Hello and thanks for reading,
**What’s the best way to animate many objects (non humans) that fold/unfold themselves ? The animations have movements, rotations, scales and material changes at some points and will be played backward too. They need also to be triggerable at will and generate events at some points in time.
I have now chosen the Level Sequence to manage these animations though the material animations part might be done inside the actors later on. As many actors will have the same animation behavior I am **rebinding **the Level Sequence to all my actors with a special Blueprint Actor created for that purpose. The job is done but I am still wondering if this is not too much work and if other solutions might be better as there are some caveats.
Here is what I have played with and some thoughts about it :
- Level Sequence was thorough because it took me some time to figure out how to **Rebind **the Level Sequences to other objects. This process has to be done through Blueprints and maintaining it might prove to be painful as my Level Sequences evolve and the **Rebinding **process will have to be manually updated depending on the changes. The node **Get Sequence Binding Actor **is the core of the problem as it has to be changed manually when main modifications are done in the Level Sequence blueprint. Nevertheless this is the solution I am retaining. I think it is the most elegant (cleaner) and less painful to maintain.
- **Timer Functions **in my Blueprint Classes - this was great but added too much complexity in the Actor Blueprints as they became more complex.
- **Embedded Sequence **which is great and might be what I would have chosen, but it is too buggy which is comprehensible as it is an experimental feature.
- I tried playing with AI and Behaviour Trees. That was useful but led to too much code and complexity.
- I didn’t dare using the **Rigging **tools because they seem to be linked to Human Actors. I feel that it might be the best solution for me but there are no tutorials explaining how to rig articulated objects (non Human).
Complexity seems to be the common issue while animating objects in complex ways.
Well, if there is an animator somewhere here on the planet, I would appreciate to have some feedback regarding the problematic of animating multiple non human objects in a precise and complex way while being able to be notified at some points during the animation and being able to trigger the animations at will. And of course, what are the pros/cons of the proposed solutions.
:rolleyes:
Btw is there somewhere a tutorial about rigging a non human and not too complex object in UE4.
Many thanks
cya
frank
PS : if something is unclear, please let me know