Alright! I want to make a one stop shop for creators trying to render animations and scenes in CITY SAMPLE because its showing to be difficult.
Camera spawning at start location issue - spawn your camera in your sequencer. Do not spawn it out in the level. Open sequencer and click the camera button.
Rendering far away objects keep disappearing - seems most solve this by increasing the rendering rage - when I want to render a building far away, or a custom building I put in the level myself, I find that if i add it to my sequence as a spawnable object so it spawns in my sequence, the far away building of concern always renders for me.
Recording Car crash animations - no fix yet
Various sequencer objects spawning at world origin, not in sequence - seems like this is a gameplay blueprint issue with no real fix at this point - recommendations - BEFORE DELETING BLUEPRINTS READ THIS WHOLE THING - migrate the whole SMALL CITY LEVEL to another project completely and don’t migrate the game blueprints. This will get you the buildings and map but wont have all the nice driving cars and people walking around.
Things to consider - when experimenting with city sample it seems to be easy to break it permanently, and redownloading city sample and recompiling everything is ROUGH. Thats why I hope people who know what they are doing can safely trouble shoot these issues and spare us noobs days of work. Ive had to redownload it 5 times already. So BE CAREFUL
Big Picture - Have CITY SAMPLE run the whole interactive city and be able to run a sequence with spawnable actors - animations - constraints - attached childs - physics - deforms etc - who keep all their actions and transforms and render fine without game blueprints interfering
For example if I attach a sword to an animation character with a constraint or parent onto a bone the sequence plays back fine but when rendering the sword spawns in at world origin.
The GOAL:
Over time we will all solve these issues. I hope the comments section will build a list of fixes. CITY SAMPLE is an amazing tool and I hope people smarter than me will drop their wisdom here for the collective good. Happy rendering my friends, and I hope this saves someone a ton of frustration down the road.