I have a particular project that I am considering moving from Unity to Unreal, but there are some specific animation abilities within Unity that my project relies on.
When I create an animation within Unity, I can set pretty much ANY attribute as a keyframe in an animation, and thus changes to said attribute are saved/accessed within the animation itself without needing any other external calls.
(Oh, and I should mention that I am working with 2D animations, so these are not skeletons I am importing, but 2D animations that I am building within the editor.)
There are two particular aspects of this that I have a particular need of.
One, I can set an object’s position as a keyframe. This is helpful because it can be the local position of an actor that is a child of another actor. So I can have my parent object move around my scene/level, and animate how the child actor moves in relation to the parent. And that child actor is its own actor, and I can attach scripts to that specific child actor. (This facet is very important.)
Two, I can create new publicly-accessible variables within a script and have the value of those variables be keyframed in my animation.
(And of course I can also keyframe what sprite the actor is using, but I’m pretty sure Unreal can do that.)
So altogether I can create an actor that has other actors set as children, and when playing a particular animation for the parent actor, that animation will include having the children move relative to the parent, change their sprite, and set custom variables of their individual scripts. All of that is saved within the animation itself so I don’t need to cue any other variables or make any other calls to make them happen.
I find Unreal’s animation trees to be far more sensible and easy to use (at least, last time I used them) compared to Unity’s animation controller, so I’d like to build this project with Unreal, but what I described above is a very important feature for my game. Is this something that can be done with Unreal? And if so, could you please direct me to some tutorials so that I can examine what it really entails?