There are some posts with similar questions, but not a real solution.
Is it possible to blend two animation assets additively in the sequencer? Simple as that.
What happens now is lets say:
Anim1 rotates the left door bone of a car to 90°
Anim2 rotates the right door bone of a car to 90°
Adding them both to the sequencer yields a rotation of both doors of 45° max.
The animations themselves are both set to additive. But that does not change anything.
Any ideas?
I am pretty sure by now that this is just not possible. But is that assumption correct? Maybe someone knows a workaround?
Hello @CodiBasti, let me see if we can help you with this issue.
It was an interesting and challenging question to solve because when I read it, I also had the same doubt. It took us quite some time to figure it out. I hope this helps you.
We found two possible solutions to your issue: one easy, by changing the approach, and another more difficult, but keeping your same setup:
The quick and easy solution:
If I were you, I would use a Control Rig in the Sequencer and avoid using animations. By using only FK controls, you could assign any rotation angle to both doors at any given moment, without dealing with animation blending issues.
The more complex solution:
This was an interesting challenge, so I worked on it with a colleague to find a solution.
3.Quick summary*: You should create a Blueprint with slots for each door, allowing you to mask the movement of one without interfering with the other.
As you showed, your idea is correct and should work as expected. Both doors should not cancel each other out, since you are adding a neutral position. However, for some reason, the animations subtract each other. So, we decided to mask the movement of each to ensure that one door does not affect the other.
To test this, we used a mannequin and replicated your case.
We created one neutral animation and two 90° animations:
In this scenario, we encountered the same issue as you: both arms subtracted their movement and ended up at 45° instead of 90°.
"LeftSlot" to the left side and the corresponding name to the right side.The Blueprint should have the following structure:
Note:
Make sure to configure the bone masking correctly in each Blender node.
With this setup, when all three animations play simultaneously, they should work as expected. Here are some images that confirm this:
When the animation affects the left arm, it works correctly.
When both animations overlap, both arms stay at 90°.
When only one animation plays, the left arm moves independently.
I hope this helps, and that we’ve been able to assist you.
I wish you the best of luck with your project, and I hope you can move forward smoothly.
Best regards, and have a great day!
Hi there!
Thank you so much for taking the time and trying it out and also for documenting your solution.
The slot approach is the only one I found too. Which is super manual work for many animations unfortunately.
Also the first approach is not working for us, since we have predefined animations from third party software.
But yeah, the slot approach is what we are using right now, We script the editor to be able to automatically create the node setup in the animation blueprint.
It is still a workaround and a bit weird that it’s just not possible out of the box, also because the animation assets can be set to “additive” but that does not have effect in the sequencer, but only the animation blueprint.
Nonetheless, I really appreciate you effort. This will help a lot of people. Thats for sure!
Codibasti
