we need to set it to the idle cycle.

When saving the velocity changes it worked with how my character walks when moving and is idle when not moving.

I next added the jump and fall animation where I made the cycle of the jump and fall onto the same one so I separated it by selecting the jumping frames and placed them in a folder to make the flipbook and did the same for the fall.

For the jump and fall cycles I made sure to have the last frame be extra long so that when falling or jumping from any height it will be the same animation and wont change.

Now that I have the flipbook for the falling and jump animation I am able to add these into the movement.

This is how we were able to make the animation work. Its simple to understand where the movement of the character is below the Z axes it makes its going down so we use the fall animation. Then for the movement of greater then 0 for the Z axes we use the jump as its going up rather than down.

Conclusion

I found that this workshop was a lot less stressful then the pervious one on getting the character to move within unreal, I prefer to do it this way as its a bit simpler to understand and takes less time. Getting my own character to work within unreal was something I was excited to do, I think it turned out well as the character sprite can now walk and jump about. Because the character was made for pixel art purposes the quality of it isn’t the greatest within this workshop. I found that making the flipbooks of all the keyframes was easy to do and can see that its a quick way of making a animation work within unreal.