Actors attached to bone sockets only animate when character is selected in scene outliner

Hi All, I am new to unreal and have encountered something that has bamboozled me and I was wondering if anyone can help me.

I have a skeletal mesh that is animated by an animation blueprint, however the mesh of that skeleton is nothing but a small single ball that I added, The character’s on begin play function attaches five actors to the different bone sockets I gave the skeleton and through that I was intending to create a character procedurally.

However the animation of him walking or being idle no longer works unless I select the character in the outliner, at which point it suddenly begins to work again.

I did some debugging and just gave his animation blueprint a single animation to output at all times. And I found that the character will adopt the pose of the animation but the animation is frozen and will not proceed unless as stated above the character is selected in the outliner.

Am I missing something about how to properly attach actors to bone sockets and have them properly follow the animation? Is there some flag I need to switch somewhere?

Thanks for any potential help or advice you can leave. :slight_smile:

yes, I believe you didn’t put all the steps required. i don’t know which ones based on your description but in general, some nodes may or may not reinitialize the animation and other data on the object/blueprint.

read the nodes description carefully, some may mention if they are reinitialize or not.

when you select the object in the outliner, the editor rebuilds/reinitialize that object on the fly. there is an option somewhere that can turn this behavior on or off of one need this, not the case probably here. is on by default anyway.

Thanks for the advice, is there a way to rebuild/reinitialize my character object via a Blueprint? I’m not able to see anything in the documentation that would let me do that.