I have been animating in Unreal for my job for the past few weeks and it has honestly made my life a living hell. I’m not new to UE but the constraints constantly break, to the point that half of the animation I’ve done is irrelevant now. It seems like any little thing I do, the engine just decides to randomly undo.
Every time I add a constraint, I have to close the sequencer, zero out the location of the object, and delete the constraint from the animation tab (this is to ensure the constraint only applies inside the designated sequence). Then open the sequence and pray the object is still constrained. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.
When I open up other sequences, constrained objects will be randomly missing. Then I have to redo all my work.
This morning I was trying to use the attach feature instead of constraints and the engine just decided not to attach the object for some reason. But if I constrain an object to a constrained object, it will be missing from pathtraced renders, and if I try to use the attach feature, it won’t attach. So neither parenting method, attaching or constraining, works in this scenario.
This parenting system seems far too buggy / complex for sequencer shots that require no physics and no coding or gameplay. All I am trying to do is parent objects to other objects, but it is a massive headache and seems to only work half the time. Working this way feels like it takes five times longer than it should.
If I was dealing with 1 or 2 sequences, this constraint system might be okay, but we are working with multiple sequences and objects that constantly have to attach / detach from other objects.
I hate to complain but I truly don’t know what to do at this point. Dealing with this has been awful, and most of my issues seem more like software bugs than user error. We are using 5.2.1 and aren’t currently able to upgrade, so if there are fixes in newer versions, I don’t have access to them.