How I build paired animations (Patreon)

I was asked earlier this week how I build the paired sex animations, so I thought I'd give a little overview of it.  This won't be super detailed, but I think I'll hit the important points!

So far as I can tell, Unreal Engine's sequencer is great for building cutscenes, but dynamic things like stealth kills or my sex scenes are not really what its set up for.    Unreal's montage animation system, however, is perfect for it!

To start, I do make the animations in one scene.  I then export each skeleton as a seperate animation into Unreal.  One important thing is to NOT move the root bone of the skeletons.  Its important that this remain at the origin so I can use it to line the animations up later.

The circles represent the root bones.  I leave these alone!

Once I've brought the animations into Unreal, I go about setting up montages.  This part is kinda tedious.   For each character I set up sections for each Stage of the animation.  Its import to note these stages all have the same names, and that they're set up at the same time in the timelines of all animations, so everything syncs correctly.

All animations have the same section names, this makes it easy to cycle the stages no matter what animation is playing.

When it comes time to actually play the animation, there is a little prep work before hand.  First I freeze the motion on both actors so nothing is moving around.  Then I turn off collision between them.  This will make sure they don't try to push apart.   In this case I also turn off the enemies collision with the camera so they don't make it go haywire.      

Since the animations have the same root position, I can then just set the player's position and rotation to match the enemies, and I know the animations will line up perfectly.

When the animations are complete, you basically just unfreeze everything and turn collision back on.

I have this set up and breakdown on the enemies blueprint, but you could put it on the player if you needed to.

Once that's all done, we can tell the montages to play.  This I put on the enemies blueprint.  When the player tells them to play the animations, they will actually start the animation for both themselves and the player.  This way every time I add an enemy, I don't need to go back and change anything in the player blueprint.  I just need to specify with the enemy which animations need to be played for everyone involved.

To control changing stages, I have a counter that keeps track of the current stage.  When its called to change the stage,   I simple change the stages on each montage to the next stage in line.  so long as each montage has the section names, it will change them.  I keep this on the player blueprint.

So this is an overview of how I line up and sync the various animations.  

If you have any questions, or need clarification,  please let me know!