Hey! I exported a simple animation via blender fbx. The animation seems to work when viewing the animation blueprint and the animation sequence but when I hook it up to the bp and run the game it does not play. I’m at a loss as to where the problem could be, hooking up the default 3rd person character with a default animation works just fine with the same setup. Any pointers would be appreciated!
I’ve attached everything I think might be important to solving but let me know if there’s anything else anyone wants to take a look at.
ABP_card + card bp (have tried both the play animation node and hooking up the apb)
If the sequence and the AnimBP preview both play it, but the same clip is dead once you press Play, the graph is usually fine and the runtime mesh is not actually using that pose. The default mannequin working on the same nodes points the same way: the wiring can play an animation, this asset is just not the one driving the visible mesh in game.
Check these in order.
Skeleton asset, not just “it looks like the same rig”. Open the AnimSequence and read the Skeleton it was imported onto. Open the skeletal mesh on the card Blueprint and read its Skeleton. They have to be the same asset. A Blender FBX often creates a brand new skeleton on import. The sequence preview then uses that new skeleton’s preview mesh, so it looks correct, while the card in the level is still on a different skeleton and the clip cannot drive it. Reimport the FBX with the card’s existing skeleton selected in the import dialog, instead of letting UE create one.
Which component is playing it. In the card Blueprint, the visible Skeletal Mesh must be the one whose Animation Mode you set. A second mesh, a child actor, or a mesh you hid in editor but not in game will keep showing the ref pose. During PIE, select that component and confirm Anim Class is this AnimBP.
Play Animation vs AnimBP. Those two do not stack. If Animation Mode is “Use Animation Blueprint”, the AnimBP writes the pose every tick and a Play Animation node on the component is overwritten. Use one path. Either set Animation Mode to “Use Animation Asset” and play the sequence, or keep the AnimBP and put the clip in a state whose output pin actually reaches Output Pose. To one-shot it from Blueprint while an AnimBP is assigned, add a Slot (DefaultSlot) in the AnimBP and play a montage into that slot.
Preview is not the state machine. The sequence editor and an AnimBP preview can show the clip even when the state machine never enters that state in game (Speed, a bool, or the default state is empty and you were scrubbing the sequence directly). Put the clip in the default state with no transition in front of it, compile, and PIE again. If it plays, a condition was keeping you out of the state.
Root motion. If the motion lives on the root bone, the asset preview shows it, but a mesh with root motion disabled stays visually still. On the AnimSequence, see whether Enable Root Motion is on. For a card that should travel, either enable root motion on the mesh component or bake the motion off the root into the bones in Blender before export.
The mannequin test already rules out “Play node is broken”. Matching the skeleton and making sure that same component is the one evaluated at runtime is what usually fixes this exact split.
