Anim Montage Won't Auto Update When Animations Do

Development Character & Animation
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1

We have a single Anim Montage for say an intro reveal beat where the AI does the following in order:

  • Wake up anim
  • Wait for player to waive anim (loop)
  • Throw player a weapon anim
  • Wait for player to take practice shot anim (loop)

We’re using a mix of montage sections so we can create the loops and stitch together animations, 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 / Feature Request==

The issues 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 such as End Time duration (even if closing the editor and restarting).

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.

We currently 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 could update the duration by hand and timeline would scale, but often times animators will have changes to a couple animations at once so we’d still run into the same issue of rebuilding the montage form scratch essentially.

==Repro Step==

Open up or make an Anim Montage that has several animations stitched together along with several AnimSections and AnimNotifies.

Then either:

A. Select one of the animations in the montage and change it to another animation in the drop down list.

B. Reimport a longer animation for one of the stitched pieces.

In both cases, 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 to accommodate the animation change.

==Expected==

Auto update the montage with changed animation lengths and move all placed markers relative to the change.

And / Or ability to mark Montage Sections to snap at the end of an animation, that way it auto moves and brings with it Anim Notifies that are snapped onto the section with the blue symbol.

2

Hi ,

I am leaning more towards this being intended behavior. Mainly because you CAN trim the length of a montage anim clip by setting start and end time. Say you have an animation that is 5 seconds long. You set start and end to 1 and 3 seconds. Then you extend the animation to 7 seconds long, the engine can’t know what section you want to use now. And if you still wanted the 1-3 section, then the engine would probably be messing that up if we implemented the functionality you’re looking for.

We’ve added things like this in the past and almost always roll them back (usually something with sequencer trying to adjust for new content. things like that).

If you think I’m completely wrong here, let me know. I’m open to hearing an alternative point of view.

3

Hi ,

We have not heard back from you in a few days, so we are marking this post as Resolved for tracking purposes. If you are still experiencing the issue you reported, please respond to this message with additional information and we will follow up.

4

Hi, I find the feature is essential too.
Considering a montage like a container of an animation clip, I at least expect it to adapt to the animation length changes.
It becomes really annoying reimporting an animation over and over, because maybe you’re trying out various combinations of hold frames in the handles (in and out point of an animation take), to make them work with the blend in and out of the montage, to build up a flowless, not glitchy animation flow.

Everytime I have to reimport the new anim, check its length, go in the montage, click on the animation take referenced in, go in the text field, write down the length numerically, see the result, maybe make changes in maya, re-export, and repeat, over and over. It’s just so time consuming!

I wish there was such feature implemented.
Best,