Here you will learn how to setup the plugin in your own project based on the Third Person Template!

This guide assumes that you have installed the plugin to your supported Engine version or in your project Plugins folder, and added the Third Person Template Feature to your project.

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Getting Started

Project Settings

For this setup we are going to use the included Gameplay Tags hierarchy for calling the included animations, but you would make your own based on Gameplay Tag Table Row and define that data table in here to extend on the tags to use when Emoting.

Class Creation

Create a folder in root to hold our files relevant to Emotes in. We'll call this one n00dEmotes

Create a child of BPC_N00dEmotes and call it BPC_Emotes. 

Drag the child we made into the n00dEmotes folder

Setup Example Animations

Also from the Testing/Animations folder, copy over the primary included animations.

Right-click on them and replace their skeleton

Choose SK_Mannequin_Skeleton for this. This will map these demo anims to the UE4 Third Person Template Character rig and these animations will then work for you on the UE5 character. 

And rename them

Create Data Assets

Each of these animations now require us to define a data asset with data that we want the system to care about when playing

Choose PDA_N00dEmotes

For this example, we're just going to copy across the ones that are included in the plugin over to our own folder...

Rename them

Reference our own animations in each of the data assets.

Hover over each variable for tooltip, you will notice that not all the options are selected the same for each animation we've defined in each of these data assets.

Class Setup

Character

Open the ThirdPersonCharacter blueprint and add this component to the character's components window

With it highlighted, in the Class Defaults of the component, add your data assets to the Cached Emotes

On the event graph, add 1-4 input keys and call the Emote node on each of the primary emotes

We're just doing these on the keys for simplicity but you can call these wherever you want. So long as a character implements n00dEmotes and knows about the data, you will be able to call this Emote node. 

And also get some data from the component. The Emote(s) pin is of type PrimaryDataAsset. 

Anim BP

Cache the MainStates as a cached pose and feed it into the layered blend per bone node, defining a new slot UpperBody on BlendPose0. 

You may need to create a new slot definition.


In the layered blend per bone node, setup the defaults like so

Test

Press play in the viewport and press keys 1-4. You will now be able to cycle through the available emotes on this character

Happy emoting!