After I saw last twitch stream I decide to learn a little bit more about animation system in UE4 and here is my feedback:
Amount of features is just incredible - like really AMAZING
It’s fun and interesting to use
Quality of UI is inversely proportional to above mentioned stuff. Seems like someone tried to refactor old UI, but then abandoned this project in the middle of “battle”
Problems I encountered:
Impossible to rename Groups.
Impossible to remove/delete Group
Impossible to rename Slot
Branching point concept and track is removed completely, now it is type of Notify. No mentions at all about this change and it’s extremely not user friendly - I found this only thanks to user from answer hub who checked old source code =/
Useless Anim Slot Manager menu which, by logic, should allow to manage Slots and Groups, but in fact it has less functions than Montage screen with slot in groups and offers exactly ZERO new actions.
Before updates in November you could rename slots, remove groups and etc - now all this functional is gone :c
1,2,3,5 cosmetic and 4 is actually in improved form
But, 1+2+3+5 are all really just cosmetic issues. (missed new slots get created in default group no matter) Key is: Moving slots works! They are in no way blocking development. 4 is actually newly simplified workflow, just create a Notify and set its Montage Tick Type to Branching Point from default of Queued. Even the old docs say Branches are better but more expensive Notifies in essence. I was also confused at first. But asked on forums. 4.6 release notes mentions some of the changes to Animation Montages. I personally didn’t open a bug report. They only have add buttons and no delete buttons in menu. They shipped working feature, polish later? Not big deal.
Well, it worked before refactoring and now it does not - looks like something is wrong! Of course polish later, but it’s like 3 month later and still nothing
I’m not whining, it’s does not stop me from developement even for a second - as you mentioned, just UI quirks, but it should addressed sooner or a later and I just want to raise priority a liiittle bit!
>>Impossible to rename Groups.
>>Impossible to remove/delete Group
>>Impossible to rename Slot
We have an immediate feature coming up after this feature that went in, but it got delayed. So sorry about the mess. We’re supposed to use smart naming that is supposed to support all this, but the difficulty right now is to link between different assets using same names. We should have this prioritized as soon as current sprint is over.
>>Branching point concept and track is removed completely, now it is type of Notify.
It’s not gone, but now it should be AnimNotify that you can mark as Branching Point. Could you see if this is working?
