What's the best way to record gameplay generated animations and events?

Development Character & Animation
1

I’ve got a cool animation system that just plays montages according to some gameplay logic (basically like a music sequencer). Now I want to record videos of this, just recording the output of these animations like they are in game, but how would I do that?

If I used Sequencer I don’t have any way of triggering the animation logic, my system uses the update/init animation event in the anim BP and I don’t see how you can use gameplay stuff like this in Sequencer. But this would be the ideal solution if you could do that, just say to the game “do your thing” and have everything happening come into Sequencer just like the way it was in game. After that you could add some camera work or whatever. But as it is now I would have to first see what actually happens in game and trigger animations every time the animation switches which is just a pain.

I tried Sequence Recorder which sounds like it would do what I wanted but it first off recorded the animations which I thought was pretty strange. Those animations didn’t even look like they do in game, the actors had wrong transforms and things just looked strange. Why not add animation sequences like you do in Sequencer normally? I guess Sequence Recorder is more of a solution to “record a sequence of a character you control in game” rather than “record what actors are doing by themselves”. Also it didn’t trigger sound events which I thought was pretty strange. If those don’t get heard in Sequencer how are you going to capture gameplay sound at all?

Right now the most realistic way for my problem seems to be to use some third party screen capturing software like OBS and capturing the gameplay while possessing some floating camera in game, which is disappointing. Is there no better solution? All I really want is the ability to mix gameplay footage with custom camera animations/fades and all that. Kind of like Idolmaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gibQsRyuoI0

2

Do you mean to capture the screen, or the position of your animated actor’s joints, over a set of frames, that can be saved as a new animation and used later? If its the last, maybe saving the joint transforms for each frame in an array and then sequentially make transforms using the data in the array. Idk if theres an easier way… but if there is I would like to know.

3

I meant outputting a video of anim BPs basically. But now it at least kind of works in Sequencer, the only thing that doesn’t is previewing the animation in the sequence but you can add an animation track (that won’t be played since you’re using the anim BP anyway) and kind of preview it. It’s not locked to the right time so not perfect but better than seeing nothing.

Maybe the Sequence Recorder is better too but I haven’t tested it.

4

Well if you have an Nvidia card you could just use ShadowPlay. It’s built into the card as a hardware capture so if all you need is a “what you see is what you get” and the playback quaility is as good as the render quality.