Made a Lego building mechsnic

[near totem]

that building mechanic is looking good

[analog sand]

Thanks ❤️ Definitely need to modify it tho.

It kinda vibrates when it stops and I also need to make sure that there's no pieces floating when it pauses too

Was just a test tho I'm sure I can improve it

[copper beacon]

may i ask how this was implemented?

[analog sand]

Heya. So basically the animation itself was made in blender

So the pieces all start on the floor then jump to its final place which I determined by keyframing them all in the final place

Then it's exported as an Alembic (.ABC) file and brought into Unreal

then just blueprint stuff to trigger the animation

[copper beacon]

Oof sounds tedious

And why alembic

[analog sand]

idk tbh

I think when I was looking at doing it I contacted Thrill Da Will who made a lego game and he used it too I think

[copper beacon]

I’ve heard the same but I don’t see how it gives any benefit over fbx

I’m working on a new method myself which won’t look as good but will work without animation which should save a lot of time

[analog sand]

ig one of the benefits is that you can import it with it already being animated

Like it's got the animation and static mesh in one

rather than needing to make an anim montage or something

[copper beacon]

No this won’t have any animations or montages

[analog sand]

ABC file lets you bake the animation as part of the mesh basically

[copper beacon]

Oh ok so what it just auto plays the animations when it’s in unreal? Cause .fbx bakes the animation and puts it in the same file as the mesh and when u import anything into unreal it converts it to an unreal asset format so unless ur writing special code to keep it from converting to a uasset I see no diff between the two formats

[analog sand]

Well yes but to make that thing animate in Unreal (like actually in game), you'll have: the mesh, the animation file and possibly an anim montage right?

With ABC you just get the mesh file technically