I have first posted this on the boards because I was not sure if it’s really a bug, but no one seems to know, so I’m now posting it here as a probable bug 
In my usual workflow a looped animation has the first and last frame the same. Let’s say I have an animation in 3dsmax that runs from frame 0 to 8 (same pose in 0 and 8).
After importing it into UE, the animation runs from frame 0 to 9, so at least visually (anim preview gui) it looks lake the animation plays for 9 frames, but the length in ue is correctly reported to be 0.2666 seconds.
It’s even obvious that the “poses” in different frames in UE don’t match those in 3dsmax. It looks like animation time length is ok, and only visually it’s scaled to “number of frames in animation +1”. For example, frame 4 pose in 3dsmax is actually frame 4,5 in UE. Just to be sure how this is handled in other engines, I tried to import the animation into Unity and there it seems to be exactly as in 3dsmax (ending with frame 8).
The animations are done at 30fps and I tried to turn on and off the import option called “Use Default Sample Rate” with no difference.
Here is how the timeline looks for the same animation in 3dsmax and in UE (4.7.3):
Hey ,
Sorry for the delay in response, but I wanted to run this by one of our engineers before I explained this to you.
From what I understand, this is not a bug. UE4 displays animations in the timeline differently than Max or Maya.
For frame 8 to exist, it has to have some data present “on that frame”, so to speak. What that means is that the “data” is the interpolation between frame 8 and the pseudo frame 9.
Maya actually illustrates this a little bit better. When you select a frame in Maya, it selects all of the space between that frame and the next(see below)
Now, we are discussing changing the way this is displayed. The way we are showing this to you, the user, is a very literal interpretation of the data, instead of displaying it in a more common sense manner.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
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Hi,
thanks for the explanation. I kinda thought it probably won’t be a bug, but in any case, I think how the animation frames are visualized at the moment is a bit unintuitive and I can’t see any advantage of current “visualization”.
Somehow can’t get over the fact that a “pose” isn’t hit on a “spot” of timeline where it denotes particular time/frame and that all other “poses” of different frames are getting “visually interpolated” and are happening on different spots between keyframe times.
So yeah, as you are saying, please consider this little “tweak”.
Thanks . We are always looking for ways to improve the experience. Thanks for the feedback!
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Just a heads up, we’ve changed this for 4.14. Should match frame numbers exactly with Maya, Max, etc.
