It will come easier if you focus on a specific area. I kind of jump around a lot, mostly because I don't make enough to actually pay my bills without some extra income so I have to do work for this guy on the side building a game for him. At the same time it forces me to explore other things but in this line of work it don't really pay to be a jack of all trades. People want someone who's an expert at something in particular. I still have a ways to go before I can make that claim, it's an endless struggle but I post what I learn and this stuff didn't come easy. The stuff I talk about in this series eluded me for like 2 years.

@@unrealdevop wow that's amazing man. Thank you so much for sharing what you know, it's so helpful. Best of luck to you

@@unrealdevop id be willing to pay top dollar for some tutoring if you were open to it as well. Let me know if you're interested, totally fine if not but I could pay 50$+ an hour if you were interested, I'm sure you are busy though but if you are interested it would be mostly questions around animation and ALS in unreal engine, just helping me get up to speed so I can do my own. Just wanted to offer as we could help each other out. Either way, thanks again!

@@RictorScale You can contact me on the Discord my name on there is J0hnC0nn0r

You have to think of it differently in order to properly understand it, I have a firmer grasp on this then I did at the time i did these videos. You have Two Animations, Each Animation is Whole in it's Entirety from head to foot. We may choose to replace this with something else, perhaps we play a different animation on the Upperbody. If your using IK Bones, the IK Bones are considered part of the Lower Body, so if I use IK with the IK_Bones as their Target/Effector then I am telling the hands to go where they actually are on the Entire Animation that is being played only on the Lower Body. Because Those IK Bones will be where the hands would have been on the Lower Body. If however I get the IK Bones from the Entire Animation Playing on the Upperbody and use them as the Target, the hands will stay where they are because they are already there. This of course assumes that the IK Bones were constrained to follow the hands and maintain their rotation during that animation by the Author of that animation. Now this is where people get confused: Say you decide to apply a breathing animation over the top of all that after layering it (The Split Lower/Upperbody Animation or just a single animation) You could simply leave the IK Bones out or use a Layered Blend Per Bone to Only Apply the Breathing on everything but those IK Bones and use IK to move the hands to them.....the problem is that those IK Bones are Static....they don't have that breathing Applied to them.... So How do we fix this? Well we can use Virtual Bones, now were talking about the Nuances of Additives. It's difficult for most people to wrap their head around this because preconceived notions tend to get in the way and people don't normally think of motion in this way.

@@unrealdevop thank you for the detailed reply! that really helps crystalize in my mind why we want to use virtual bones But i still don't quite understand why the virtual bones don't have the issue of the left hand detatching from the weapon in your example here The left hand get detached because its blending two animations that together means that the relative positions and rotation of the hands are no longer aligned why do the virtual bones, that perfectly follow the hands, not also get misaligned?

@@Crovea In the example I showed I was offsetting the Shoulder using a slider, that does not effect the virtual bones because the virtual bones are offset by how offset the hands are from each other per-frame of the animation. If I were additively applying an offset to the arms, it would offset the virtual bones if the virtual bones were part of that part of the body the additive was applied too. Therefore when making Additive Animations you have to keep that in mind, if you look at the ALS_N_SecondaryMotion animation (The Breathing) You will notice that the hands are synchronized....meaning the hands never get offset to each other. This can be done by constraining one hand to the other while making your animations so that the hand is always relative to the other....some animators may re-parent one hand to the other....in both cases your accomplishing the same thing. The point is that if you don't want the hands to be offset during Additives you apply you have to make sure that the Additive does not offset the hands either.....

The link is in the Description. I borrowed those stands from the Content Examples Lol, sorry for the confusion.

Also if you watch the Intro to this series it will make a bit more sense. You can keep up-to-date with the changes I make over time by joining the Discord. I probably won't be making any more changes though for another 2 months or so. I have to put together a new level and build it up before I continue the series.