Posted October 18, 2025 by Anthony Balladares
Author: Anthony Balladares
Published: 10/17/2025
For this week I was mainly focused on creating the Player Mech. This all went smooth, until I hit a road bump with trying to get an animation for the mech. First I thought just putting the same animation we used for the player would work, but this turned out to not be true, First of all, since the mech has different joints from the player, everything just looked wrong. The mech was stuck looking compressed and he was flipped upside down, due to the animation. So my second choice was to create an animation from scratch, This would turn out to become a big challenge, especially with someone who has barely any experience with creating custom animations.
With the help of this video I would begin my journey to create custom animations. But, this would still end up to be challenging, and would just be too time consuming to create every animation for the mech from scratch, so I began to do more research on how I could use the animations that we already have for the mech. This took some time until I found a great tutorial.
This is the video that taught me how to save a ton of time with animations. This taught me how to work with IK_Rigs and IK_Retargeting, which, for a quick summary, is how one would retarget the bones in one skeletal mesh and connect it to match the actions of another skeletal mesh. While this method was quicker, it was still time consuming, since I had to manually go over each bone and connect it to match the other model's bone manually. But, this problem was all solved when my teammate, Halstead, told me that I could simply just go to the animation blueprint we were using and have Unreal do the retargeting for me. This was mind-blowing, as I just spent hours trying to figure this out, just for it to be done in less than a second with a simple click of a button. But, all this time did not go to waste, as I did learn a lot on animating with Unreal.