Animation Sharing - How does it work?

Development Character & Animation
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Hello there, I’m using animation sharing for a project with lots of characters on screen. I’m very confused by the documentation as it’s not very clear on lots of different aspects. At the moment, I’m facing problems.

  1. Why are collisions disabled when using animation sharing?
  2. Animation Notify when you get the owner from the skeleton mesh, it’s empty! Why is that?

Please can anyone help. I’ve looked throughout the internet for help and can’t seem to find any useful information.

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Hello everyone, I managed to fix my issues and since I don’t see that many people taking about animation sharing here; and having similar issues to me.

  1. The reason for collisions being disabled is that Animation Sharing uses the Master Pose Component for sharing animations between the different meshes. The Master Pose Component doesn’t allow for physics at all, which means that the physics asset will not be shared between the different meshes.

Master Pose Component - Working with Modular Characters | Unreal Engine Documentation

To get around on the collision issue, I allowed for collisions to happen on the capsule collider on the character instead. This allowed me to shoot and stab the character without any issue.

  1. To get the animation notifies to work, instead of getting the owner you get anim instance instead and cast to the Animation Blueprint that you’re using for that animation sequence. Once this is done, you’ll called the function Get Instanced Actors which will give you an array which you loop through and call what ever function you need to call.

Some other things I noticed while playing around with the animation sharing plugin is that once you set a animation to be on demand, the animation blueprint is no longer called. Also, I would suggest using the Animator Budgeter alongside this as plugin as it will give you even more frames.

The Animation Sharing Plugin is really great, and I hope they continue to develop it even more as now I’m able to have about 200-300 characters on screen while having a smooth frame rate. Before this was implemented; when I had more than 50 I was going below 20 FPS.

1 Like
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Thanks - capsule collision worked.

I use line trace for foot steps and melee attacks. How that could be done using this plugin?

Also when my AI dies, which blueprint could be used to destroy actor?