I animated 90 different material components in Sequencer by hand. It took a long time and the result is underwhelming. Also, a pain to edit. I’d like to animate these lights to music so, I’d love to be able to squeeze the duration of all the tracks at once to make the animation snappier or paste to all of the tracks at once. I’ve had to do it each individually. I’m coming from the motion design world and loving everything about Unreal except for my inexperience. Can anyone point me in a better direction for animating many objects at once? Like I wish the property matrix could work. But I’m not sure if that’s the way. I’ve looked into the Material Parameter Collection node but that animates everything the same at once. I’d like control over variation. Also, I’d like to add many more of these light tubes.
Create master material with parameters you want (and maybe simple calculation inside).
Then You can make Material instance, with base settings.
Then you can make instances of that material (ie. instance of instance).
This way you make hierarchy and top material will change all its child’s unless you change something in child.
Also if you turn those lights into actors (Add blueprint scripts to them). Then you make dynamic material instance, and expose variables to blueprint. You could change exposed variables (that change material) in editor.
Then there is yet deeper hole: make all lamps communicate with some source of information, let them grab variable and decide what to do with that value.
For your stuff best would be some blueprint code mixed with dynamic material instances.
Are those bars like spectrum analyzer?
make central blueprint/actor to manage it all. Like game mode (not level blueprint!). This will be events source. You can later use animation tool to fire those events.
make events and dispatchers, make (and learn communication for blueprints)
make base blueprint actor that listens to events and reacts when event is fired.
then each type of light should be child (inheritance) of that listening actor.
With all that you should have actors that can be lights or whatever that listen to events. Now animate each TYPE (group) of lights separately. Then fire events that start animation (you probably can make master track in central blueprint that fires all those smaller events).
Thank you so much!! This is awesome. It all makes sense in a broad strokes sort of way. It’s time for me to step up my game and follow your guide. very helpful Nawrot!!! Thank you
But it doesn’t render in the Movie Render Queue or in PIE. Maybe DMX doesn’t do that? I’m out of my depth here. It’s pretty cool and definitely a better result than before but still not good enough control y’know?
