Not really sure what my issues is, but I’m pretty sure it’s animation related. I’m working on a 3D side-scroller (think Crash Bandicoot or Little Big Planet) style game. I have a character pawn with a custom mesh I made in Blender and exported to .fbx, I want the actual character pawn to remain facing the same direction (East/right), but the mesh rotates depending on which direction the player is moving (North, South, East, West).
In Blender, I set up my skeleton and animations so that the Root bone controls which way the mesh is facing (again: North, South, East, or West) and only added keyframes for the Root bone in the movement animations (running, walking, etc.) as well as “Facing” animations for when the character is standing still. The “Facing” animations only have one keyframe, and that’s for the Root bone. All other animations (idle, jumping, falling, etc.) don’t have a keyframe for the Root bone.
My initial assumption was that the only time the character would change directions is when they were moving so if for example, the idle animation is playing, since the idle animation doesn’t have any keyframes for the Root bone, it would keep the rotation from the last movement animation that was played. I have a “Carry” animation that has keyframes for all bones (except Root), when I play the Facing animations, or any animations that have unused bones (bones with no keyframes) then Unreal Engine plays the Carry animation’s frames for the unused bones, I haven’t been able to figure out why UE picked the Carry animation, or how to change it (which is also an issue), but this seemed to support my assumption.
My issue: Unreal Engine has apparently assigned a default East-facing rotation to the Root bone for the animations that don’t have a Root bone keyframe (idle, jumping, falling, etc.) so when the player moves, the character turns in the direction it’s moving, but then immediately turns back to face East if any other animation plays (again, idle, jumping, falling, etc.). I disabled the root motion controls for the pawn, and I know the pawn itself isn’t rotating when I move. I don’t know if it’s an issue with how I imported the model/skeleton, or if there’s a setting I need to adjust so it’s not moving the Root bone when non-movement animations play, or if I’m just way off on how I thought it would work. I’ve tried looking around online, but I haven’t been able to find anything that helps.