Hi,
We’ve made some pretty huge changes to how UMG animations are managed, and the good news is that I suspect those changes may solve the issue you’re seeing here since we addressed some similar issues with needing to wait a tick after construction before being able to play an animation. The bad news is that those changes may be tough to backport, and not all of them made it into 5.6. If you do plan to upgrade, you should get the bulk of the rework with 5.6 (CL#41112585) and be in a better position to cherrypick the additional fixes. Once you’ve upgraded, you’ll want to grab CL#43336467 and CL#43410676. Those changes are *very* recent so I’m not yet sure if they’ll make it into a 5.6 hotfix or be pushed back to 5.7, but if you do end up backporting them then I’d be interested to hear how things go.
Best,
Cody