Animation for Equipment

Here you will learn how you can animate the equipment templates

It is important to note you should not unlock the equipment. Unlocking was mentioned earlier and it turns the class of an asset to an entity. Meaning you will not be able to equip items if they are unlocked as they will no longer be classed as equipment.

When you choose which equipment you wish to edit and create your own animations on you'll be greeted with the animation screen with a ghosted out avatar for reference

Unlike other templates the equipment will allow you to create an animation as well as add child nodes on the skeleton panel. we cannot move the main equipment section however any child nodes from this one will allow for repositioning and animations To give an example on how we go about making animation for equipment I will be showing some of the basics here.

At a later date there will be other articles and videos showing more advance learning.

We are going to keep the original shield and create 3 child nodes coming off of the shield parent. We will start by doing a little colour edit to the shield. If you choose to, you can readjust the size and shape and even use the pivot tool to reposition where the shield is being held.

Now we work on the models that will be part of our animation. I create 3 different sized hearts all using the emissive colour. (you can toggle emissions on in the colour pallet where there's a star)

Once you have created your models move them over to their child nodes by click, dragging and dropping them onto their child node. make sure the timeline arrowhead is on 0 and position everything to where you want the start animation to begin.

For mine I am having everything hidden inside the shield.

We then go about creating our animation. Moving our arrowhead to the desired time and then repositioning the models to where we want them to appear. As with all animations make sure you have everything end on the final key frame, you can do this by moving the arrowhead to the very last frame of the animation and press the diamond icon in the corner.