Hi everyone,
I am new here and trying to learn Unreal.
I come from using Unity and after all the B.S. I decided to switch to Unreal.
At the moment I almost completed a Udemy Course on Unreal to get the basics.
So still getting my bearings all do I feel I slowly get a bit of a picture about some basic procedures. However one thing that I can not seem to get my head around are animations.
Lets say I have a blueprint with lets say 3 static meshes, lets say cubes and i want to animate them in a surtain way relative to each other.
I can add a levelSequence and there create some animations using the Sequencer.
However it feels strange.
because I want to add some animations on a blueprint and trigger them using code and or blueprint nodes.
I later then want to instantiate one or more instances of the multi mesh blueprint and let it animate on its own.
and later in an other level add the blueprint with its animations and add it there.
I have been working with animations using bones where this concept seems to work but for animations without bones it seems that I have to use the level sequencer.
I feel I am not understanding this at all and the course I took does not cover this.
Can someone explain this better or point me to a direction ? That would be greatly appreciated. The solution may be somewhere in plain sight but Unreal and the forums are still overwhelming to me. I feel still very noob like stumbling around…
p.s. as example in Unity I created a track for a tank, moving blocks by animation animating the blocks of 1/2 track one block distance and looping and mirroring them. So 4 animations controlled 2 tracks backward and forward.
I have no idea at all how to do something like this at all at this point in time.
(It seems I am not allowed to upload content as a new user so ill add an example when possible)
Well, Timelines are quite useful for Static Mesh animation, and you can play them like animations in Blueprint and C++. You would create a float track in the Timeline and use SetRelativeLocation to move the meshes.
@ Thanks for your answer. Timeline seems indeed very interesting for some animations and other effects. In my user case it would be a hell to get the blocks to rotate and move around at the track edges neatly into the exact position of the block that was on that position. But ill surely will try and have a go on that.
In any case didn’t know timeline was a thing so that itself is very useful information for me.
This is probably a stupid suggestion, but you could store an array of vectors and rotations in a data table (see Data Driven Gameplay Elements) and use the Move Component To node for each value in the table.
Another method would be Splines, but they probably aren’t applicable in your situation. Here is a good non-Epic affiliated tutorial on spline animation.
It is incredible that something so simple cannot be done easily without having to sacrifice a rooster on a moonlit day.
It is a feature that has been experimental for several years, the last time I tried it it was still super bugged:
Actor Sequence component
Simply moving a button on a console or turning a stopcock becomes absurd lot of work.
BTW, There are several options for using level sequencer animations in blueprints.
But I don’t know if it would work to animate component references within the blueprint itself.
I found the Actor Sequence yesterday. It was exactly ( i think) what I was looking for. However Unreal crashed right after pressing play. So the warning “Experimental” is there for a reason 
I’ll try it again this weekend when I have a bit more time.
I have a feeling that I have to do something like that if I can’t get the Actor Sequence component to work properly.
Or perhaps else use the Timeline on the horizontal movement and hide the front and back of the tracks by metal plates or something. Not a nice solution so that would be a last resort kind of thing.
