Quick Example
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I thought I would start off by showing you a quick example of what you can use the passing trigger feature for in Aximmetry. In this example I made a couple of different animations of this car in Unreal and I wanted to be able to trigger these animations in Aximmetry at any point in time. The cool thing is, with this feature you can. And once you have these animations and Aximmetry, you could still set up your own virtual cameras, your moves, everything. You can even trigger multiple animations at once. It's really cool. So let me show you how to set up passing trigger in a project. It's really simple.
Outline of Project
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So here is a scene that I've downloaded off the marketplace. It's a good old western scene. And for some reason I thought it'd be really cool for a 1980s hatchback to go through this scene. I know that doesn't make any sense. I guess I was thinking like Back to the Future or something. But anyway I've recorded a couple of different sequences of this 1980s Volkswagen going through the scene. If you look here, here is one recording. It's basically just turning this corner up here and coming around. And then I've got one doing what I would do if I was in the desert is donuts here. So we're just doing some donuts and some circles. Here. So those are the two different animations that I have recorded in Unreal. And now what we want to do is we want to be able to trigger those animations at any point in time in Aximmetry.
Basic Blueptint Setup
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So we have to do that in our Blueprint so I'm gonna go up here to my Level Blueprint. So the first thing I need to do is I need to create a couple of things here real quick. I'm gonna make a new variable and I'm gonna call this ‘Sequence 1’. Then I'm gonna go over here to the Variable Type and I'm going to type in ‘level sequence’. If you look down here something called a Level Sequence Actor. And I'm gonna select that, and I'm gonna hit Object Reference. As soon as I hit that I'm gonna hit Compile, and then I'm gonna go down here to our Default Value. You'll see Sequence 1 and I'm going to select CarAnimationStart. That was the first little animation I showed you guys. Is the VW coming down through the buildings in the old western town. So I'm going to select that. I'm gonna hit Compile and Save. Now I'm gonna drag this into the blueprint that I had to get Sequence 1. So now we go here I'm gonna type in ‘play’. If you look down here: Play Sequence Player. That's what we want. Play Sequence Player. So now that we have these selected, we are now going to type in ‘bind event to trigger’. And look. It's not showing up. We got to turn off this Contact Sensitive, and there it is: Bind Event to Trigger. So we're gonna put this right here.
Setting Up Custom Event
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Okay, we're now going to add Custom Event. We now have a custom event. Ok, now what we're gonna do is we're gonna add a target here and we're going to type in ‘Get Aximmetry Trigger’. So we're gonna Get Aximmetry Trigger and what we're gonna do is we know this is the first animation that we will want to trigger when we get to Aximmetry, so we're going to call this ‘Car 1’. Okay, so that's ‘Car 1’. We've got our trigger. We now need to take our event Begin Play and take this down to our Bind Event and then we need to take our custom event out of here and to Play. And we'll compile this real quick. So once we get into Aximmetry, once we trigger Car 1, it's going to start this custom event which is that car going down in between the two buildings. Now for fun I want to add a second animation. I want to include the second animation that I built. I want to have the ability to play that any time in Aximmetry. So basically we're gonna go back to our variables and we're going to do the exact same thing. So I'm gonna hit a new variable here. I'll type in ‘Sequence 2’. If you look over here I'm going to select... Again I've got to Compile. I gotta Compile it. So there we go. I've compiled it, so now I can come down here and select ‘CarAnimationCircle’. So I've selected ‘CarAnimationCircle’. Gonna compile again, then I'm gonna drag this into the blueprint. And there it is: ‘Get Sequence 2’. And now we're gonna do exactly the same thing that we did up here. So I'll just go ahead, just really quickly I'm gonna copy and I'm gonna paste this, and let's move this here, pull this to your target, move this here. We're gonna add another bind event to trigger. There it is. We're gonna add another custom event. Okay, and now we're going to add another Get Aximmetry Trigger, there it is. We're going to call this one ‘Car 2’. Okay, now we need to take our custom event off of that trigger and put that to Play. So there we go. Here is our blueprint to trigger these animations in Aximmetry. So I'm going to compile this. I'm going to hit save and then I'm gonna close out of this blueprint.
Cooking of unreal Scene
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And this tutorial has taken in consideration that you already know how to add the Aximmetry Camera blueprint into your Unreal scene. You know, and change your Custom Depth Stencil Paths, and all that. So this tutorial is taking consideration that you know all that stuff, so for now we're just going to go ahead and hit Cook Content for Windows. Ok, our cooking is complete. and now we're gonna go into Aximmetry.
Importing uproject into Aximmetry compound
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So I’ve already got a sample project set up. Everything in here, except for the Unreal project that we just cooked. If you look here, I've got my virtual camera and I've got a personal green screen. If you look here, this is something I just downloaded off Video Blocks. Here's our person over green. Go fullscreen, and so we'll be incorporating that into the scene as well. So I want to disconnect that, and I'm going to load my unreal project that we just cooked a second ago. And if you look down here, here are our two passing trigger pins: ‘Car 1’ and ‘Car 2’. If you look over here, there are the triggers for it, so let's go ahead and connect everything up here. And do our Cam Transform, our Cam Field of View. And I love that they've added this and to the new version, the Cam Focus Distance. it's so awesome just to have that already in here. You know you can do rack focusing on things, you know with a MIDI controller, or you know just a standard controller. It's really cool. So we're going to connect it into here. And if you look, there's our shot, so I'm gonna go ahead and go to our camera. I'm gonna move over here, go fullscreen.
Managing animation playback from Aximmetry
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So there's our shot, there's our talent, but the reason why we're all here we want to see how this passing trigger works. So now I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna click the Trigger, right now. If you look right down there, there's a car coming around the corner. And the cool thing is you're seeing everything here sort of you know raw. I haven't added any cine effects or post-processing effects, like you saw at the beginning. In the beginning I had a vignette, I had some colorization going on, I had some grain. And you know, cool thing is you can add all that stuff at any point in time. But the real reason why we are here is like, hey you know I want to see if we can have a couple animations at once. So I'm gonna move over here. If you look, I'm gonna move here and I am going to Trigger another animation. And look at that. So we've got two animations. And click this again, you'll see I got two animations going on at once. This car’s coming around the corner again, and we've got this guy here, which is super sweet. At any point in time we can move our camera, do other camera moves. We can start these animations at any point in time. But you'll see here, you know, as soon as the animation stops, it just sort of resets. And you'll see what it looks like here. So that animation has stopped. And you know if you ever want to reset it, you know, just hit Trigger animation again. So I have found, if you're making animations in Unreal, any disorder, you want to have some head and tails on those animations And sort of time those out, so you have enough to work with in Aximmetry.
And that was how you pass a trigger to Aximmetry
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But anyway, that's how you pass a trigger Aximmetry DE. I think it's a really cool feature, and this is just scratching the surface and I can't wait to see what we all do with this. Once again here is the open that I built and this was like, as I said, all real time for Aximmetry. If you have any questions, please feel free to visit the forums on aximmetry.com. And also there's a great Facebook group online called ‘Aximmetry and Unreal Engine’. It's a great group, and if you ever have any questions, somebody is always there to answer it. Thanks again for watching! This has been Jamie and I hope to talk to you soon.
