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)?