Event Blueprint Update Animation is not firing during the game

Hi all!

I’m hoping someone can help me with a problem I’ve been having. I’ve been using Paragon’s Minion assets to do some AI prototyping and have some enemies running around behaving just fine. I decided to create a second enemy (“ProjectileEnemy_BP”) as a child of my first (“Enemy_BP”). I’m using a different skeleton, so I’ve created an Animation Blueprint from scratch and assigned it correctly to the Mesh Component of ProjectileEnemy_BP. I have placed an instance of ProjectileEnemy_BP in my level.

I had some trouble getting the Pawn to be recognised in the ABP, so I stripped the ABP back to its absolute basics to see what was going on. All it contains now is the Event Blueprint Update Animation node hooked up to a Print String “Hello” node. This somehow never fires. If the ABP is open in the editor, it fires while the game is playing (and reports no Pawn), but if I close the ABP editor, then it does not fire at all.

287876-meshcomponent.png

Things I have tried so far:

  • Restarting Unreal
  • Creating a fresh Animation Blueprint
  • Changing the Debug Filter in the ABP editor to not preview the instance
  • Placing fresh instances of ProjectileEnemy_BP in the level
  • Checking that the instances in the level are correctly assigned the ABP and matching skeletal mesh while the game is running

Nothing seems to get the Animation Update reporting its tick. I’m fairly new to Unreal, but so far have managed to get to grips with it easily enough. This one is baffling me though!

Many thanks in advance for any help.

The Answer is… The incorrect skeleton had been set for the ABP. It should’ve been “Minion_Lane_Siege_Skeleton” instead of “Minion_Lane_Core_Skeleton” for my mesh “Siege_Core_Dusk”.

I would’ve thought that you’d get a warning if you set a mesh’s ABP to that of a different skeletal mesh, but it appears not! Lesson learned. :slight_smile:

For me the solution was enabling tick for the Character Mesh, otherwise the animation update would fire only once, when starting the game: