UETextCoordsToKeyframe - An Unreal Engine 5.1+ Python script that converts coordinates into positions for animation keyframes
Given a list of coordinates in a text file (and some other inputs), this Unreal Engine Python script converts the coordinates into keyframe positions for a given object and level sequence.
For my Unreal Fellowship, I wanted to be able to animate the path of two meteors in my short film; I wanted the meteors to travel a path in the shape of the infinity symbol, which is better known as a lemniscate. I also wanted to have the meteors move in opposite phase of each other.
The focus of the fellowship was World Building, and I did not have the time to learn how to do animation in Unreal Engine. However, I DO know how to plot a graph from coordinates. I also know Python. So, I wrote two scripts: one to generate the lemniscate path as a series of coordinates written to text file, and another script to convert those coordinates to positions in a keyframe.
In this repo lies my script to convert path coordinates to keyframe positions. As an added bonus, to see how this script works, you get my lemniscate path generation script and a sample UE project to test everything out in!
You want to see keyframes being generated in the test project? Simply run the generateKeyFramesFromTextFile.py script in the test project. This will create the lemniscate paths for the spheres. Then run the level sequence to see the spheres travel along the path!
The script is located in the Content\Python directory of this repo.
You can simply create a folder in your project's Content\Python folder and copy the files from this repo in there. Alternatively, you can keep the files in your Content\Python folder, but you must add the content of the __init__.py to your folder's __init__.py to make sure that Unreal will know where to find the functions.
After that, you should be able to make use of the functions after doing from GenerateKeyFramesFromTextFile.generateKeyFramesFromTextFile import generateLocationKeyFramesFromTextFile (if you put it into a folder called GenerateKeyFramesFromTextFile), or just from generateKeyFramesFromTextFile import generateLocationKeyFramesFromTextFile if you do not have the files in a subfolder in Content\Python.
Enjoy!
