Hello all. I’m new to unreal. I’m using Unreal to make a short movie using World of Warcraft’s assets. I figured out how to do individual character animations in sequencer. But for part of the movie, I want to have a large number of soldiers marching along a road. At this point, no fancy battle seen or anything like that. Just literally a group of soldiers (2 to 4 wide x maybe 50 soldiers long) walking down a path. My first (primitive) solution that partially worked was using a camera rig rail as my path. I set my soldiers up relative to 0 coordinates and attached them to the camera rig. This worked as long as the path was relatively straight as you can see in this video: ArmyMarchTest3 - YouTube
But as soon as I added some curvature to the spline, the soldiers towards the back start weaving way off course as you can see here: ArmyMarchTest4 - YouTube I realize this is because the actors’s origin coordinates are so much further away from 0,0. so the further the actors are form 0 the wider they are going to swing off of the rig rail. So the camera rig rail doesn’t seem to be the way to go.
What would be a better way of achieving this where each actor stays on the actual spline? Also is there a way to have just one of each type of soldier so that I don’t have to add an animation track for every single one of them?
I recreated the track and cart based on this tutorial (Ue4 Tutorial - Moving an Object along a path using a Spline Track - YouTube) and seems like that has some potential to work with some tweaking, though I don’t really know that much about blueprints yet, and I’m not sure how to make this show up in sequencer.
I just wanted to ask more experienced users if this was even remotely the right way to approach this. Would a crowd simulation blue print be better? I’ve seen a couple of blueprints on the marketplace that put soldiers in formation, but those appear to be for RTS type games so I’m not sure those will be the right application since I’m just trying to make an animated short. Or am I just stuck having to animate and manually position each and every soldier separately?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Sorry for being such a newbie.
(EDIT: the other issue with my current method is that it requires to position however many soldiers (50 to 100) and then add each actor to sequencer and manage each animation track which starts to get unwieldy). So based on a lot of google searching, it seems like I need to make a blueprint that would position actors along a spline and allow me to move those actors along the spline via key frames in sequencer??)