tl;dr Is there a way to update an animation’s length, reimport that animation, and have an Anim Montage rebuild itself retaining the relative placement of montage sections and anim notify markers?
The Info
We’re doing some rather long narrative set pieces with AI where they jump out of AI behavior and do a series of scripted animations through Anim Montage, so we have a single Anim Montage for say an Intro reveal beat where the AI does the following in order:
- Wake up animation
- Wait for player to wave animation (loop)
- Throw player a weapon animation
- Wait for player to take a practice shot animation (loop)
- Outro animation
We’re using a mix of montage sections so we can create the loops, and then we’re adding in anim notifies to check if the player has done an action so AI can move onto next section.
The Bug / Lacking Feature:
The headaches come in when we update the timing of an animation! We reimport the new animation FBX into the the original animation UASSET, that works fine. But the Anim Montage is still running off old data (even if closing the editor and restarting) in terms of animation length so an animation will get cut short by Anim Montage system defined End Time. If we click the yellow arrow to reset the End Time to default, it goes to 0.0 and not the length of the animation.
Right now we have to rip out the updated animation from the Montage and drag it back in, which messes up the whole timeline of placed markers for sections and notifies. We’re basically rebuilding it by hand which is laborious.
Alternatives We Know About:
We could create separate Anim Montages but it’s way more efficient (when the system works / when we don’t have to update the timing of animations) to look at a whole narrative beat for an AI in bite size pieces within one montage. And making it one long animation would still make us arrive at this same issue, it’s better for our animators currently to work on animations separately and stitch them together in Anim Montage.
Repro Step:
Open up or make an Anim Montage that has several animations stitched together.
Then either:
- Select one of the animations in the montage and change it to another animation in the drop down list.
or
- Reimport a longer animation for one of the stitched pieces.
In either case, notice the End Time for that animation remained the same as original, and none of the timeline markers for montage sections or anim notifies moved.
Expected:
Auto update the montage with changed animation lengths and move all placed markers relative to the change.
And / Or marking Montage Sections to snap at the end of an animation section, that way it auto moves and brings with it Anim Notifies that are snapped onto the section with the blue symbol.