Animating in Engine - Default bone compression settings use Animation Recorder instead of ACL

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hello!

When animating in engine, when we Bake to Anim Sequence the resulting anim sequence has Bone Compression Settings set to DefaultRecorderBoneCompression.

This is different from animations we import from DCC, which default to ACLAnimBoneCompressionSettings.

We notice the same behavior in the Control Rig Samples Pack (see attached screenshot).

We can simply set AnimationRecorderBoneCompressionSettings to ACLAnimBoneCompressionSettings in our ini, but we wanted to check if there’s a reason that isn’t the default behavior in the engine. I.e. Why do animations imported from DCC default to ACL but animating-in-engine workflows don’t?

Our current assumption is that Animation Recorder predates animating-in-engine and this is just an artifact of that, but was there an original reason to have custom compression settings for Animation Recorder? Do we risk impacting some other workflow by changing the default to fix our animating-in-engine workflow? Do Epic projects have this same issue, where the bone compression settings is different depending on the animator workflow?

Thanks!

-Aaron

2

Steps to Reproduce
From a Level Sequence, use Bake Animation Sequence.

3

Hey there,

Chatting with folks on the team the reason is that it uses the AnimationRecorder is purely historical and comes from before ACL was implemented. In some cases, internal teams, run a process to change it to ACL after saving. One dev has expressed that there might be a curve type that isn’t supported by ACL that is for the Animation recorder, so you might run into issues there. But it seems that it should be ok to make that INI adjustment.

Dustin