File size impact of duplicated animations

Development Character & Animation
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I suppose I could try to test this by packaging a couple of test projects but before I go to the trouble I figure I’d ask here first: Is there any significant file size or memory impact from having duplicates of the same animation file in a UE project? Stated another way, do the animation uassets all exist “alone” or do they point to some underlying file in the file structure?

I have found that in many cases it’s very useful for me to use multiple copies of the same animation with different sets of notifies rather than to try to script one set of “master notifies” and use a lot of conditional logic to determine which should fire when; e.g. if I use the same attack animation for both a player character and an enemy, how I set up hitbox and invul frame data, IK weight curves, etc., between those two will not be the same, even though the actual bone transform keyframes are all identical. When I duplicate “SwordSwing_1” and make “SwordSwing_1_enemy” am I being super wasteful of memory and file size space just to change my notifies around? Is there some way of telling UE to use two different notify sets in reference to the same underlying animation in the file structure (and/or in memory)?

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Hey @RhythmScript!

So to answer your question… It’s very dependent on the size of the animation, honestly. However, something you can do is put all of the notifies on ONE animation.

For instance, you have your “SwordSwing_1”. You can put in notifies for “PlayerHit” and “EnemyHit.” Then on the Event graph where you would normally use your notifies, you can use “TryGetOwner” and check somehow (Maybe through a bool labeled “IsEnemy?” on the actor_BP using the animation), and then use that to check whether or not the animation should do anything when a given notify is used. And you can even color code them!

Let us know if you need a little more guidance!

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Putting the notifies on one animation would necessitate a lot of rework. It isn’t just that specific case (that’s just an example), it’s things like

-charged up melee attack release has 3 levels, based on charge
-each one is the same animation but with a slightly faster play rate and slightly altered parameters on the hitbox animnotify

They’re all imported from the same .fbx file. Still it sounds like UE treats every imported animation as its own standalone entity, which is what I was curious about.